Rednecks and Broomsticks (S21, E07-448)

Snowball isn't gonna deal with this freaky nonsense.

Plot Summary
The Simpsons drive home from a ski resort.  Bart, Lisa and Maggie try to pass the time on the very long drive by playing a knock-off of the once-notable Bop It game.  This goes on for hours, and eventually Homer has enough, grabbing the contraption and stomping it right under his seat.  Predictably, pieces of the toy get under the brake pedal, while at the same time the distracted Homer is unaware he's driving in the wrong lane.  He is forced to drive off the road, and after a rocky ride, the car eventually winds up in the middle of a frozen lake that has since cracked open, and the family as a whole falls unconscious.

Cletus is able to rescue them and bring them back to health.  To further this, Cletus shows Homer a moonshine operation he has in the backyard, then is amazed when Homer is able to accurately detail what is inside the booze.  Cletus now insists he take Homer around the area and have him taste other moonshine.  Meanwhile, Lisa accidentally stumbles upon three girls who refer to themselves as Wiccans, some code word for witches.  Ever the skeptic, Lisa doubts they'd be able to cast a spell to get Lisa out of the pipe cleaner project due the next day, but to her surprise Ms. Hoover suddenly gets sick and Lisa is saved.  Lisa returns to the women to learn more, and becomes interested when she learns they care about nature as well.  Lisa starts practicing being a Wiccan in her room, which the ever cautious Ned Flanders spies, calling a hotline to take care of the problem.

Back in the woods, Homer and some other redneck are having some kind of moonshine tasting competition, but they hear police coming and everyone is forced to dump their booze.  Meanwhile, nearby, Lisa is about to be initiated by the women when the police stop them, having arrived not for the moonshiners but for the Wiccans, who are arrested for witchcraft.  Just before the trial, one of the Wiccans, angry over the predicament, curses the town to become blind.  Crazily enough, half the town does go blind, causing some panic.  Despite that, Judge Snyder believes this case to be too flimsy even by flimsy standards, and dismisses the case.  However, Moe leads a mob that capture the witches and hold an old fashioned witch trial of their own.

Going back out to the woods, the mob, now with the mayor's backing, acquire an old device that is meant to dunk the accused in the water, with the surviving being proven to be a witch.  Before the women are forced to the machine, Lisa arrives to tell them what really happened: when the rednecks ditched their moonshine when they thought the police were arriving, a lot of it ended up in the river, which flows into the town's reservoir.  Therefore, people who drank from there after the fact ended up temporarily blind from the moonshine.  Homer tastes the water in the river to confirm it, and the women are set free.  Moe tries to get the mob to get angry about something else, only succeeding in getting them mad at him.  Still, Lisa is glad to open her mind to a new set of beliefs, and Homer finds a new way to have fun with his redneck buddies by playing with the witch torturing machine.

Quick Review
I probably should've expected this.  For the first time since Season 14, there was a string of three episodes where two of those three scored an eight or higher.  There was no way that string of quality could continue in this era of Simpsons, and sure enough this clunker comes along to bring that streak to a crashing halt.

Homer's story with Cletus had minor potential and I suppose it was reached despite the fact that it fizzled out toward the episode's end.  The Wiccan story which ends up becoming the episode's main plot was just boring, mostly unfunny and at times painful to watch.  If it wasn't for the moonshine subplot this could've been one of the worst episodes of the series just from how bland it was.

Final Score: 6.0