‘The Simpsons’ Just Delivered One of its Most Heartwarming Episodes Ever
One of the key ingredients that you’ll find in most of the very best episodes of The Simpsons is heart. And by that we mean love, not a dump truck full of army surplus beef organs.
This week’s episode, “Stew Lies,” proved that even after 36 years on the air, The Simpsons can still find effective ways to tug on audiences’ heartstrings. And, oddly enough, it did so in just five minutes.
The episode begins with Marge and the kids heading home from the grocery store, only for Bart and Lisa to get into a squabble after they both call shotgun. Lisa briefly copies Bart, and as a result, Bart decides to punish Lisa by repeating every single thing she says. Her efforts to thwart Bart’s plan (complimenting herself) are unsuccessful because, as Marge points out, “Bart commits to the bit. Always has.”
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Bart stubbornly keeps repeating Lisa’s words literally everywhere she goes, from the school classroom, to the eye doctor. After two months Lisa finally accepts that this annoyance is her “new reality” and decides to “make something good come out of it.” First, she teaches Bart Mandarin by getting him to parrot simple phrases. Then Bart s her during an animal cruelty protest. And Bart even takes up the saxophone, and does pretty well, all purely to spite his sister.
After six months of bonding, Lisa reads a letter to Bart, written from the perspective of her brother, which he then has to repeat back. “We entered as adversaries, and through some strange magic, we have emerged as friends,” Lisa says, immediately echoed by Bart. “I set out to break my sister’s spirits, but wound up giving her a priceless gift: the knowledge that her brother will be by her side, so she’ll always feel loved and protected. I am the best big brother a girl could ever ask for.”
A tearful Bart doesn’t repeat that final line. “Does that mean it’s over?” Lisa asks. “Because I’m not sure I want it to be.” Then they say that they love each other and share a hug, while a surprised Homer and Marge watch from the hallway.
Disney
Again, all of this happened in the first five minutes of the episode, leaving the rest of the runtime to focus on how Homer’s relationship with a Guy Fieri-like celebrity chef gets him in trouble with the mafia.
In a lesser version of this episode, the Bart-Lisa scenes would have been dragged out for the entire runtime as a B-story. But cutting between the tender family scenes and the wacky stew-based mafia plot would have been a mistake. Front loading and isolating the Bart-Lisa story was certainly an unusual choice from a structural standpoint, but it allowed it to be uniquely poignant and oddly touching.
