THE SIMPSONS Greatest Hits: “Bart Sells His Soul”

Welcome to The Simpsons Greatest Hits, my never-ending quest to find the greatest episode of The Simpsons. Please come find me on twitter @FirsttoLastpod and let me know what is the best episode, and keep a look out for it on this weekly column.

Bart Sells His Soul

Season 7/Episode 132 overall

First aired: 08 October 1995

Written by Greg Daniels

“He’s back, in Pog form”

This is the episode that started me thinking about this project. I was day dreaming in work and the scene where Bart gets spooked while accosting Ralph Wiggum jumped into my head and I started laughing. As I remembered more scenes from the episode, I began to think that maybe this was the best episode of The Simpsons ever made and it would be open and shut.

Oh, how young and foolish I was six weeks ago. However, this is up there with the greats and, so far with this series of articles, it comes from the latest season we’ve dipped into (not a huge feat as every episode written about previously has been from the legendary fourth season). Also, the plot is very simple: Bart sells his soul, and then suffers the ramifications of that act.

“Ow, my freakin’ ears”

This is one of the more supernatural episodes outside of a Halloween special. The show really leans into the idea that Bart has actually sold his soul without undercutting the weird things that happen to him with logical explanations. Instead, Bart’s inability to laugh, the reactions of Santa’s Little Helper and Snowball II, his invisibility to automatic doors, and the fact his breath doesn’t fog up the ice cream freezer are presented as symptoms of a life without a soul.

Much like Homer the Heretic, there is a religious angle to the affair, but it never crosses the line into preachy-ness. If you told me that an episode of TV ended with the main character overcoming his torment with prayer I would tell you to keep it. However, somehow someway it works. And a huge aspect of that is the work of Nancy Cartwright.

The voice of Bart Simpson, Cartwright manages to inject Bart with huge amounts of emotion and trauma as he slowly begins to realise that selling his soul to Milhouse is going to ruin his life. The c*cky, laughing character of the fantastic opening sequence gradually becomes more manic and broken as the episode goes on, and Cartwright sells his descent into despair in a way that is quite heartbreaking.

“This sounds like rock and/or roll”

The B-plot in which Moe turns his tavern into a family restaurant is quite throwaway on the surface. Like most plots of this kind, things move incredibly quickly and before long everything has fallen apart and Moe is back to square one.

However, the tale of Uncle Moe’s Family Feedbag is a nice juxtaposition to the darker plot of Bart Simpson losing his soul, and my main complaint about it is that I wanted to see more of it. Moe is a fantastic character, full of hatred and violence, so making him the owner and face of a crazy, fun, wacky family restaurant is a stroke of genius.

In the end, this episode kicked off the neverending search for the greatest episode of The Simpsons, and it definitely deserves to be held in very high esteem. It’s weird, scary, dark, funny, and a great showcase for Bart and also Milhouse who falls into the Mephistopheles role as tempter and tormentor of poor soulless Bart Simpson.

Overall Score: 5 Burning Hot Colas out of 5

Note: I didn’t score last week’s entry which would have earned 5 Pudding Cans out of 5.