Robot Parade by They Might Be Giants

Brent Spiner

Brent Spiner as Data. A Spock for the 90's.

That is about all that I can recommend from last night’s Simpsons episode.

Everything was just there, vacillating between boring and recycled. Even Lenny licking the frog after taking his drug test was just Homer not not liking toads from the episode Missionary: Impossible.

This episode seems to want to make some sort of statement about the American workforce being downsized, the 99%, robots taking over our jobs…?  The title is a not so subtle take on Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot but never really reaches the proper levels of satire that title would indicate.

It starts out muddled with Homer not being able to drink for the weekend so he can pass his work mandated drug test and ends muddled with Homer and Mr. Burns being saved from rampaging robots by all the former Springfield Nuclear Power Plant employees who Burns had fired to hire said robots.

There’s no message anywhere, just a lot of starts and stops, and things that go nowhere.  The entire second act of the show with Homer working with the robots (who are all voiced by Brent Spiner aka Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation) and trying to befriend them is only so that he’ll drill into their heads and delete their initial prime directive.  I feel that there really could have been more there, but as with so much else in the episode, they go off in a new direction before they really reach any payoff.

Hasn't Homer befriended a robot before...?

And as with last week’s episode, How I Wet Your Mother, the plots are just more and more convoluted and with fewer and fewer resolutions.  And with fewer and fewer truly funny moments.

At this point, I wonder if the current writers have seen the previous seasons of the show.  Maybe it should be required viewing so that they can be reminded of how great things used to be and what our expectations are, instead of just trotting out the same ideas in lesser forms.  But clearly that is expecting too much.