Kredit Kookies: Billboard: Principal Skinner – he paints houses!Ralph says “It’s Dark”.Chalkboard Gag: “I will not put hot sauce on the CPR dummy”.Couch Gag: the family must swim, in the style of a 200 meter Olympic swimming competition, the length of a pool to the couch.Everyone picks a lane.Marge, Lisa, and Bart make it to the end, but Homer apparently drowns before reaching the couch.

Dumbing It Down: While Homer takes Bart and Lisa for an uneventful afternoon jaunt to the Springfield Squidport (where the “truth-in-boardwalk-advertising-law” has put a damper on the midway), Marge cleans out the basement and discovers a working sauna.She becomes addicted to the spa, and is oblivious when Homer injures his tongue due to a prank involving Bart and fire-eating.

After the cast (?!) comes off of Homer’s tongue, he discovers that the fire he consumed has burned away his taste buds, leaving him a “supertaster”.The blandest foods cause him excruciating pain until Lisa brings him the blandest food of all, cafeteria food.He decides to hang out at the school cafeteria and gorge himself on the blandest food of all.While there, he learns about “helicopter parenting”, an intensely involved way of encouraging one’s children to succeed.When he realizes that Bart is wildly under motivated and Lisa is unpopular with her peers he decides to become a helicopter parent.

He presses Bart into entering SE’s balsa wood model competition, encouraging him to complete the most complicated model available (a replica of the Westminster Abby).He encourages Lisa to increase her popularity by using techniques displayed in a “queen bees and wannabes”-style book, encouraging her to use mental manipulation to achieve her gains.

Homer runs himself ragged trying to balance the kid’s demands, and ultimately he ends up destroying the Westminster Abby model in his sleep.Bart wins the contest because his is the only model that actually looks like a kid built it; Bart ultimately confesses Homer’s role and loses the savings bond.

Lisa, meanwhile, rapidly tires of hiding her true nature to impress the shallow popular girls and gives up her ruse as well.Dejected that his attempt at half-assed overparenting has, once again, failed, Homer turns to Marge for solace.

Red Dress Press: Let’s get the winged appaloosa question out of the way – I have no idea how a “previous owner” of the Simpsons’ home could have put a steam room in the basement of their home when the structure was completely destroyed during “the Simpsons Movie”.

Undeniably wacky, this episode wisely focuses on Homer’s repeated attempts at improving the lives of his children.Though it’s a theme that’s played out many times before, with the right sort of writing, it’s a plot that never gets old.

Unfortunately, this episode is the very example of imperfect writing.Lisa’s tried to be popular before and failed; Bart’s tried to be seen as a good student and failed; Homer’s tried to parent his children overzealously and failed; Marge has taken up some relaxing hobby that drains her concentration.Combining frequently-used plot threads into a fresh new plot and adding a pile of lame, whacky jokes doesn’t make the plot fresher, and it doesn’t make the laughs come more furiously.What it results in is a middle-of-the-pack episode; too lame to be considered offensive, too ordinary to be considered exceptional.

When the laughs come, they’re of the mild sort – there were a couple of good moments in Homer’s flight of fancy about Westminster Abby.The laughs were small and well-hidden Easter eggs in the large rough of the episode.

A disappointing outing.

Did It Fail At Masonry?: If you like your Simpsons episodes wild, this one’s for you.Tongue casts, fire breathing, the spirit of Oscar Wilde as Tinkerbelle and a hidden sauna in the basement that’s fully functional all play some sort of part in the narrative.You’ll enjoy it if you were a fan of the unreality of episodes such as “Kill the Alligator and Run” .For the rest of us, it’s a pass.

What The Screwballs Think: The episode drew a 2.9, second in its timeslot and the second-highest rated program on Fox’s Animation Domination block.

Springfield Shopper: The next episode of The Simpsons, “Waverly Hills 9-0-2-1-D'oh”, will air on May third.Check back here on the fourth for a full review!