“With rum running hoodlums in the catbird seat, Springfield sent for the one man who could clean up the town and shoot the gangsters: Rex Banner.” – Narrator Who Is Not Walter Winchell

These days there are more teevee cop stereotypes than you can shake a nightstick at.  There are the gruff loners who play by their own rules, but they get results, damn it.  There are the emotionally haunted forensics experts.  There are the (always model pretty) lady detectives who are just as tough as the boys.  In the subset of federal teevee cops, we’ve got everything from savvy military investigators and yet more forensic experts to the ever reliable, order barking modern super-agent.  Epitomized by Kiefer Sutherland, he’s tough, he’s ultra-competent, he’s had way too much coffee, and he likes yelling orders into cell phones.  That, in a nutshell, was Will Arnett’s character in “Steal This Episode”.

Set the clock back to a time before cell phones and SWAT teams, and those same upright federal crusaders with haircuts you could set your watch to were still there, they were just less excitable.  In place of Sutherland’s unrestrained id, there was Robert Stack, battling crime week after week in gangster ridden Chicago.  And that, in a similar nutshell, was Dave Thomas’s Rex Banner in “Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment”.

Both characters are hard charging, rule crazy feds, but that’s about where the similarities stop.  Like the Capital City Goofball or Race Banyon before him, Rex Banner is the kind of one-off satirical archetype at which The Simpsons excelled.  His clipped speech and complete lack of humor are instantly recognizable even if you’ve never seen Robert Stack wear a fedora.  The same way that you don’t need to know the name of a single square shouldered astronaut or giant fuzzy mascot to get Banyon and the Goofball, you don’t need to know a single teevee cop to understand that Banner is a ramrod straight G-man from the old school.

Banner’s dialogue matches his posture.  He speaks in short sentences that are nevertheless laced with old time slang worthy of an untouchable 1920s prohi:

“Listen, rummy, I’m gonna say it plain and simple: where’d you pinch the hooch?  Is some blind tiger jerking suds on the side?”

“Open up, curly, this is a raid!”

“Don’t crack wise with me, tubby.”

“It’s not up to us to choose which laws we want to obey.  If it were, I’d kill everyone who looked at me cockeyed.”

There he is, a minor character never to return, who nevertheless becomes a full, if batshit crazy, human in just a few minutes of screen time.

Compare that to the grossly underwritten and underthought agent in “Steal This Episode”.  I’d call him by his name, but they didn’t bother to give him one.  Other characters only address him three times: once as “sir”, once as “hotshot”, and one final time at the end when Lisa just walks up to him in court and starts talking.

Just as damning is the fact that we don’t seem him do much of anything.  He swoops into Homer’s backyard theater, then goes away while the show has Homer escape and Marge repeatedly (like, a lot) feel bad about turning him in.  (Incidentally, Marge didn’t mean to do it, but that kind of story subtlety is instantly lost in the seemingly endless scenes where Homer unknowingly guilts her over and over again.)  The next time we see our federal Javert he’s outside with the lead singer of Judas Priest, then he’s in court, and then he’s done.  The man has no story, no resolution, no nothing.

Worse still are his lines.  There’s no consistency to them.  They’re a mash of the usual Zombie Simpsons expository sitcom banter:

“Men, set your guns on kill.  We’re going after Homer Simpson.”

“Earplugs in, blinders on, we trained for this.” [copious screaming]

“Hollywood may be run by big corporations trying to squash people, but they make movies about people standing up to big corporations trying to squash them, and winning.”

He tells us what we already know, tells us what we’re about to see, and sums up the ending in case the other half-dozen times it was explained to us didn’t take.  These aren’t the words of a hard-ass, take no prisoners federal agent.  They’re the words of a nameless nobody with no core and no character.  He’s on screen, he yells some things (most of which have nothing to do with one another), and then he’s gone.

It’s been a long time since Zombie Simpsons created a character anyone would remember more than an hour after watching the episode, and this nameless Rex Banner wannabe is a perfect illustration of why.  They don’t deal in characters anymore, they deal in props.  The audience for Homer’s movies includes Miss Hoover, Sideshow Mel, the Squeaky Voiced Teen, Chief Wiggum and a bunch of other characters who probably would never have been there in Season 8.  When Superintendent Chalmers gets singled out by Homer, it could’ve been anyone else in the back yard without changing the scene one whit:

Jimbo and Frink have always been best friends.  They have so much in common.

Agent Whathisname is a recognizable archetype that they treat like any other replaceable part.  They don’t give him a story, don’t make him move the main plot (he doesn’t chase Homer to the consulate, the family just goes there and he somehow knows they went), and don’t even bother to give his lines the least bit of personality.

Rex Banner is a precisely distilled take on fictionalized Elliot Ness: body and mind carved out of solid wood.  The other guy, whoever he was, flitted in and out of a few scenes and then vanished, his presence and personality as insubstantial as a wisp.