THE SIMPSONS Greatest Hits: “Last Exit to Springfield”

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.

Last Exit to Springfield

Season 4/Episode 76 overall

First aired: 11 March 1993

Written by Jay Kogen & Wallace Wolodarsky

“It was the blurst of times”

I think what a lot of people forget about early episodes of The Simpsons is how packed with content they are. They are filled with dream sequences, cutaways, and non-sequiturs that – due to the popularity of Family Guy – were gradually phased out as the show continued.

When I embarked on this quest for the greatest episode of The Simpsons ever made, I took to Twitter and found that this episode was the top of a lot of people’s lists. The gifs sent my way all focused around the sequence in which Homer stares into space trying to work out how two very obvious things fit together (more about this later).

What no one focused upon was the vast amount of iconic elements that are in this episode, which are not limited to Lisa’s braces: The Big Book of British Smiles, “hired goons”, McBain bursting out of the ice sculpture, Abe Simpson’s story that doesn’t go anywhere, Homer as Don Fanucci from The Godfather Part II, “Now play Classical Gas”, Lisa’s protest song, Gummy Joe and Chomper, and a variety of other oft-quoted moments that are all shockingly from the exact same source.

It puts me in mind of the English TV show Fawlty Towers, a 12 episode masterpiece that is held up as the perfect example of a show not wearing out its welcome. One of the most famous episodes is The Germans, the final episode of the show’s first season. When people talk about it, they always discuss the big finale when Basil loses his mind and starts goose-stepping around the hotel. What people forget is the opening three-quarters of the episode with the moose’s head, the concussion, the fire alarm, etc. all iconic elements of the show that people would be hard-pressed to place in the same epiosde as each other.

“I tied an onion to my belt”

It’s hard to imagine that an episode which contains such greatness as Homer going on strike or Basil mentioning the war, could also contain a million other quotable and amazingly funny moments, but that is standard practice of these classic episodes of The Simpsons. They are so stacked with ideas, concepts, parodies, homages, spoofs, one-liners, wordplay, and pretty much every other conceivable aspect of comedy that they beg to be rewatched over and over.

Last Exit to Springfield tells two fairly simple stories that weave through each other with ease. Story one is that Lisa needs braces and story two is that Mr Burns wants to get one over on the union by removing the dental plan from his workers’ contracts. The two plots intersect in the episode’s most famous sequence as Homer’s internal monologue is revealed to just be Marge saying ‘Lisa needs braces’ and Lenny saying ‘dental plan’ over and over (eight times to be exact).

To keep the plan, Homer stands up for it and becomes union president, which puts him in Mr Burns’ crosshairs. The episode is a fantastic showcase for Mr Burns as he tries to outthink and outplot Homer, a man with an IQ of 55. The episodes that delve into Burns’ villainy and the villainy of capitalism itself are fantastic, and Burns has always been a great foil to the Simpsons, a family he could buy and sell with money he found in his couch cushions. It is a credit to The Simpsons that they can balance a cartoonish horror movie villain like Burns beside a family drama about having the money to afford dental care for your daughter.

“Why must you turn my office into a house of lies?!”

In conclusion, this episode has stood the test of time, and 25 years after its first airing it is still full of laugh out loud moments and jokes that need to be rewound to hear because you’re laughing at the joke that came before it.

This column won’t be full of tirades as to why old Simpsons is superior to new Simpsons or anything like that, and watching an epiosde as good as this, I’m very happy to excuse the show beocming lazy or less sharp as it reaches the 700 episode mark. There are other shows that are held in high regard that have never produced anything as strong as this fourth season of The Simpsons, a season I predict I will be coming back to over and over and over again, like Homer thinking about the dental plan.

Overall score: 5 British Smiles out of 5