TV Recap / Review: Flanders Stops Talking to Homer in "The Simpsons" - "The Flandshees of Innersimpson"

This evening saw the debut of the 12th episode of The Simpsons season 36, entitled “The Flandshees of Innersimpson" (a riff on the title of filmmaker Martin McDonagh’s acclaimed 2022 black comedy The Banshees of Inisherin, with which this episode also roughly shares an overarching narrative). Below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment of the long-running animated sitcom.

“The Flandshees of Innersimpson" begins with the Simpson family noticing a bunch of billboards for popular DJ, which have some pretty funny names like “Sextow31" in the world of Springfield. And when Homer (voiced, as always, by Dan Castellaneta) learns that wealthy DJs often buy mansions for their parents, he begins to aggressively encourage Bart (Nancy Cartwright) to pursue that line of creative work. Homer provides his son with his record collection, which includes hits by Devo and Smash Mouth and sets him up with a couple turntables. Where this starts to get really outlandish is when Homer rents out his own billboard advertising Bart’s “residency" in his backyard treehouse, and a lot of the kids from Springfield Elementary School show up to party the night away– this feels like a stretch even for the elastic reality of The Simpsons. The show never hangs a lampshade on why these 8-to-10-year-olds would be permitted to party outside for all hours of the night, but it mostly serves as a plot device to get Ned Flanders (Harry Shearer) really angry at his neighbor.

At first Flanders asks politely for the volume to be turned down so he and his sons Rod (Pamela Hayden) and Todd (also Cartwright) can get some sleep, and when that doesn’t work Ned simply buys some noise-cancelling headphones (“Sleeps by Dre" is a solid visual gag here), which naturally Homer immediately bothers. So after another sleepless night– and the elementary school kids trashing the Simpsons’ backyard and ending Bart’s DJ career because he took too long to drop the beat– Ned literally gives Homer the shirt off his back and then declares he will never speak to his neighbor again, as that was the last thing Homer had never borrowed. At first Homer is happy enough about this turn of events to “Woo hoo!" several times, but after a few ominous visits from another neighbor named Mrs. McCormick (guest star Fiona Shaw from Star Wars: Andor) he begins to miss his interactions with Flanders.

Homer tries all manner of methods to get Ned to start speaking with him again, including having Marge (Julie Kavner) go over and talk to him, but none of it works, so eventually Homer writes a multi-page apology, which only serves to make Flanders even angrier because it proves that Homer is a real human being with feelings who should never have treated Ned that way for all those years. This culminates with Ned stealing back everything Homer had ever borrowed from him and feeding most of it into a wood chipper, and then the two neighbors having a sort of demolition derby in the street outside their houses. In a courtroom after that confrontation, Judge Harm (recurring guest star Jane Kaczmarek) sentences the two frenemies to couples counseling, at which they are encouraged by therapist Annette (My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Rachel Bloom) to take transcendental medication together. This leads to a trippy dream sequence that I suspect was the highlight of the behind-the-scenes making of this episode, because it certainly was my favorite part of watching it.

During their shared dream, we see Homer and Ned morph into a number of famous pop-culture duos, and I’m gonna go ahead and list them here because I wanted to go through that sequence again: first they’re Itchy & Scratchy (from The Simpsons, of course), then Buzz Lightyear and Woody (Toy Story), Ernie and Bert (Sesame Street), Batman and Robin (Batman), Mr. Burns and Smithers (The Simpsons again), folk-music duo Simon & Garfunkel, Chewbacca and Han Solo (Star Wars), He-Man and Skeletor (Masters of the Universe), Abbott and Costello performing “Who’s On First?" (The Naughty Nineties), Tattoo and Mr. Roarke (Fantasy Island), Garfield and Odie (Garfield), Daryl Hall and John Oates from Hall & Oates, Napoleon Dynamite and Pedro Sanchez (Napoleon Dynamite), Jesse Pinkman and Walter White (Breaking Bad), Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee (Lord of the Rings), (I think) Pikachu and Ash Ketchum (Pokémon), and Lucy Van Pelt pulling the football away from Charlie Brown (Peanuts).

Anyway that part builds to a big Lord of the Rings / Game of Thrones-style fantasy battle in which Ned and Homer are attacking/defending each other’s castles, and once that’s over they invade each other’s brains to discover that they’re actually kind of okay with their “status quo" relationship. So they wake up and embrace each other, and then Homer goes back to stealing Flanders’s newspapers, and Homer returns Ned’s famous green sweater, which is now way too big due to being stretched out. I thought this was a fun episode overall that improved as it went a long, though I still feel like the Bart-as-DJ stuff could have been more grounded… although it did give us a memorable closing-credit mashup of a number of different classic songs and quotes from The Simpsons’ heyday, including a quick “Weird Al" Yankovic cameo and the first time we’ve heard Phil Hartman’s voice on this show in a long while, so there’s that.

New episodes of The Simpsons air Sunday evenings on FOX.