TEOTWAWKI

The Simpsons, S24E09

Homer got involved with a group of people in town preparing for a possible crumble of civilization.  Homer kept his preparation a relative secret and moved the family to the preppers' hidden community after there was a sudden shut down of all technology in town.  Marge had to convince him to return to "society" and share their supplies instead of letting their town suffer on its own.

This isn't the first time that Homer's jumped on the doomsday bandwagon, so I wasn't really excited about the idea.  However, at least there was really no harm in Homer preparing for the worst.  No one got hurt or anything, and when the family returned to town to help everyone, no help was even needed.  You just had to enjoy Homer's crazy ride until he saw it through.  And that kind of story I'm okay with, but it's not really too amusing.

That being said, there were a few things that I liked in particular.  At the beginning, I liked when Homer called Marge "mom" and then switched to calling her "Mrs. Simpson."  I think this worked for me because Homer is often at the same level as his kids, and it feels like Marge is the only real adult.  Another part I liked was when Homer was looking for Bart and Lisa and kept finding similar kids, but not his own, and when he finally did see them, he was like "who the hell are you?"

One of my favorite things, though, was when you could see the production name of the video that the Prepper showed Homer at Moe's that said, "you're all gonna die productions."  That, in combination with the ridiculous video that guy had shown him, made that name really funny to me.

There were also a few lines that I liked.  The first was when Homer mistakenly thought that the new group he had joined were preppies:

[Prepper Guy] Not preppies. Preppers.  But I like your hatred.[Homer] It’s based on nothing.

The other line I liked was when Homer was remarking on how people mocked him, despite that civilization had seemed to crumble as he predicted:

[Homer] Marge, when I started prepping for the end of the world, everyone laughed at me.[Marge] No one was laughing.  You kept it a secret![Homer] Well, just because I imagined it, doesn’t make it any less true.

I also find it interesting that when the Learn Zone was locked down that it was the men who freaked out instead of the women.  I took notice of this mainly because on Family Guy I just know they would show the opposite.  I was reminded of that episode on said show where Peter and the others thought that they were the only ones left in the world and Stewie simulated the same situation for the ladies and they simply fought each other.  It's just refreshing to see a scene when push comes to shove, it's not always women who lose their shit, but sometimes guys.  Realistically, both parties would have freaked out, I think.  Terror due to being suddenly trapped is not gender limited.

I don't know what to make of the "twist ending" where the zombies were riding the meteor or whatever to Earth.  It might have been a reference to some movie or something.  Or just something to make Homer's adventure a little more ironic.  Just wish it were ironic in a funnier way.  I felt like it was unnecessary.

There were enough good bits in the episode to keep it from being completely boring.  However, I didn't think the overall idea of it was very original.  But this show has been on forever, so it's a little hard to expect them to be throwing out fresh ideas at every turn at this point.  I'm content enough that there were things to enjoy period, and nothing in particular to complain about.