Homer deals with profound loss in this week’s episode of The Simpsons, “Mona Leaves-A.” Can the writers pull off a golden-age-esque episode about losing a loved one, or will it turn into a nightmare?

Kredit Kookies: Chalkboard Gag: “This Punishment Is Not Medieval” (written in an Old Gothic-esque font); Couch Gag: Homer evolves gradually over time into his modern form, finally coming through his front door. Marge asks what took him so long and he sighs – a particularly impressive gag, culled for the third time from season 18’s “Homerazzi”.

We open at the Springfield Mall, where Moe’s just pulled into a parking space. Patron after patron stops by his slip, hoping he’s leaving. He quickly begins to enjoy his newfound power over the citizenry. “I like creating disappointment. You know that little moment when people's hope dies? I feed on that.”

Inside the mall, Bart and Lisa are annoyed with Marge’s having tricked them into coming to the mall just to buy sweaters (from the well-named "Itchy and Scratchy's"). Everyone in the family wants to do something else – Marge declares they’ll do what Maggie wants to do, and she selects “Stuff and Hug”, a stuffed animal creation store. Bart and Lisa are ticked, and Bart shows his displeasure by secretly pitching his sweater into the trash – Lisa follows suit as soon as she knows Marge isn’t watching.

Inside the shop, Ralph Wiggum is overstuffing his animal (causing it to explode). Lisa selects a dolphin, and an assistant refuses to allow her to dress it as a doctor until she tells him it’s a boy - she snickers in delight at having fooled her. As Marge attends to Maggie and Lisa, Bart wanders free and discovers a sound-activated hippo toy that allows you to record and replay a short audio message. Naturally, he records a nasty message for Homer on every hippo in the store, resulting in Homer destroying them all by violent means.

At home, OFF discover their front door ajar. Assuming the worst, Homer grabs “The Defender,” a concrete block wrapped up in a chain and swung mace-style over his head, and enters before the rest of the family. He recognizes the scent of apple pie and realizes the “intruder” is his runaway activist mother, Mona.

Sending the family out for ice cream, Homer and Mona have a chat over the pie.  Mona tells him that she’s abandoned her activism, that the authorities aren’t chasing her anymore - she wants to settle down and be a mother to him again. She asks him for forgiveness. Despite having eaten every slice of her apple pie, Homer’s not interested in listening to what Mona has to say and is afraid to get close to her because she tends to disappear. They have a strong argument, in which Mona explains she only wanted to improve the world but in the end only ended up hurting Homer, the most important thing in her life. Homer recalls sitting in front of an open refrigerator as a child, Mona leaving on another mission without hugging him goodbye, and his reaching into the fridge for some fried chicken as comfort. It drives home Homer’s inability to accept Mona’s apology, and he refuses to digest the pie she’s given him. Mona simply walks away.

That night, Homer’s alone in bed watching an extreme sports award show. Lance Armstrong and Fozzie Bear are presenting an award, and by the time Fozzie’s been knocked off of his puppeteer's hand Homer realizes he’s been too harsh on his mom. He goes downstairs to apologize to his mother and finds her sitting up in a chair, dead - the episode's most effective scene shows the exterior of the Simpson's home, with Homer crying out "Mom?" to the quiet and darkened room.

The following day, after Mona’s memorial service, Homer’s lost in his grief but surrounded by the men in Mona’s life (Seth and Munchie from “D’Oh’n in the Wind; Abe; Mason Fairbanks, Homer's near-biological dad from "Paternity Coot"). Abe, who’s barely able to contain his delight, tells Homer that he no longer wants to dance on Mona’s grave (a statement belied by the tap shoes he’s wearing). His friends try to deliver comfort - Lenny doesn't get along with his mother, Carl does get along with Lenny's mother, and Apu and Ned take the time to have a religeous debate.  Homer ultimately takes custody of Mona's ashes, and the family goes to watch Mona’s video will.

On tape, she chastises Homer for presumably, “looking through her things.” She gives Bart a Swiss army knife, Lisa “her rebellious spirit”, Marge a hemp bag (“Smells like a concert…”), and Homer a final task. She wants him to climb to the highest point at Springfield Monument Park and scatter her ashes at exactly three in the afternoon. 

That afternoon, the family is seen making the long climb to the highest peak. Exhausted and sweaty, they drop back to rest one by one, leaving Homer alone to reach the top. When he releases them, they drift into a crevice far below the peak – directly into a missile guidance system, jamming it before it can launch. A few dozen guards rush out and dither about what’s happened, and Homer loses his balance and falls into the crevice. He’s beaten up for his troubles and awakens later tied to a chair in a a missle silo.

If you guessed Mr. Burns was behind all of this, you’d be right. He’d been planning on launching all of the SNPP’s leftover waste into the Amazon Rain Forest. Declaring there’s nothing Mona or Homer can do to stop him now, he gives Homer back his mother’s ashes (which had been vacuumed out of the console) and prepares for another launch.

Lisa, Bart, Maggie and Marge, realize Homer’s missing, search for and find him, and witness the end of this exchange. They decide on a quick, decisive action - Bart tosses down his knife for Homer to extricate himself (where it momentarily becomes lodged in his head), and Lisa and Marge create a diversion by lighting Marge’s hemp bag alight with a pair of Mona’s crystal earrings - which Lisa took from the bedside table, apparently not satisfied just with inheriting her grandmother’s rebellious spirit.

