THE SIMPSONS Greatest Hits: “The Way We Was”
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.
The Way We Was
Season 2/Episode 25 overall
First aired: 31 January 1991
Written by Al Jean, Mike Reiss, and Sam Simon.
“I’m livin’ it, but I ain’t lovin’ it.”
A prequel is a hard needle to thread. It has to tell a complete story within itself while enhancing the characters/events of the present story. Sometimes it works incredibly well (Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp), and other times, it does not (Prometheus). Within The Simpsons run, they have dipped into the past many times to differing levels of quality, but the first time they went back in time was this episode, and it was one of their best prequels, and best episodes.
The premise is pure Simpsons: the family are forced, when the TV breaks, to talk about their lives. Bart spends the whole episode trying to fix the TV while Lisa is enthralled by her parents tale of high school love and drama, and the story of how they ended up together.
“Ladies pinch. Whores use rouge.”
What is most interesting is that the show doesn’t pull punches with some of its bigger ideas about Marge and Homer’s characters. So Homer is shown to have always been lazy and dim-witted, but there is also a duplicitous-ness to his scheme to win over Marge. He lies to her, and his lie directly harms her by ruining her chances during a school debate.
And Marge is shown to be academically adept, reasonably popular, and a budding feminist. It’s a strange contrast with the put upon housewife she becomes in the modern timeline. Now, obviously, I’m not implying that Marge is too smart or too good to be a housewife, but the teenage Marge seems like she would grow up to be the kind of woman that wouldn’t accept such an old-fashioned household set-up (and also wouldn’t settle for a man like Homer, but that’s a rant for another day).
“Once you stop this car, I’m gonna hug you, and kiss you, and then I’ll never be able to let you go.”
The personalities of the young Homer and Marge reflect that of their two eldest children with Homer’s school ethic and Marge’s academic excellence mirrored in Bart and Lisa’s behaviour. It is interesting to see the writers use this flashback episode to both fill in the gaps of Marge and Homer’s past, but also to inform their future.
Overall, the flashback episodes of The Simpsons would become victim to the show’s longevity, meaning that eventually Marge and Homer met in the 90s instead of the 70s in an episode that probably won’t be a part of this feature. This episode, though, is a fantastic love story that gives the couple a romantic ending with a less than romantic beginning. It presents their courtship as oddly realistic.
Marge and Homer’s relationship isn’t perfect but, then again, no one’s is. It’s cool that the show doesn’t give them a full fairy tale, instead choosing to give them something a little messy and, in all honesty, a bit problematic.
Overall Score: 5 Days of Detention out of 5
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