Monday, April 8, 2013

Weekend at Burnsie's (S13, E16-285)

For a guy who was dead for awhile, Burns is enjoying this a bit too much.
Plot Summary
Marge is a little disturbed over how altered genetically grown vegetables have gotten, so she decides to grow them herself.  She attempts to set up a mini-farm in the backyard, but a murder of crows keep eating her seeds.  She sets up a scarecrow to scare them off, and oddly enough it works.  One night, Homer - who hadn't been informed of this apparently, mistakes the scarecrow as an intruder and bashes it apart with a shovel.  The crows see Homer as the 'alpha male' of the group and he basically gets them to help him be even lazier.  However, when they try to help Maggie 'fly', Homer scolds them and even tells them to 'shoo'.  The crows have enough of Homer and they swarm him, pecking away at his eyes mostly.

Dr. Hibbert applies stitches to Homer's eyes somehow, but Homer is still suffering immense pain from the attack.  Dr. Hibbert suggests Homer use medical marijuana to ease his pain, medical marijuana being legal in whatever state they're in.  Homer is initially unwilling to go with it, citing a bad experience he had with it once as a teenager, but Hibbert convinces him to try it anyway.

Homer quickly grows to love his pot and quickly devolves into your stereotypical stoner.  He finds everything interesting, even listening to the entirety of the bible with no problems, though he signs a form of Ned's without even realizing its to re-criminalize all marijuana.  Meanwhile, Mr. Burns is trying to come up with a good joke or two to lighten the mood at an upcoming investors meeting as the plant has lost quite a bit of money.  Homer, still high as ever, stumbles in and unwittingly laughs at everything.  Realizing that he can use Homer's sense of humor to lighten the mood, Burns hires Homer as his new executive vice president.

Homer is enjoying his new life as a high VP, but soon learns that the movement to re-criminalize medical marijuana has received enough signatures to reach a vote.  Homer rallies a bunch of potheads around town to organize a movement, but he does it a day after the vote, a vote which made medical marijuana illegal again.

Homer is bummed he can't get high again, but with Marge's help he promises to never use drugs again, for the kids - though he still has one left as a reminder.  However, he forgot about his new position and he has to go laugh at Burns' jokes without any help.  Neither he nor Smithers can laugh at Burns' attempts at humor.  Burns decides to take a bath while the two get their act together.  Homer brings out his last pot cigarette, but because of his promise, he has Smithers smoke it.  Before Smithers realizes it, an hour has passed, and Burns still hasn't returned.  The two rush to the bathroom to find Burns seemingly drowned in bathwater.  With the investors meeting coming up in under an hour, Homer and Smithers do the only thing they can do under the circumstances.

They stage the meeting by having Smithers hook Burns' body up as a puppet with Homer doing the talking during the meeting.  The routine doesn't go very well, but all the body movements restarts Burns' heart and he lives again, though upon learning Homer didn't want to take Burns to the hospital, he requests Smithers pull the string that allows him to slap Homer, then Smithers, then both of them, then himself, and eventually all three at once.

Quick Review
This episode was heading toward low-end mediocrity for awhile.  The pot references and jokes weren't all the funny, really, and it seemed like this episode was going to be rather forgettable.

However, the last part of the episode, featuring momentarily dead puppet Burns, salvaged the episode and finally brought some laughs that the episode sorely needed.  The bit that closes the episode, the one where Burns slaps everyone, was an excellent way to end what was otherwise mostly a below-average episode.

Final Score: 7.7

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