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| "Mono-d'oh" moment, this ain't. |
Bart is forced (somehow?) to attend a school dance. The night of, Bart starts off bored out of his skull, but is convinced by a 5th grade girl to join in, and the two dance together so well, Bart wins a "Best Dancer" award. Impressed, the girl tells Bart to wait for her outside. Bart quickly rushes outside, but is immediately rushed and bullied by Jimbo and gang; his trophy is smashed and the girl, witnessing both Bart being bullied and him placing more priority to the trophy over himself, dumps him a second later.
Bart tells the family later on, and Marge finally has enough of the bully culture. At the next town meeting, she swiftly convinces the town to enact anti-bullying measures, which initially work well as Jimbo and gang are arrested the next time they try bullying Bart. However, for the most part, the new laws involves the police arresting anyone that they've been tipped as being bullies. Homer uses this lazily, having people arrested for just annoying him in his daily life. Soon, Rod and Todd Flanders realize that their father, after being bullied around by Homer earlier in the episode, is a victim of bullying as well and the two call the cops on Homer, who is arrested in short time.
Homer is sent to a bullying rehab center, where a former bully turned doctor takes several "bullies" and has them undergo psychological breakthroughs to determine why they're so upset. Homer is no exception, he learns that he only hates Ned because Ned is basically 100% better than him. Still, after the completion of the program, everyone in it gets hailed as a "hero" for no longer being bullies. Homer, somehow, translates this to parades and first pitch throws, which start to annoy Ned.
Ned confronts Homer at an autograph function, and makes Homer realize that every time Homer puts Ned down, he seems like less of a person to his two sons. Homer desperately tries to get Ned to forgive him, but Ned only reluctantly does so the following day, when the two make up and agree to have lunch together.
Quick Review
Over the previous summer, I analyzed scores for each episode matched with the people who wrote them, and determined that Tim Long is the worst of them. Well, actually, Valentine L. Garza fared worse, but she had written just a couple of episodes at the time, and the episode she wrote this season puts her ahead of Long, probably. The last episode Long wrote before this season was Season 25's Married to the Blob which I now claim is the worst episode in the series, it was that bad.
This episode is the first episode aired since that's written by Long, the only episode he wrote this season. To be fair, the episode started off with some promise, there were a few decent jokes, Wiggum's escapades were good, and with the absurdity of everyone being arrested for "bullying" I was hoping for a decent conclusion / lesson with the episode. Then I remembered, this episode was written by Tim Long.
Sure enough, the second half of this episode was an absolute disaster, starting from when Homer entered that bullying rehab center. That entire sequence with "Dr. Raufbold" (voiced by the always-excellent Albert Brooks) was a complete drag to sit through. From there, the episode tries to bring about an end to the Homer/Ned spat, but does so in such a hamfisted and boring way. It almost felt like an after-school special at that point, except most after school specials have better writing than this.
The first half of the episode is this scrap heap's saving grace, its only getting this high of a score because of it. Otherwise, the latter half of the episode is an exercise of tedium, a good example of how not to write anything. Hey, at least there weren't that many pointless references (except the Magic School Bus one at the end to fill time!)
Final Score: 6.1
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