Homer’s marriage is in trouble… again.
Warning: full episode spoilers follow.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. In the newest episode of The Simpsons, Homer’s boorish behavior drives Marge to the breaking point, and he has to fight an uphill battle to win back her affection. That may be the basic concept behind “Every Man’s Dream,” but it could just as easily apply to a couple hundred other episodes in the show’s 26-year history. If the goal was to prove that the series still had life and originality left going into Season 27, this episode failed pretty miserably.
The conflict started out well enough, as Homer discovered he suffered from narcolepsy and wasted no time in using his new medical condition to his advantage. The hospital room scene was easily the highlight of the episode, between Marge’s copious vacation pictures and Dr. Hibbert uncharacteristically losing his bedside manner when Homer joked about not paying his bill.
Unfortunately, the episode was locked into a downward slide from there. The one element that set this conflict apart from all the many other “Homer and Marge have marriage troubles” episodes is that the two went as far as separating. But really, after all the crap Homer has pulled over the years, is using his Narcolepsy as an excuse to be lazy anywhere near the worst stunt he’s pulled? The idea that this of all things would finally send Marge over the edge strained credulity.
Granted, the setup was less important than how the separation actually impacted the characters, but the episode only failed harder in that regard. The rest of the Simpsons clan barely put in an appearance once Homer left. Instead, the focus shifted to a new romance between Homer and his pharmacist, Candace (voiced by Girls star Lena Dunham). What exactly the chipper, comely Candace saw in Homer is a complete mystery. Aside from a vaguely amusing hallucination scene, the episode never did much to exploit this oddball pairing in terms of humor or drama. It was a nice touch not only bringing in Dunham, but also the entire core cast of Girls. Unfortunately, they were all relegated to forgettable bit parts as Candace’s hipster friends. If anything, it made me wish this episode went in a different direction and involved Homer butting heads with Springfield’s millennials.
Homer, you’ve really done it now.
Three things really bugged me about the execution of this storyline. The first is that Marge was treated like an afterthought for most of the episode. We barely saw how she or the children coped with Homer falling out of their lives. Marge trying to make a new life for herself as a single woman would hold far more potential than another episode devoted to Homer bumbling about and trying to fix his latest boneheaded mistake. The second problem is that the episode was awfully cavalier about Homer moving on and essentially cheating on Marge with Candace after a couple of days. Homer may be a perpetual screw-up, but what sets him apart from the Peter Griffins of the animated sitcom world is that he’s still a well-meaning, decent guy who honestly cares about his family. Remember “The Last Temptation of Homer,” where the mere thought of being with another woman was enough to send Homer into a shame spiral? Suddenly those days seem that much farther behind us.
The third problem is that all of this was rendered moot in the end. The logic behind Marge kicking Homer out, the significance of Homer cheating on her, the bizarre nature of his romance with Candace – all of it was meaningless because the whole thing was just an elaborate dream sequence. It seemed very much as if the writers didn’t know where to take the conflict or how to properly wrap things up, so they just swept it all under the rug with the “It was all a dream” excuse. Somehow, the fact that the episode played that card multiple times before the end didn’t make the joke any funnier or more effective.
It’s fitting that the most memorable moments from this episode were the self-referential callbacks to older, much better Simpsons installments. I chuckled at the sight of the cafeteria wall in the nuclear plant, which displayed dozens of “Owner of the Month” plaques with Mr. Burns’ face and one with the Germans from “Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk.” It was also amusing to see Milo and Strawberry hanging out with the rest of Springfield’s hipsters and references to everything from Mr. Sparkle to Space Coyote among Candace’s many tattoos.
Perhaps there are still ways to get mileage out of the idea of Homer working to save his marriage, but this certainly isn’t it. This episode wasn’t just redundant, it operated on flimsy logic, mostly ignored Marge and seemed to have no problem with the idea of Homer shacking up with another woman. Worse, none of those problems even mattered in the end, because the whole thing proved to be one elaborate, pointless dream sequence. If this is a sign of things to come, Season 27 is going to be a long slog.
