Does the Principal and the Pauper deserve its reputation as one of the worst episodes of the Simpsons?
Does the Principal and the Pauper deserve its reputation as one of the worst episodes of the Simpsons?
Does the Principal and the Pauper deserve its reputation as one of the worst episodes of the Simpsons?
yes
Nobody calls it the worst. It's just seen as the point where the writing started to get worse.
>takes away character identity for le ebin twist that isn't even that good
Not one of the worst, though.
It's one of the blurst
>blurst
YOU STUPID MONKEY!
No, the writers were literally making fun of the audience. It’s not a serious episode, and is as canon as any other episode of a long-running sitcom that’s resets every episode.
Why do the Simpsons writers ignore this episode yet insist that Maude Flanders stays dead?
Shows can have new status quos. They just don’t happen often. It’s episodic television as opposed to serialized.
Different showrunners allow different things plus Scully years had many status quo changes
There's nothing clever about just ignoring characterzation. It's just as bad as that garbage episode about Bart having mutilple ex-girlfriends that was clearly the writer's rejected romcom movie script about a 29 year old man. Bart's 10 but that was just ignored for the sake fo the script.
>NO U
I agree with him that the ending encourages the viewer to dismiss it as non-canon, but the rest of the episode really doesn't do a good job of making his point.
It should’ve had a more ridiculous ending to get that point across, like for example, Flanders is suddenly revealed as impostor, then Krusty, then Homer, and then it turns out the entire town is made of impostors. The audience would’ve easily dismissed everything as a joke.
By today's standards of Simpsons episodes and the ones from the last oh man how long has it been 10 years?
nah it was funny
there was no way to continue taking everything seriously anyway, this didn't BREAK seriousness, it was broken already.
Stop making these fricking threads every day. You're not making the next sneed.
It's the epitome of "this was funnier in my head".
It's not good, but Simpsons made Lise goes Gaga and probably even worst, so Principal and the Pauper, while mediocre, is above many other episodes anyway because a 5/10 from earlier seasons is a 9/10 in newer ones.
No not at all. It is nowhere close to the worst. That being said it did damage to a character and was a sign of the show's decline.
The Principal and the Pauper is a good example on how entries in an established franchise don't exist in a vacuum.
I think the episode by itself is fine, but it fricks with the continuity in a way it's just insulting to the audience. You can't do this to a character so many like in a show like the Simpsons. No ammount of good execution could fix a stupid idea like this.
Someone said that it would have been a great episode if it was about Skinner simply having a bad past instead of being a impostor and I agree.
i only saw it after the fact but i really didn't get the outrage. wait that's what everyone is mad about? type of reaction
If the Simpsons ended with Season 11, maybe
As it stands it's better than a lot of Simpsons episodes from the 00s and 10s
season 11 is still too late for it to be considered one of the worst imo
I think the real problem is that Skinner was the wrong character to use for this reveal. The situation is a reference to an in real life event where an imposter took over someone's life because the mother preferred having someone around to take care of her to the alternative of a son that was likely dead, and while Skinner's relationship with his mother makes this a tempting outcome, it ultimately doesn't work because Skinner is a lifelong mama's boy in a way that an impostor could never be and the actual Skinner isn't. The joke with Skinner isn't just that he's a Nam vet, it's that he's an authority figure who ironically has someone else running his life. Him being an imposter just invalidates everything about his character.
You could do this joke with Quimby instead, where the actual Quimby is a parody of a "good Kennedy" (just as Quimby is a parody of a bad Kennedy) and ultimately the town picks the fake Quimby because the real Quimby starts shaking up the town in ways that disrupts their mediocre status quo. That's just an on the spot example, but my fundamental point is you need to the imposter reveal in a way that doesn't harm existing aspects of a character but instead explains or enhances them.
looked it up and your right
>Roger Tichborne was presumed dead until a butcher from Australia known as Thomas Castro claimed to be Roger Tichborne. He was instantly accepted by Lady Tichborne as her son until he failed to convince the courts.