David Cooper

One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish - round up!

Added 2024-08-30 08:00:00 +0000 UTC

This was an oddly paced episode for the purposes of this project! Homer's story has such a strong emotional arc, packed with some great jokes, and our focus was almost entirely on the obscure restaurant at the start - which our characters leave seven minutes in.

This has given me little room to comment on the main content of the episode itself, on Homer facing his mortality and having to actually decide what to do with his last day on Earth. It's been many years since I last saw this episode, and I was surprised by how moving I found it this time around. Maybe it's because I'm a father now, but the thought of Homer not ever seeing his family again, and almost missing out on the chance to give them a proper goodbye, brought tears to my eyes.

And listen - I'm not dumb! I've seen this episode many times in my life, I know Homer is going to survive. It would be weird if I somehow had missed that he died halfway through the second season. But this time it hit me differently. I found it interesting that I could be moved by something I knew so well, this is a testament to the power of good storytelling I suppose.

The new character hat count (NCHC) for this episode is 0%, but the new character headband count (NCHC) is 44.4444444%.

We met 9 new characters in this episode, and 3 of them don't work at The Happy Sumo. We're up to 366 in total! This is fun.

This post is part of my "Every Simpsons Character Ever" series. For a list of my rules in this project, click here.