C.E. D'oh
"C.E. D'oh" is the fifteenth episode of The Simpsons’ fourteenth season.
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[edit] Plot
A sleepy Marge is too tired on Valentine's Day to have sex with an eager and well-prepared Homer, who dejectedly leaves the house. He sees a billboard for a school offering extension courses. He goes to the school and attempts to take a course on stripping for his wife, which Dr. Hibbert teaches, but is kicked out for hogging the stripping oil and (literally) slides into a class on Successmanship. The class teaches Homer how to succeed in the workplace.
It gives Homer inspiration, and he investigates problems at the power plant, so he develops solutions to the problem—all of which are rejected by Mr. Burns, without reading them. This angers Homer after overhearing Burns admit that the plant’s real owner is a canary named 'Canary M. Burns' to protect Burns from responsibility for any wrongdoing by the power plant. Homer, with Bart’s help, devises a plan to overthrow Burns by releasing the bird from the plant to the Canary Islands.
After the bird is released, he tells Mr. Burns that inspectors are here to check the condition of the plant. Out of panic, Mr. Burns, who is unable to find his canary, names Homer the new owner. Homer reveals that it was all a ruse: there are no inspectors; and he had tricked Mr. Burns. As Homer's first act during his brief tenure as the plant’s owner, he fires Mr. Burns and, quite literally, overthrows him by throwing him off of the balcony where the masses flows him to a taxi-cab while singing "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye". Mr. Burns then heads to Marrakesh, Morocco with Smithers to purchase a great deal of opium.
However, problems ensue when Homer is in charge of the plant. He has less time to do things with the family, much to their disappointment. He is forced to lay off employees at the plant, making himself miserable. He has to listen to the plant’s woes from his analysts while on vacation. One night, Mr. Burns visits Homer (mentioning that Smithers was arrested and sentenced to 80 years for opium possession, but seems to be ecstatic to have been put in a Turkish prison), and brings him to the cemetery, where he shows him the people who he was too busy working to have good relationships with (such as Mr. Burns' wife, who died of "loneliness and rabies").
He makes Homer understand how much he has missed his family. So Homer decides to quit as the owner and give back ownership to Burns. However, Burns already has plans to take back ownership of the plant and drugs Homer, and begins to encase him in the wall of a crypt. Unfortunately for Burns, he is too weak to carry each brick from the cart to the intended wall. By the time he manages to finish a couple of layers, it is daytime. Homer wakes up and steps easily over the few layers of bricks that Mr. Burns had painstakingly managed to cement in place.
He tells Burns that the power plant is his again and walks away. The next time we see Homer, he is having a barbecue with his family and much happier to be back to his old life.
[edit] Cultural references
- Lenny and Carl fight with rods of plutonium in a similar manner to the lightsaber duels from the Star Wars film series; they fight over the issue of which of the Star Wars prequel trilogy films Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones "sucked more".[1]
- The title is a pun on the acronym C.E.O.
- The motivational speaker points to a special edition Bentley Continental R, saying the only two in existence are owned by him and Steven Spielberg before the creator was shot.
- In The Itchy & Scratchy Show episode on TV, Scratchy is a passenger of an airplane controlled by Big Bopper, Richie Valens and Buddy Holly and the plane crashes. This is a reference to their deaths in a plane crash on February 3, 1959.
- The song that Homer accidentally gives Maggie for bedtime (and intended to play for Marge for Valentine's Day) is "Sex Bomb" by Tom Jones and Mousse T. from the album Reload.
- Dr. Hibbert's exotic-dancer name "Malcolm Sex" is a parody of Malcolm X, along with Hibbert's risque catchphrase that's a take-off of X's credo "By Any Means Necessary".
- The scene where Burns attempts to trap Homer in the crypt is a reference to the Edgar Allan Poe story "The Cask of Amontillado".
- The scene in the Successmanship 101 class is a parody of a famous scene from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross where Alec Baldwin's character gives a group of unsuccessful salesmen a combination of pep talk, insults, verbal abuse, and self-promotion.
- During the scene where Homer eavesdrops on Mr. Burns and Smithers, Smithers mentioned that Mr. Burns is coming close to getting into trouble with the government for dumping nuclear waste into Legoland, California.
- When Mr. Burns talks about how a canary is the C.E.O of the nuclear plant, he mentions how it has happened before with other companies, pointing out that the oil monopoly Standard Oil was owned by a "half-eaten breakfast."
- Bart and Millhouse were making fun of baseball's most troubled teams (at the time), the Montreal Expos and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays respectively. The two also make fun of their respective pitchers Tomo Ohka and Esteban Yan in the episode.
- Nelson's comment that Billy Crystal "is the man at the baseball park that everyone hates" is not the first time the show has insulted Crystal. In "New Kids on the Blecch" Marge says she is a "regular Billy Crystal", leading Bart to sarcastically quip "You got that right!" However, previously Bart has stated a fondness for Crystal, stating in "The Front" that he has no interest in award shows, unless "That delightful Billy Crystal is involved." Billy Crystal's name is on Homer's revenge list in the episode "Homer the Great".
- The scene in which Burns mentions Smithers being taken to a Turkish prison eagerly is reference to Midnight Express and a man imprisoned in Turkey for smuggling drugs who willingly has a homosexual relationship with another prisoner.
- The scene where Homer is chastised by Dr. Hibbert is a parody of the famous scene from The Paper Chase.
- The product Homer uses all over his body is Oil of Oh Yeah, a parody of Oil of Olay.
- The organisation chart Burns shows to Smithers has a crossed out picture of Frank Grimes from "Homer's Enemy" and a picture of the inanimate carbon rod from "Deep Space Homer".
- The scene where Flanders sees Homer and Marge's bedroom from his bedroom, than turns off the lights as he is smoking a pipe is a reference to the movie, "Rear Window".
[edit] Production note
The fact that the barbecue at the end is billed as "Homer's 305th Everything Is Back To Normal BBQ" asks the question of how Simpsons episodes were numbered around this time. Officially, C.E. D’oh is the 306th episode in the show's history. However, if Barting Over is the 300th episode then this episode would officially be the 304th to air (unless the Who Shot Mr. Burns?-two parter is counted as one episode instead of two, making the theory that C.E.D'oh is the 305th episode a possibility).[citation needed]
Barney Gumble is seen sober again, even though he relapsed on "I'm Spelling as Fast as I Can".
[edit] References
- ^ Scott Chernoff (2007-07-24). "I Bent My Wookiee! Celebrating the Star Wars/Simpsons Connection". Star Wars.com. http://www.starwars.com/community/news/media/f20070724/index.html?page=3. Retrieved 2011-08-28.
[edit] External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: "C.E. D'oh" |
- "C.E. D'oh" at The Simpsons.com
- "C.E. D'oh" at the Internet Movie Database
