Tag: The Changing of the Guardian

“Who wants to be the first to enter God’s good graces?” – Ned Flanders Zombie Simpsons has a well established track record for wild plot twists, nonsensical stories, and characters behaving so strangely that one wonders whether or not they’re still supposed to be human.  “The Changing of the Guardian”  valiantly upheld that reputation, particularly in the way it took its main conflict, scrambled it beyond even a semblance of coherence, and then awkwardly jammed it into just the last two minutes of the episode. Consider, for a second, the enormous inhumanity this episode expects you, the audience member, to swallow.  Set aside the oddity of Mav, the millionaire surfer, and his wife Portia, the ultra-liberal lawyer, deciding to basically steal the Simpson children for no reason.  Or Homer and (especially) Marge trusting their kids to these people they barely know.  Set aside even the brain dead way they all met.  Just think about the ending from Bart, Lisa and Maggie’s perspective.  The kids go off with their new guardians for what the episode explicitly describes as “a weekend”.  At some point during that “weekend”, Marge and Homer see a picture of the kids with Mav and Portia under the heading “Our Family” in the window of a portrait studio.  After a meandering car ride, Homer and Marge finally get to Mav and Portia’s ski chalet, where (after he of course crashes the car) Homer gets out and starts yelling at Mav with Bart standing right there: Oh.  Look.  Homer’s angry. Notice that Bart doesn’t say anything.  Cut to the next scene where Homer, Marge, Mav and Portia have a discussion about Mav and Portia taking the kids.  This is the finale of the episode, and it is as confused and sloppy as anything Zombie Simpsons has ever broadcast.  Here we go: Mav: Honestly, we fell in love with ’em.  And it just seemed like you guys didn’t really want ’em. Homer: Sure, you wanted the fun parts.  But do you want to go their little league games and recitals. Mav: Totally have. Portia: Like clockwork. Homer: Well, I’m glad someone has. Wait a second, weren’t the kids just there for a weekend?  And do they have baseball games and music recitals up there in the mountains?  Marge: Look, before anyone says anything else, how could you possibly think you could get our kids? Portia: It happens more than you know, Marge.  I’m a lawyer, he’s a surfer, that combination’s pretty unstoppable.  This is just amazingly hacktacular.  Marge asks a sensible question, to which Portia gives a nonsense response.  This is Zombie Simpsons directly telling us that they do not give a shit.  But it’s about to get worse, because we’re finally about to hear from the kids: Bart: Well I’m afraid that we don’t want to be with anyone but Mom and whoever she chooses to be with. Lisa: Portia, you’re the woman I dream of becoming, but Mom is my mom. Where the hell have these two been? …