“Oh, yes, sitting, the great leveler, from the mightiest pharaoh to the lowliest peasant, who doesn’t enjoy a good sit?” – C.M. Burns

Despite watching it once and fast forwarding through it a second time, I’m still not sure what the main plot of “Moms I’d Like to Forget” was.  Most Simpsons episodes since the dawn of the show have had a main plot, sometimes accompanied by a second one that fills in the time or complements the main one in some way.  But “Moms I’d Like to Forget” didn’t seem to have an A-plot at all, at best it had two B-plots and a whole mess of extended filler sequences. 

Certainly the title would lead you to think that the story with Marge and the other mothers was the main plot, which is what I thought at first.  But when you take a second to think about it, the other three mothers are hardly on screen.  Not only do they not show up at all until almost halfway through the episode, but when they are on screen, literally all they do is sit there.  Here they are when we first see them:

And here they are the next time they’re on screen:

Here we can see a more advanced form of sitting, with a slight recline:

And now, in a flashback, thrill to their ability to sit without the aid of furniture:

Finally, we come to the denouement of this particular B-plot, sitting on a couch:

That is all five scenes in which we see the titular characters (not counting the picture Marge has of them – wait for it – sitting), and in not one instance does any one of them do anything.  The only time we see them standing is in a photo in Marge’s scrapbook (which she naturally keeps in the bathroom).  But when that photo dissolves into a flashback, why, look what they’re doing:

I have a hard time calling anything that static the main plot.  (The only on-screen movement the three of them engage in comes during that thoughtless porno setup at the end, and even then they remained seated.  Somewhere, Bryan Safi sheds a single tear.)  There isn’t even anything that could qualify as interesting dialog going on, which becomes painfully apparent during the fifth sit session when they try to wrap things up by having Marge say:

“I remember why I left this group seven years ago, and it’s why I’m leaving now.  Good day, ladies.”

That’s all well and good, except that Marge wasn’t the one who spent the rest of the episode trying to remember what happened.  That was Bart.  Marge knew what happened all along, but all that sitting apparently numbed the writers to the point that, when it came time to craft an ending, they couldn’t remember which of their two main characters was going through which story. 

There was more to the episode of course, including another resolution-less B-plot where Bart didn’t do much.  The rest of the screen time was filled with dream and fantasy sequences, flashbacks, and that teeth grindingly dull trip to Comic Book Guy’s House of Voice Over. 

The numbers are in, and, as expected, the NFL playoffs made for a whopper, with Zombie Simpsons being left on the televisions of 12.65 million viewers.  That’s easily the season high, and it’s the highest number (outside of last year’s 20th anniversary special) since Season 18, when “The Wife Aquatic” was also given a massive boost by an NFL playoff game.  Fortunately, next Sunday FOX has the early game and the football watching public will be tuned to CBS for the primetime lead in period.