Tag: Lisa the Greek

“Let’s see . . . football . . . football, homoeroticism in, oddball Canadian rules, Phyllis George and.” – Lisa Simpson  There are obviously a lot of ways “MoneyBART” fails miserably in comparison to “Homer at the Bat”, which it consciously aped.  But there is a different Season 3 masterpiece to which it is pathetic and terrible in comparison: “Lisa the Greek”.  In both episodes, Lisa needs to study a sport she doesn’t know about.  In “MoneyBART”, everything about this, from how much she knows at first, to how she goes about it, to what she reads for research is nonsensical, slow, and nearly joke free.  “Lisa the Greek” is the opposite.  What is this “based-ball” of which you speak? When Bart complains that Lisa knows nothing about baseball, she reads off a list of old managers she thinks were women.  This is one of those painfully bad jokes that doesn’t make any sense, is embarrassingly obvious, and still takes forever.  How the hell did she make that list without discovering that the names on it are men?  Is Lisa Homer-level clueless now?  After they come back from commercial, Zombie Lisa demonstrates further un-Lisa-like ignorance by saying that “free safety” and “point guard” are baseball positions.  Again, this is both way out of character for her (she isn’t one to confidently state something she isn’t sure of) and excruciatingly obvious and slow (it was so funny the first time they did it twice!).  The scene ends when she promises to do some research, except if she hadn’t already done research where the hell did she get that list of managers?  It shouldn’t be asking too much that the plot makes sense within a single scene.  By contrast, in “Lisa the Greek” Lisa already knows the basics of football, telling Homer that Denver just fumbled and following the game without any needless, time sucking, out of character stupidity on her part.  I need to learn about a sport, where do I go first? In “MoneyBART”, Zombie Lisa needs to learn the basics of baseball.  Instead of going on-line where she would find everything she needs,  she goes to Moe’s.  Again, this is completely out of character as Lisa would know better than to think that her idiotic father and his drinking buddies are the best source of knowledge available.  This leads to some pointless banter and the discovery that Lisa is not the only nerd who has wandered into the bar.  With no prompting from her whatsoever, Frink and the nerds bombard her research material.  As commenter sVybDy pointed out: She never even explained to them what she was doing there or why she was interested in baseball. Are they omniscient? This is one of the classic hallmarks of crappy fictional writing: the characters know things they shouldn’t.  If I walked up to some guys with laptops talking baseball, I may strike up a conversation.  But they don’t know that I’m there to research baseball unless I tell them, which Zombie…