If you like jokes that are funny because they reference a thing you know about, you might love this episode. I did not. Remember the squirrel from Ice Age??

The middle one of the three parts is a parody of Godzilla, and I think they tried to have the poor voice actors do a Japanese-accented version of their characters. That might sound like a bad idea, but the execution is so much worse that I am genuinely unsure if it's supposed to be an accent or a joke about dubbing. Just bafflingly bad.

Number of jokes that were at least a little funny: 0

Overall rating: 1/10

This one is actually interesting for a couple of reasons!

The episode has a controversy warning on the Simpsons fan wiki. Apparently, "Fans and critics generally agree that this episode goes a bit too far with its mistreatment towards Bart." This is an absolutely bizarre opinion, and some quick googling shows that the internet is full of people saying strange shit about this episode.

The first part of the episode is Bart bullying Lisa on a field trip, tripping her and humiliating her in front of their classmates. She finally snaps and gets a restraining order on Bart, and begins poking him with a 20-foot stick. They go to court to get the restraining order lifted, but Bart is sexist towards the judge, and she instead extends the distance to 200 feet. Bart has to go live outside, but he's kinda into it. In the end Lisa forgives him for almost no narrative reason.

People on the internet who spend their time discussing a Simpsons episode from 2005 use some interesting language when talking about it. Bart's bullying is repeatedly called "a prank", but Lisa's revenge is "abuse", "torture", and "ILLEGAL". People are even pretending to care about "continuity" between episodes! I can not help but to see this as a gendered thing, and those critics as weird incels.

It's nice that there was a B-plot, those do a lot for the pacing.

Number of jokes that were pretty ok: 13 (!)

And this might be only in contrast to the season 30+ dogshit I watched recently but,

Overall rating: 6/10

The episode is about Abe getting scammed for his life savings. Homer is pretty mean to him about it, it's a bit of a bummer.

The most interesting part of the episode is when they track down the scam call center, they find a bunch of unused gift cards. This is interesting because it does not make sense.

The episode tries to have a moral or maybe subvert having one, but it doesn't really work. They should have gone a little further with it or spent a little more than just the last minute on the resolution.

Number of jokes that were a little funny: 1

Overall rating: 2/10

So I decided to watch a randomly selected episode of The Simpsons. This one was a low roll.

The episode focuses on the priest character no one likes and his new youth pastor, who I assumed at first to be some celebrity I didn't know about because he is drawn in an overly handsome style. Well, it turns out he is actually a self-insert of the writer of the episode, who also voices the character. He is some stand-up comedian and podcaster whose Wikipedia page tells us he originally planned to become a youth pastor and lists "sarcasm" as one of his genres.

The writer's self-insert proceeds to totally Christmogg the priest by giving an extremely generic sermon that takes up 4 minutes of the episode's 20-minute runtime, and which the random assortment of Springfield's residents at the church all inexplicably love. He then befriends Lisa, which is pretty unrealistic considering we all know she is already best friends with my self-insert character from my fanfic.

A shocking number of the jokes are just the camera cutting to a random character who has no reason to be there. Why are the Simpsons suddenly eating a meal with Skinner's mother and the Comic Book Guy? For that matter, there is no reason for the self-insert to be sleeping on that train set in the picture.

Number of jokes that were at least kind of funny: 2

Overall rating 3/10

It feels nice to give them their first personality trait.