Them, Robot (S23, E17-503)

Oh, the humanity-er, robotiny, er, humanity but with robots, uh, hm, yeah.

Plot Summary
A plant physical is coming up, and Mr. Burns promises to fire any employee found with any drugs in their blood - including alcohol.  Homer tries to get through the weekend without drinking, but accidentally ingests some alcohol without realizing.  The following morning, Homer is fearful for his job, but Burns grows tired of even paying for the drug tests, especially when some employees contract gamma radiation.  Smithers tells Burns that today's technical advances allows him to replace his workers with cheap robot workers.  Burns happily obliges, and soon forces everyone at the plant to train the new robot workers before firing them.  Smithers, however, does tell Burns that he should keep one human worker around as a scapegoat, or to do tasks too low even for robots.  With Homer coming in to kinda tell Burns off sort of, Burns decides to let Homer be that one person that stays, even firing Smithers because one of the robots can do his duties even better..

With the massive layoffs, Springfield's economy hits the tank, and other businesses start to suffer.  Homer, meanwhile, tries to make friends with the robots, but they are unwilling to even acknowledge him except to get him off their backs.  Later, Homer accidentally breaks one of the robots, and pulls out a manual to try and fix it.  He learns in the manual that the robots do have a conversational feature, and after several explosions, finally learns out to bypass the security self-destruct to finally get the robots to talk.  Although the Brent Spiner-sounding robots only provide logical replies to Homer's rambling, Homer decides to trick the robots into playing a game of baseball with him.  Homer accidentally stumbles onto the road - and live traffic - forcing the robots to comply with their prime directive: to preserve human life.  Several get destroyed in the process, and Homer gives them a sendoff in his backyard.  However, now one of the robots tries to get Homer to stop drinking beer, and Homer decides to do something drastic to get them to stop nagging him about it: drilling holes in their heads to give each of them a "robotomy".  Predictably, this backfires, as all it does is replace the robots' prime directive with a new one: eliminate all impediments to the nuclear plant i.e. Homer.

As Homer flees from the now murderous robots, he runs to Mr. Burns house, but he can't do anything about the robots either.  The two flee to Burns' greenhouse, but the robots surround them in there.  Suddenly, the two are saved by all of Burns' former workers, who have banded together in either unemployment or underemployment and they work together to destroy the remaining robots.  Burns learns his lesson and rehires everyone as temps.  Later, Homer has reactivated one of the robots to go fishing with him, but the robot can't deal with Homer any longer and self destructs.

Quick Review
Can you believe its been over 10 years since Brent Spiner last portrayed Data in a live-action role?  Him providing the voice of the robots really was a joy to hear, and though the robots' interactions with Homer had its moments, there were also several lowpoints through the episode to prevent it from really being good.

Final Score: 7.0