“Your bowtie is just darling.” – Rene
“Well, thanks.  Yeah, it kinda draws the eye away from the old mug.” – Moe

[Note: Apologies for not getting this up yesterday.  I’m having grotesque technical problems at the spinoff site and reliable ratings numbers were delayed a day by NASCAR overrun anyway.]

• They don’t take long to get right into the shitty writing, do they?  Immediately after showing us the 2009 Oscars on the TV, Homer says exactly that.  Zombie Simpsons really doesn’t trust the audience to pay attention in the least, do they? 
• Looks like we’re doing sad Moe this week.  Naturally, he’s not standing behind the bar when he tries to talk to Homer, Lenny and Carl but is instead off alone for no reason. 
• Setting aside the cheap emotion they’re going for, the suicide hotline didn’t have to be terrible.  But it also didn’t have to be that long and drawn out, either.
• They really needed to drop the prank call thing when cell phones made it stupid, but they’ve been clinging to it for years now.
• “This trip is about turning your life around.”  Stupid plots are not aided by equally stupid dialogue.
• What’s with the limo, and why is Marge dressed like that?
• I wasn’t going to bitch about the fact that this trip would be horribly expensive for theoretically working class people, but then they had to rub my nose in it: “Are you sure you want to spring for something that expensive. / Yes, cause every time you wear it, you’ll know how much we love you.”  Marge’s lines in this episode are just atrociously obvious and literal. 
• “And look over there, Moe”.  She’s not going to get anything better to say, is she?
• Lisa’s “maybe if it’s in good taste/Oh, come on” thing is just as bad.  It’s a hacktacular setup, and the punchline is “come on”.  Why not just have her look at a dog and say, “Don’t even say it”? 
• The whole waterslide thing, I just, what the fuck?
• Wow, they’re combining lots of ideas they’ve done before.  Moe is suddenly happy and handsome and the bar is getting redone.  I’ve only seen that like seven times before.
• And now Marge is back and apparently never noticed that Grampa was gone?
• Hey, speaking of repeat jokes, hot and cold water in the shower. 
• So this Lisa subplot is just going to get worse, isn’t it?
• “The suit wasn’t magic, Moe.  Don’t you know the story of Dumbo the elephant?”  Multiple people approved that line, and not one of them asked whether or not there was any reason for Moe to think it’s magic, why he didn’t just get another suit, or why they had to then recap the whole movie right after that.
• Well, I was wrong about the Lisa subplot.  It didn’t get worse.  It just ended abruptly and for no reason.  Probably for the best. 
• And it ends, just as nonsensically as it began.

Here at the end of Season 24, Zombie Simpsons is sticking to its long tradition of incoherence with the big new innovation being the inclusion of two crappy, underdone B-plots instead of one.  Lisa’s little encounters with, uh, holographic marketing, were so straight ahead dull that they couldn’t even make fun of things that are crying out to be made fun of.  Bart’s was a little more traditional in that it made no sense and combined two characters acting wildly unlike themselves, and none of that even includes Grampa climbing on the roof. 

The main plot was yet another fascinating look at how terribly sad and depressed Moe is.  The twist here was that now Marge cares for some reason, and Moe got his own brand of whiskey for which he apparently needed to wear a single, not-quite Chanel suit at all times.  That about two-thirds of all the dialogue was either hacktacular sitcom setup-punchline clunkers or repetitive exposition made the thing aggravating in addition to being boring.

Anyway, the final ratings are in and they are just as bad as late Season 24 has come to expect.  A tiny 4.43 million viewers wished they were watching Dumbo on Sunday.  That replaces last week’s episode at #6 on the all time least watched list.  With three episodes to go, Season 24 is locked into being the least watched ever by a fair margin.  The only question between now and the end is how low it’ll sink.