Image used under Creative Commons license from Wikimedia Commons.

“This exhibit is a once in a lifetime event.  It’s the first time these Egyptian artifacts have been allowed out of England.” – Lisa Simpson

There’s no new Zombie Simpsons until September at the earliest (October? fingers crossed!), so we’re going to spend the summer overthinking Season 9.  Why Season 9?  Because we did Season 8 last summer, and Season 9 was when the show started becoming more Zombie than Simpsons.  Since we’re too lazy to do audio and too ugly to do video, we’ve booked a “chatroom” (ours is right between the one with the sexy seventh graders and the one with the bored federal agents pretending to be sexy seventh graders).  So log on to your dial-up AOL and join us.  This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (surprisingly enough, not on “ushabtis”).

Today’s episode is 924 “Lost Our Lisa”, yesterday’s was 913 “The Joy of Sect”.

Mad Jon: Ok, so onto the "Lisa is actually an 8 year old" episode.

Charlie Sweatpants: Good, I’m tried of playing defense. There is almost nothing good about "Lisa’s Wacky Adventures to the Museum".

This is either at or very near the bottom of 9.

Mad Jon: Ah, we can play offense together then. I really dislike this one.

Dave: Because it’s schmaltzy as hell?

Because there’s no story at all?

Charlie Sweatpants: Well, those are two of its problems.

Mad Jon: There are maybe 3 or 4 funny things, the rest is very zombie-esk.

Charlie Sweatpants: The horns of suspense got worn out, the wretched cherry picker scene goes on for two whole minutes, and Homer’s bizarre evangelism for risk taking doesn’t make half a lick of sense.

Mad Jon: In full discloser, when I was watching it today, I shut it off for about 20 minutes after Milhouse and Bart wake up Homer. So I watched it in two parts.

Dave: Don’t really think that makes much of a difference.

Mad Jon: I don’t either, but that was several hours of drinking ago.

Those kinds of outbursts are a bit of a trigger for me.

Charlie Sweatpants: That was a ripple of dumb compared to the white capped rollers that were coming our way.

Oh, they’re at the nuclear plant. For no reason, it’s not like Homer had to be the one to give them glue. Did they think the drawer breaking and Homer’s screaming about quitting so he doesn’t get fired was so good they just had to include it?

Mad Jon: THEY CLOSED A FUCKING DRAWBRIDGE ON HIS SKULL!

Sorry, that had to happen.

Charlie Sweatpants: Probably for the best.

But don’t forget that was after he rode the cherry picker down the hill and into the river.

Mad Jon: And used his neck as a wood splitter on the dock.

Charlie Sweatpants: The resolution was terrible, I’ll grant you, but it’s not like it was incongruous with what came before it.

Dave: They lost me at ushabtis.

Charlie Sweatpants: That was after the drawbridge.

Dave: Well, actually they lost me much earlier.

Mad Jon: I must say I like the Russians playing chess. I don’t like the rest of little Moscow or whatever it was…

But the Angry Russian speech reminds me of a friend I had at Best Buy.

We would get him drunk and make him speak Russian, because it is really funny.

Charlie Sweatpants: There were about three or four decent little jokes, the chess playing Russian was okay, I actually like Moe’s "VD clinic" taxi order and Lisa’s line about this being the first time these artifacts have been allowed out of England.

But those are tiny little pieces in what is one long, boring, nonsensical and jumpy story.

Mad Jon: Yea, the Moe line and the artifacts line were both good. They tickled different parts of my funny bone, but the end was the same.

And yes, there are no excuses for the episode as a whole.

I would rather watch the cult one several times in a row before I watch this one again.

Charlie Sweatpants: They keep at it all the way through, there’s the hanging on the sculpture/break-in thing. Even the very end, Homer can’t just knock down the thing, he has to knock down the little posts that hold the rope.

Then, in one of the true signs of laziness, he and Lisa are just – instantly – on the floor listening to it.

The give-a-shit level for telling a coherent story couldn’t be lower.

Mad Jon: Yea, the ending really felt duct taped together. Even for a bad episode. At least in other bad episodes the ending is more wacky.

Charlie Sweatpants: The ending would’ve been wacky if it had ended at the drawbridge, instead they decided to introduce Homer as the world’s most committed risk taker with three minutes to go.

Mad Jon: They just couldn’t stop themselves eh?

Dave: High fives in the writing room. Let’s keep it going!

Mad Jon: You guys were soooo close to having a poor ending, but you really had to go for it.

I’m fired aren’t I…

Charlie Sweatpants: He has to be tricked into letting Lisa take the bus, then he gets scared when Lenny and Carl tell him to, but then he’s Capt. Daredevil. I don’t ask for a lot of continuity between episodes, but it doesn’t seem that hard to have continuity within an episode.

Mad Jon: You know, I never picked up on that, but now that you’ve spelled it out, that is a pretty large stretch for the last 5-10 minutes of one episode.

But don’t worry, Homer will just walk it off.

Charlie Sweatpants: He will, but that isn’t a good thing. This is one of those episodes where all they had was Jerkass Homer stuff, and they just ran with it.

Mad Jon: I’d agree more, but, you know…

Charlie Sweatpants: Yeah, anything else here?

I’ve managed to work myself into a foul mood again.

And I’m ready to be done.

Mad Jon: No, having chatted about these episodes made me want to go lie down.

Dave: Hooray, closure!

Mad Jon: You wan’t my advice? Continue drinking heavily.

I just put an apostrophe in "want"

Charlie Sweatpants: That’s bad closure. Both of you.