If You're So Sure What it Ain't, Howabout Telling Us What it Am?
Season 9 of The Simpsons has been out on DVD for a little while and I've started renting it from Netflix, under the theory that it's the first season in the show's history bad enough that it's unambiguously not worth owning. [Rambling on and on and on about Simpsons episode quality over the years bypassed for space and time considerations. -- ed.]
Anyway, by far my favorite episode so far out of the 9th-season bunch is Lisa the Skeptic -- the one where Lisa finds what looks like an angel's skeleton on a fossil dig and tries to convince the rest of the town that it isn't supernatural -- which widely satirizes the ever more familiar science vs. religion conflict and also contains some of the whole series' most nuanced and emotionally resonant character work in a couple of suprisingly well-shaded scenes between Lisa and Marge.
The episode also has substantial geek cred, mostly because it was written by eventual Futurama nerdmeister David S. Cohen and features Stephen Jay Gould in a small but funny part. I read Gould's Wonderful Life late last year, so what struck me most of all when I rewatched the show, hilarity and emotional resonance aside, is one scene in which a blackboard behind Gould's Simpsonized character shows an illustration of a species from the Burgess Shale:
I read Dad's copy of the book and already returned it (somewhat worse for the wear) around Christmas so I couldn't immediately look up exactly what specimen was onscreen. Of course the Internet knows the answer: it's Branchiocaris pretiosa. Sweet. For further neatness here's an artist's conception of a branchiocaris, including the bivalved shell that's mostly cut away in the blackboard illustration.
This episode also features Ralph Wiggum mispronouncing Principal Skinner's name as "Prinscipal Skipple". That is not relevant to the discussion above; I am just saying.
Anyway, by far my favorite episode so far out of the 9th-season bunch is Lisa the Skeptic -- the one where Lisa finds what looks like an angel's skeleton on a fossil dig and tries to convince the rest of the town that it isn't supernatural -- which widely satirizes the ever more familiar science vs. religion conflict and also contains some of the whole series' most nuanced and emotionally resonant character work in a couple of suprisingly well-shaded scenes between Lisa and Marge.
The episode also has substantial geek cred, mostly because it was written by eventual Futurama nerdmeister David S. Cohen and features Stephen Jay Gould in a small but funny part. I read Gould's Wonderful Life late last year, so what struck me most of all when I rewatched the show, hilarity and emotional resonance aside, is one scene in which a blackboard behind Gould's Simpsonized character shows an illustration of a species from the Burgess Shale:
I read Dad's copy of the book and already returned it (somewhat worse for the wear) around Christmas so I couldn't immediately look up exactly what specimen was onscreen. Of course the Internet knows the answer: it's Branchiocaris pretiosa. Sweet. For further neatness here's an artist's conception of a branchiocaris, including the bivalved shell that's mostly cut away in the blackboard illustration.
This episode also features Ralph Wiggum mispronouncing Principal Skinner's name as "Prinscipal Skipple". That is not relevant to the discussion above; I am just saying.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home