Episodes 6 and 7

So, we start today's post with Moaning Lisa, and the morning of the 17th of January 1990. The Simpson house has a lounge, a den and a "rumpus room", and Evergreen Terrace is in such a nice neighbourhood that Homer can leave his keys in the front door overnight without the family being the victims of burglary or car theft. What luxury! Obviously, the comfortable blandness (or maybe the bland comfort) of suburban life is a contributing factor to Lisa's depression, which shows itself for the first time in this episode. There's also a scene in which Homer and Bart play a boxing videogame, on a console that doesn't have any obvious real-life analogue, just being a vague lump of technology on top of the TV, though I think this is probably preferable to a vapid referential anti-joke like the "Funtendo Zii" that appears in Season 21. During the match, Bart also delivers the line "I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, they can't prove anything!", which was on a T-shirt I had as a kid.

More important though, is Homer and Marge's inability to deal with Lisa's ennui, something typical of baby boomer parents faced with the emergent problems of a generation growing up in a world without the culturally-enforced emotional repression they had forced upon them. Though Homer also has nightmares about the idea that Bart will one day be a better man than he (if it hasn't happened already), while Marge's dreams see her reliving the days in her childhood when her mother advised to to keep everything bottled up inside, to keep up appearances, advice she passes onto Lisa, though to Marge's credit, she does realise the error in this.

Lisa's interactions with Bleeding Gums Murphy are interesting: like he says, she has "no real problems", compared to his life of poverty and dental neglect. But her pain, whether it's caused by the pointlessness she sees in her lifestyle, or a chemical imbalance is still real, and Bleeding Gums doesn't try to discount or belittle it. Their first meeting takes place on the night of the 17th, by the way. I've written so much on this episode, and a day hasn't even passed yet! On the eighteenth, Homer goes to the arcade to learn how to video-box, which is treated as a dirty shame for an adult. How absurd, we all know that arcade games are probably the highest form of art! Meanwhile, driving Lisa to band practice, Marge passes on her awful hand-me-down advice, and instantly regrets it as she sees Lisa becoming a doormat before her very eyes, smiling to please boys and passively obeying the idiotic music teacher Mr. Largo. The episode ends on the night of the 18th, with the Simpsons going to see Bleeding Gums at a jazz club. Nice.

Taking us into the 19th is Call of the Simpsons, an episode I don't really have fond memories of. Don't worry, there's no related trauma or anything, I just don't think it's very good. Season one is a little rough all-round, but this episode is one of the weakest of the bunch. Though only a minute into it, and we've got the first instance of Homer referring to the Flanders family collectively as "The Flandererses", which is hilarious. There's also Ned's big fancy RV, which, as far as I can remember, isn't mentioned again until season six's Lemon of Troy. Odd how Bob, the RV salesman, who quickly alternates between insincere sycophancy and blunt honesty, never became a recurring character.

The 19th was a pretty eventful day! Homer gets jealous of Ned's RV, goes out and buys (a much worse) one of his own, packs it up and takes the family away in it. It's certainly paced like each scene directly follows from the last, so I'm going to have to go along with it, I guess! The RV quickly gets destroyed, stranding the Simpsons in the woods, Maggie wanders off and befriends some bears, Bart's lucky red hat is referred to for the first time, and my memories of this episode's low quality are all being proven right. I'm twelve minutes in and it feels like it's been hours of unfunny, boring rubbish. I don't like being this negative, but this episode doesn't leave me much else to do. It's simultaneously less funny and less dramatically interesting than Moaning Lisa, by a long long way. On the 20th of January, Homer is mistaken for Bigfoot, with people somehow mistaking the brown mud in which he's covered for brown fur.

We see three different front pages, all of the same paper, covering the Bigfoot story, so I guess we're on the 23rd now? Bart, Homer and Maggie have all been lost in the woods all that time without dying, amazing! And Maggie being an unsupervised baby, too! According to the news on TV, a week passes with the captured Homer being studied in a lab. Dr. Marvin Monroe, who has met Homer before, is unsure of his humanity. Marge and Homer were watching the news on TV in bed, on the night of the 30th of January 1990, and since that stinker of an episode has drained the life out of me, that's also where this post ends. Next time, we'll start on the 31st of January, 1990, with The Telltale Head!

Episodes 3 to 5

Let's get right into the third episode of season one, Homer's Odyssey, which starts on the 30th of December, 1989. I used to always get this title mixed up with the season eight episode El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer, which was annoying, because I like that episode a lot more, and I'd see Homer's Odyssey in TV listings and get my hopes up. Right from the start, there's some season one weirdness: the Springfield Tire Fire is still just the plain old Springfield Tire Yard, then the kids get to their field trip at the nuclear plant and we see the first (and only?) appearance of the infamous Black Smithers! There's also a shot of a three-eyed fish in the river outside, a throwaway joke that becomes a big episode plot point later on. That's nice.

If we follow the rules strictly (and we do), then this is a pretty depressing new year's eve: Homer gets rejected by a bunch of jobs, breaks open Bart's piggy bank, then attempts suicide. In contrast though, the way he runs to save his family with a boulder tied to him is a display of superhuman strength and agility, so it's ups and downs I guess. I'll assume that the town council meeting takes place the next day, ringing in 1990. Happy new year! Then, there's a quick montage of five Springfield Shopper frontpages featuring Homer's safety crusade, all with consectuive days on them (but no dates), taking us all the way to the 6th of January! On the seventh, Homer addresses a crowd in front of the Power Plant, and they all look like bizarre mutants, a nice little laugh that's only possible thanks to the rougher visual style of the early seasons. The episode ends shortly after that, which means that the next, There's No Disgrace Like Home, naturally starts on the eighth.

