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| AMERICA, AMERICA, SOMETHING SOMETHING FREEEEEE |
The kids get inoculations, though Bart makes a decent attempt at avoiding it. After Bart finally gets his shot, his ears swell and he suffers temporary deafness, leaving him unable to hear for about a day. Bart still insists in participating in a donkey basketball game at the school, though. Before the game, everyone rises for the star spangled banner as a flag is shown. Bart, who can't hear neither the prompts for the song nor the song itself, continues messing around with a donkey, but the donkey literally ends up eating Bart's shorts. A still unwitting Bart then showcases his bare butt towards a flag he doesn't even know is there, and people in the gym quickly chide Bart and his supposed anti-American act.
With Bart's track record, nobody believe Bart was actually deaf during the incident, and the local newspaper does its job of blowing the story way out of proportion. Soon, the entire town hates by and, by extension, the Simpson family. They get a chance to redeem themselves on a talk show, but the host only intends to make the family seem worse. Frustrated, Marge accidentally makes it worse, and soon the entire town of Springfield is hated by America. Quickly, Mayor Quimby changes the town's name to "Liberty-ville", and the entire town is given a red, white and blue makeover. At church, Lisa makes note that, hey there's still the First Amendment, and right after that a swat team swarms in and arrests the Simpsons under the "Government Knows Best Act".
After a plane ride, the family is sent to a prison meant to keep other 'liberals' from expressing their opinions, and to 're-educate' people by brainwashing into them American values. With the help from an old man, the family is able to escape, where they learn that the prison was actually Alcatraz. As the family tries to decide whether to swim to Oakland or San Francisco, a French boat arrives to help the family. Now in France, the family likes their new life, but they still miss America, given most of their stuff is still there. Thus, they decide to go back, agree to immigrate there because who could hate immigrants, right?
Quick Review
This is one of the worst episodes in the series. First off, even as an episode from 2004, its dated. Secondly, the episode goes from a 'everyone and the media blows things out of proportion' theme to a full blown political agenda. Its not even really satire like in past political episodes, its basically saying "we writers are liberal and we hate how persecuted we are just by having different opinions on things and so we're expressing our frustrations through this episode". Hey, I'm as politically-apathetic as they come, finding most political banter as mindless waste, so seeing this slop in a Simpsons episode is as offensive as killing a character because their VA wasn't available. The fact that this episode actually has passable jokes, sometimes, saves it from being the worst episode of all time.
Final Score: 3.4
For some reason, the writers of this episode seem to think that everyone in America is a republican. Listening to them, you'd think that George Bush won in a landslide. They never mention the millions of Americans who were against the war in Iraq or or incidents where liberals were the ones doing the censoring. They suddenly forgot about the special interest groups in both parties.
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