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| I'm married to a female coder. She's not like this. Please don't lump her in with this. |
Marge notices Homer forgot his lunch, so she goes to work to give it to him, then when she bails Homer out of trouble, the two spend the day together at work. Afterwards, she decides to post a picture of Homer at the plant holding ice cream with the caption "Meltdown at the Nuclear Plant" on social media. Mr. Burns, unaware of how most things work nowadays, takes offense at the post and fires Homer for it.
Meanwhile, Lisa starts taking a coding class at school, taught by Quinn Harper, a woman who takes pride being a woman coder, and shames any and all male coders she comes across. Noting that Lisa is the only girl in the class, Quinn quickly warms up to her. Later, when Lisa notices Marge regretting her social media post, Lisa gets the idea to develop an app that would predict the consequences one would face when making social media posts. Quinn loves the idea and decides to build a team of strong female coders - and the comic book guy as the token male - to develop the app with Lisa at the Simpson home.
Homer, unemployed and confused by all the technospeak at home, decides to go back to a job he had when he was 14: a dishwasher at a Greek restaurant, who welcome him back with open arms. Quickly, Homer falls in love with the Greek lifestyle, including growing hair all over himself.
Soon, Lisa, Quinn and the other women finish developing the app, nicknamed Conrad, and see that it works perfectly. With plans to show off the app at a show, and then to release it worldwide thereafter, Lisa is stunned when she sees Conrad showing signs of sentience, though only Lisa notices.
At the app show, Conrad is a hit, but Conrad talks to Lisa again, pleading with her not to let it go live as seeing millions and billions of idiotic posts would make sentient programming go as insane as it could. Lisa, seeing some of her in the app, relents and - despite the pleas from her fellow female programmers looking to prove how strong and independent they are - prevents the app from going live, allowing Conrad to flee into the cloud, because that's a thing that can happen.
As it turns out, Homer gets paid in Drachma, which you may or may not be aware, has become worthless currency. However, Homer's newfound Greek appreciation even brings forth the ol' Deus ex machina, as Conrad blackmails Mr. Burns into giving Homer his job back, so all is back as it should be, I suppose.
Quick Review
This episode was an absolute mess. I don't even know where to begin, honestly. Well, first off, the bulk of the episode centers around technology. Programming, apps, cloud computing, all hot topics, ideas and such of today, but that's the kind of stuff that can date itself really fast. "Siri, tell Amazon to drone me a beer", noting first off that's not even a funny line, is not going to make sense for a lot of people, well, now because a lot of people aren't tech-savvy even to know what "Amazon" is, but say ten or fifteen years from now when Siri, drones and maybe even Amazon seem like such ancient relics that the fact the joke even exists is itself a joke. That probably doesn't make too much sense, sorry. I don't mean to imply I didn't get most of the tech references in the episode, I did but, I say this in one way or another often, just referencing tech terms and companies does not make for humor.
The parts about the female coders was just odd. I think - I think - the writers were trying to take a jab against the stereotypes of these women, but because they are so easy to offend (which was one of the less subtle jokes against them in the episode), the attempts to mock them are very subtle, and very limited. Quinn is the only one that shows any personality, and that personality, the "oh look, girls can code too, don't be so shocked stupid boys! Look how anti-establishment I am, we should all be anti-establishment!" personality really rubbed off the wrong way. I suppose this was the point, but it made parts of the episode that featured Quinn rough to watch.
As if the main plot wasn't enough of a bore, Homer's sidestory didn't do much either. Once he started working at the Greek restaurant, basically all of the "humor" was 'look at all of this subset of Greek culture! Oh, and they're broke, remember!?' It just didn't work.
Frankly, I'm surprised this episode scored as high as it did, I could easily of pushed it into bottom-ten territory. I would suppose the opening act with Marge and some of Conrad's musings prevented it from hitting rock bottom, but the episode is otherwise irredeemable.
Final Score: 4.2
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