First day with Homer back on the job, and the Simpsons are already going to the company picnic, on this amazingly balmy January afternoon. I did say that we were following the rules even if they didn't entirely make sense, didn't I? For the record, Smithers is now white, too. Would it be giving too much credit to the writers of later seasons to suggest that Marge getting daytime drunk at the picnic is an early sign of her addictive personality that crops up a couple of times in later years? Probably. The next night, Homer insists they eat their gross-looking trays of multicoloured goo at the dining room table. Everyone else seems almost oblivious to his familial dysfunction-fueled angst, which is really strange considering later versions of Homer, who only gets more and more oafish and inconsiderate. He also mentions his mother calling him a big disappointment, which conflicts with what we later learn about his past. I know this kind of nerdy nitpicking is frowned upon, but this is a blog about pointlessly figuring out exactly when each episode takes place, so it's unavoidable, really.

It's the tenth when we get the first appearance of Dr. Marvin Monroe, in the form of a TV advert, and the next night has the first appearance of Itchy and Scratchy! Homer pawns the TV and cashes in the kids' college funds and they go straight to meet Dr. Monroe in person. So that leaves us with this post's last episode, Bart the General, starting on the Twelfth. Over the course of the day, we see Bart's daydreams about getting murdered by Nelson, including the funeral where he has Xes for eyes, used in so many "DEAD BART LOST EPISODE" hoaxes, then in real life, we get another one of my earliest Simpson memories: Bart in the bin, rolling down the hill, then sitting despondant in the bath when he gets home. The next day, there's more first appearances from the old bearded man, Jasper, and the gun/war memorabilia shop owner, Herman. The big training montage seems to take place on the fourteenth and fifteenth, and the actual battle on the sixteenth, judging by the number of sunsets we see during the montage (two of them).

I'll assume Bart's fourth wall-breaking anti-war message at the end is non-canon, so the episode and this post end on the 16th of January, 1990, and the next post, we'll be starting with Moaning Lisa, on the 17th!

Episodes 1 and 2, plus THE RULES

Time and space are famously nebulous concepts in the world of The Simpsons, even moreso than our own, and though there isn't much that can be done to assess the spatial dimensions of their universe, the temporal are far easier. By which I mean we can, with a whole load of episode rewatching and note-taking, figure out exactly when each episode takes place. Of course, I don't expect it'll take much more than two seasons before things start to contradict each other, and everything falls apart, but that's part of the fun, isn't it?

So, that's what this blog is: an attempt to put every episode of The Simpsons on a timeline, including flashbacks and flashforwards. There's a few rules I'm going to be sticking to, to make things a little easier to follow, too:

1 - Unless explicitly stated otherwise, an episode starts on the day after the previous episode ends, even if this contradicts real world events and/or customs.
2 - Rule 1 still applies betweeen seasons, for two reasons. The first is that the characters don't age between seasons, so there's no reason to assume that a year has passed, and the other is the 2-part cliffhanger Who Shot Mr. Burns?, which takes place at the end and beginning of the fifth and sixth seasons, respectively.
3 - In episodes set in the present day, Bart and Lisa are always ten and eight years old, and their birthdays are always their tenth and eighth birthdays (unless there's evidence that says otherwise).
4 - Treehouse of Horror episodes, similar episodes such as Simpsons Tall Tales and Simpsons Bible Stories, and clip show episodes generally aren't considered part of the timeline, unless they have framing stories, which will be tackled on a case-by-case basis.

I think that's everything, so let's get started with the first few episodes of season one! The first episode is The Simpsons Christmas Special, or Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire, which is helpful, as it gives us a firm starting point: Homer's side job as a mall Santa pays on Christmas Eve, then he immediately goes to the dog track, befire eventually returning home with Santa's Little Helper at the end of the episode. So, the first episode ends on the night of the 24th of December, 1989. Before watching it for this blog, I hadn't seen this episode in many years, and it's really different.

I know the difference between old and new Simpsons is well-explored territory on the internet, but there's still a few things I'd like to say on the matter. Firstly, there's a lot of affection in this episode, with the love between Homer and Bart feeling especially sincere. There's also a nice moment later one, with Lisa sat on Grandpa's lap watching TV. Generally, this humble start also doesn't feel like a billion dollar media franchise, either: I'd compare it more to those animated specials they used make of characters from newspaper comic strips in the 1970s and 80s. I'll be a little reasonable with the rules, and assume that no-one's going to work or school on Christmas Day, so, we'll start counting the dates in the second episode, Bart The Genius, from the 26th.

So, Bart's class has the aptitude test on the 26th, he starts attending the Enriched Learning Center for Gifted Children on the 27th, and after a couple of unhappy days, blows up the lab and dyes himself green on the 29th, with the episode ending on that night. Bart turning green is actually my earliest memory of The Simpsons, from when the show first aired in the UK in 1990, when I would have been 4 years old! Anyway, what I took from watching this episode again today is that Bart was the only person at the Learning Center to display any real intelligence, when he comes up with the "going undercover" plan to get back to Springfield Elementary. The kids there are all just reciting memorised tricks rather than showing any actual intelligence, and the adults are simply obseesed with the stereotypical trappings of intelligence, like shunning popular culture or deifying intellectuals of the past. Anyway, back on topic, Bart is green, naked and reading a comic, and it's the night of the 29th of December, 1989. This post is already pretty long, since it started with an explanation of this whole endeavor, so I'll end it here, though the next post onwards will detail three episodes a pop. Hopefully you'll keep reading!