The Simpsons: Season 18, Episode 10 – “The Wife Aquatic”

Couch Gag: The couch is a poster hanging on a wall and an unknown hand pins up the Simpsons onto it.

Number of times I laughed: 5

Plot: Springfield is having a free, outdoor silent movie gala, but the bullies find it to be a tad dull – “This movie isn’t silent, I can hear it sucking.” – So they throw beats at the film projector (run by Rod and Todd) until the film breaks. Having a canister of old vacation footage, Selma and Patty throw it into the projector. The film is of an old vacation to Barnacle Bay, a place they all went to as children. It is near and dear to Marge and she reminisces about it prompting Homer to burn the film onto DVD and then onto an iPod. However, Homer is unable to get it burned into the iPod and so he decides to take the family to Barnacle Bay.

After years of neglect the bay is no longer a vacationer’s paradise, but a run down slum (the worst place they’ve been to, except Brazil says Lisa.) The ever sweetie Homer refurbishes an old merry-go-round and creates a lovely fireworks display just for Marge. Unfortunately one of the fireworks lights the dock on fire and burns it to the ground, er sea. The townspeople string Homer up on a fish hook and then have their picture taken next to him as you would a giant fish.

Marge talks them into letting Homer go on the condition that he will pay for the dock by fishing. Out at sea Homer decides it is opposite day and fixes bait for supper and beer batters the hooks. The beer attracts the Yum-Yum fish (which was the town’s glory-days attraction before they suddenly disappeared) and the boat has a grand day. This lasts only moments as a “perfect storm” rises and capsizes the boat.

Thinking the men are all dead, the town holds a funeral for them until they all show up again unharmed (having been saved by some Japanese fishermen.) We then get a little moral lesson about over fishing to which the town learns not to fish, but to destroy all of their trees to sell to Larry Flynt’s pornography company.

Rating: *1/2

What a waste of a half hour. The writers not only forget to write a decent story, but forgot that this is supposed to be funny and left most of the jokes at home. The Perfect Storm is six years old, and mostly forgotten by now, so why they chose this to parody is beyond me. The Simpsons have often thrown awful little moral lessons at us before, so I should be used to it by now, but this one really stunk it up. The plot rambled. It resembled a plot, but it used their old device of having one dumb gag (the free movie) exist for the sole reason of moving them to another dumb gag. I kept waiting for one of them to say “the Simpsons are going to an island.” I laughed a few times, but just barely.

Trivia:

• The title is a reference to the film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
• The main plot is a parody of The Perfect Storm.
• The song played when Homer starts clubbing yum-yum fish is “At Last” by Etta James.
• While going to the Barnacle Bay museum, Marge and Lisa pass an exhibit called “The Science of Spongebob”.

 

 

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