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| Remember: this isn't a Halloween episode. This is a regular episode about an "ordinary family". |
The Simpsons go to a facsimile of Disneyland, but despite going to every attraction it offers, they simply do not have any fun. However, the family does glimpse one last attraction that is unlisted on the park map: a place called "Rocket to Your Doom". The Simpsons, the only family to even notice this "attraction", go in, only to be whisked away in an actual spaceship, and be flown away from Earth. Turns out, its the Rigelians, in a non-Halloween setting, who wish to bring the Simpsons to their homeworld for reasons yet to be explained.
As the family arrives on the planet, they're given a quick tour of the planet and its supposed culture, but are then sent to a local zoo as an exhibit, and then told a short time later that one of them will be sacrificed as food. Given the choice to decide, the family agrees Homer should be that sacrifice. Its part of a grand celebration, but just before it begins, Homer is whisked away by a teleporter beam.
His rescuers, the Rigelian equivalent of hippies, celebrate their rescue operation with a dance, and offer Homer a one-person spaceship with which to return home, but Homer couldn't leave without his family and opts to go save him. Rigelian law dictates that with Homer gone, the rest of the family becomes the sacrifice, and when Homer returns, Rigelian law dictates the whole family becomes the sacrifice anyway.
This time, the Rigelian Queen comes to take the first bite - a section of Homer's ass that had been sliced off. However, as the Queen learns the hard way, it turns out the Simpsons are actually poisonous, thanks to their diets (including Lisa's, whose more "natural" diet isn't any better), information the Rigelians didn't bother to look into until after the fact. Now considered inedible, and the Queen having died, the Simpsons are allowed to return home with their memories of the experience to slowly fade as though this experience never happened. On the spaceship home, the Simpsons get a call from Grampa, who tracked them down only to complain at them, and the family decides to reroute their ship elsewhere.
Quick Review
This was not a decent episode by any stretch of the imagination. This episode, which was originally planned to be the Season 24 finale, was held back about a season and a half because its script was being considered for use in a second Simpsons movie. That would explain the somewhat rushed, nonsensical pace of the plot as well as the absurdity of it, but given how bad it was I'm somewhat glad it's stuck as a forgettable Season 26 episode instead of a stand alone movie.
Ignoring the plot, the episode relies too much on references for comedy, especially meta references like the chip-eating bit from Deep Space Homer. Just about all of the humor in regards to the Rigelians just wasn't funny, and the whole episode just feels like something that would've been better pitched as a Futurama episode, but would've been turned down - even during the short-lived Comedy Central era.
I wasn't expecting much from this episode, and the episode didn't even meet that.
Final Score: 4.1
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