To the too-obvious strains of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”, the smoke wafts down through a vent to the guards, who soon are happily distracted. Homer has gotten hold of “The Defender” again and swings it about, knocking out guards left and right. With his wild swinging, he manages to both stop the launch and initiate the self-destruct button.

As the launch aborts and the missile base implodes, Mona’s final victory over Mr. Burns – and the society he represents – comes about, though Mr. Burns survives. Homer – in a Bond film reference – returns to earth via a Union Jack-emblazoned parachute.

When he lands, Marge helps him realize that he’s forgiven his mother, and that he still loves both Mona-and, importantly, that Mona loved him.  She lives on in their family. Homer rips open the vaccum bag, releases Mona’s ashes, and they dance in the wind as the scene dissolves to a montage of clips of Homer and Mona together from previous episodes, set to “Mother and Child Reunion” by Paul Simon (a reference to "Mother Simpson").  

The final clip shows Mona pouring sugar into Homer’s cereal. He asks for more, she tells him “no” he’s “ sweet enough already.” They finally embrace, as Homer sneaks one last spoonful of sugar.

We close on a title card dedicating the episode to the memory of Elsie Castellaneta (Dan Castellaneta’s mom) and Dora K. Warren (Harry Shearer's mother - thank you to reader Trish for catching this!).

Red Dress Press: A mixed bag of an episode, once again. While I liked the gag with Moe in the parking lot, it didn’t pay off (I expected to see him still proudly standing by his car sometime further into the episode), and the “Stuff And Hug” segment was just a fairly useless excuse to set-up to get the family out of the house.

Still, the material between Mona and Homer proved heart-rending and resonant - it really shouldn’t have been leavened with dumb Homer humor such as his winching his belt about his own waist to stop the pie from digesting.  Despite this, small details - like the return of Seth and Munchie, and Homer's friends flocking around in a time of trouble - elevate the episode generally.

I like it that the show addressed the Burns/Mona conflict and brought it to an interesting, funny end - Burns would be that petty.  It's interesting to note that Mamie Van Doren has become his reference point for the pinnacle of the opposite sex, when once he lusted after 30's sex symbol Greta Garbo and has made reference to several 20's-era movie stars in similar ways.

Yet plenty of irritating moments pop up.  First, there’s no closure for Mona and Abe. You could argue they said everything they needed to say to each other in “Mother Simpson”, but if he still wants to dance on her grave after so many years have passed between them then there’s still something worth talking about or fixing in the way they relate to one another.

Lisa's sudden avarice when it comes to Mona's posessions proves mildly shocking.  The show portrayed Lisa and Mona as true kindred spirits, and I'm saddened by the fact that we never get real closure between these two characters, and further saddened by Lisa's sudden greed.

Lastly, the third act Should Not Have Existed. Period. It’s one thing to have a Bond parody - which the show has already done in the Hank Scorpio-centered episode “You Only Move Twice” - it’s quite another to shoehorn such ridiculous derring-do into an episode that’s primarily about Homer’s inability to accept his mother’s activist ways and the abandonment issues they've given him.  The Simpsons has addressed death tenderly from different vantage points man times before, in episodes such as “Old Money”, "Round Springfield" and “Selma’s Choice” - choosing the Bond parody material for a third act defeats the touching atmosphere established by the first, especially the haunting way Homer first greets his loss.  They already had the makings of a great episode with Homer’s reluctance to follow Mona’s final request and his fear of becoming another casualty of her 60's radicalism.
 
Once again, the show’s headwriters seem to be afraid of expressing true emotion in the show without tap-dancing out, laughing that it’s all a joke; it's a recurring theme in later seasons, something I still find personally puzzling.  It’s as if the general make-up of the show is torn into two camps sometimes, half of it representative of the thoughtful and emotional old days, the other half representing the joke-a-second sarcasm of the Scully era, both halves struggling toward a whole but never quite sitting with ease together.

Did it Fail at Masonry?: A crucial episode if you loved the character of Mona, and for the most part a decent tribute to her memory - at least the first two-thirds. It’s altogether middling, however, in bringing the audience full closure emotionally - you won't quite get that choked-up feeling you came away with while watching “Mother Simpson”.  Some of the jokes were genuinely funny, some of the moments genuinely touching.  But in comes that jokey, nonsensical third act that just spoils the mood.  Maybe it was best to leave Mona out there, alive but struggling.  The Verdict: definitely worth catching on repeats, but only worth recording and keeping if you loved Mona.

What the Screwballs Think: This episode garnered a 6.2 final rating (!!), the lowest-watched episode in the history of the program. So much for last week’s steady hold. Maybe audiences really do tune out when there’s no new Family Guy scheduled - but ratings for last week’s season finale of that show only did a million people more.

The Springfield Shopper: The nineteenth season finale, “All About Lisa”, is scheduled to air on May eighteenth. Be sure to check back on the nineteenth for a full recap, and then every Saturday through July for some Kamp Krusty Klassik Rekaps!