Trilogy of Error

For me this is the standout show from Season 12. Extremely well written & executed with lots of laughs.

It's an episode any generation of The Simpson's fans would really enjoy.

IMHO it is one of the classics.

This episode has three separate stories, following Lisa, Bart, and Homer, with Marge popping up to connect each of them together. This story is so intricately put together, utilizing lots of foreshadowing. It is so interesting to watch all three stories slowly cross paths until it reaches a pretty satisfying conclusion. This episode is brilliant and just as good as 22 Short Films About Springfield, if not better.

Escaping from the linear narrative is not easy, many of the attempts end in repetitive stories that the brain easily anticipates (I'm thinking of a specific episode of The Witcher). This episode is an honorable exception. Repeating only succinctly micro-fragments that help us situate ourselves, we find ourselves before a technique comparable only to Memento and few other masters of cinematography. The story lacks of common sense, but it couldn't be more fun as a good ape reminds us. I would like The Simpsons to recover this type of story governed by chaos, the constant art of deception and the good faith of the viewer.

Decided to see how IMDB ranked Simpsons and outside of the golden era which ended in season in 7, I still watched all of 8 and 9 but found more bad than good episodes and 10 it was officially dead so I'd occasionally see an episode after that but just stopped because it wasn't worth my time.

This was "ranked" on IMDB as 44 on list, and was the highest episode past when I stopped watching, I hoped it was a gem but it was clearly why I stopped watching.

The premise is solid, follow 3 characters throughout a day but different overlapping experiences.

I had one chuckle when the French teacher tells his students to laugh in French, a couple mildly amusing smiles but mostly blank and often confused by me.

An couple examples of the sloppy writing (I actually believe the writers increasingly came to hate the audience and stopped caring and those that replaced them are hacks) is they have Marge call Rainer Wolfcastle by his character name McBain. Marge knows who Rainer is but would never know him as McBain, Homer would do that not Marge. I wonder if the writers by this time even realized who was the actor and the character.

The other is it's a school day Bart just leaves the house at the start, old school episodes wouldn't just ignore that Bart skipped school and no one cared. Yes Marge cut Homers finger off or he'd have gone to work but later Lisa stops by Moe's and says noonish is when he'd be drinking, NOT on a work day!

It's just little stuff you can tell the writers don't even know who's who or what's what. This is below par on the worst episodes of classic Simpsons and should have been much lower.

If you disagree with this that's fine but you are the problem, the show should have been cancelled long ago but people with no sense of humor still watch it and laugh.

The Simpsons is a classic TV Series that had its heyday in the 90's. The main characters were born in the 80's in The Tracy Ullman Show and developed in this series. The Golden Age includes the first nine seasons. The second episode of the ninth season ("The Principal and the Pauper") already predicted a loss of ideas that become evident in the tenth season. The 10th, 11th and 12th season have lower quality than the previous but they are still interesting and fun. "Trilogy of Error" is a smart and unusual episode that recounts a day of the Simpson family from different points of view: Homer's rush to the hospital to reattach his severed finger, Lisa's rush to school to win the science fair, and Bart's run-in with an illegal fireworks deal. This episode is the best of the season and would have been a great season finale. It is a very funny parody of two crime movies: "Go" (1999) and "Run Lola Run" (1998). The events are interconnected and all of them are solved in the final. After the 12th season, the series has a further overall drop in quality. It would have been better to close with a flourish, and this episode would. The characters would then be able to return in a few movies. Unfortunately, the success of the series has prevented this.