Treehouse of Horror XI

"Hmm, Bottlenose bruises. Blowhole burns. Flipper prints. This looks like the work of rowdy teens. Lou, cancel the prom."

- Chief Wiggum

"Treehouse of Horror XI" is the first episode of Season 12. It aired on November 1, 2000. The episode was written by Rob LaZebnik (Part 1), John Frink & Don Payne (Part 2) and Carolyn Omine (Part 3). Matthew Nastuk directed.

Synopsis
In "G-G-Ghost D-D-Dad", Homer is killed a piece of broccoli and his spirit must perform a good deed in order to enter heaven. "Scary Tales Can Come True" reveals the dark side of fairy tale characters and in "Night of the Dolphin" - The world is overtaken by dolphins after Lisa frees their leader from captivity.



Opening
The titles are a parody of The Munsters opening sequence, presented in black-and-white and with the Simpsons theme done in the style of The Munsters theme song. Homer is Herman Munster, Marge is Lily Munster, Lisa is Marilyn Munster (holding a book on copyright law), Bart is Eddie Munster, and Abe is Grandpa Munster. An angry mob of townspeople with pitchforks and torches appear and confront the Simpsons. The mob kill Marge and Grandpa with wooden stakes (and some cloves of garlic around Marge's neck), set Homer on fire, and set a leghold trap on Bart's head. Then they walk away leaving Lisa unharmed possibly due to her normal appearence to walk away from the scene pretending as if she was never there with no connection of the monstrous family.

G-G-Ghost D-D-Dad
In a parody of Ghost Dad the Simpsons are eating breakfast, while Homer reads his horoscope, where it states that he will die that day, and someone will compliment him at work. Marge's horoscope says that her husband will die. Homer dismisses it and leaves for work. On his way to work, he narrowly escapes death several times. When he gets to the power plant Lenny compliments him... about a rattlesnake on his arm.

Since he is still alive at the end of the day (despite multiple injuries and close calls) Homer scoffs at the horoscope, but is finally killed after eating some broccoli, which Dr. Hibbert informs Marge that it's "the deadliest plant on Earth - why, it tries to warn you itself with its terrible taste!".

But when Homer reaches Heaven, St. Peter informs him that he hasn't done a good deed in his life, and in order to enter Heaven he must return to Earth as a ghost and do a good deed within 24 hours.

Over the next 24 hours he tries to do good deeds, but succeeds only in getting a noogie from Nelson and accidentally dropping Agnes Skinner to her death (Homer's claim that he's pretty sure she was going to be the next Hitler doesn't pass muster). With only one minute left, he grabs a baby from a runaway pram which then rolls into traffic and explodes.

Confident that he will now get into Heaven, he returns to St. Peter, who apologizes as he had not been looking during Homer's good deed. Thus Homer is sent to Hell, where Satan gives him noogies for all eternity and asks him to stop shouting because he'll wake up John Wayne, who it turns out that he has already woken up for his day in Hell.

Scary Tales Can Come True
In a fairy tale setting, the family are peasants living in a pumpkin cottage in a fairy tale world, with Homer as the village oaf. But when Homer is fired and they cannot afford food, he vows that no child will go hungry in his home. He then tosses out Bart and Lisa into the nearby woods, where they find a former son and daughter pair (who were also tossed out by Homer), are now skeletons. Lisa, using her book of Grimms' Fairy Tales, guides them through the forest's many dangers, including a troll hiding under a bridge and the Three Bears.

Meanwhile, Marge admonishes Homer for throwing out the kids (she was planning to sell them, and is already advertising Maggie for "2 chickens or best offer"), and orders him to get them back. While Homer is looking for his children, he finds Rapunzel's tower.

Rapunzel asks Homer to rescue her and lowers her hair so that he can climb up to her window. But Homer is way too heavy, and he is only able to climb part of the way up over Rapunzel's pained cries before his weight separates Rapunzel's hair (and possibly scalp) from her head, causing Homer to plummet to the ground. Homer pushes the pile of hair behind a bush with his foot and runs away.



The kids go to a gingerbread house where a witch invites them inside. Soon Lisa is in chains and sweeping, and Bart is being fattened up to be eaten.

But before the witch can cook them, they distract her by saying she has no one to look good for, and when she claims her boyfriend (George Cauldron) is coming by soon for a date, Homer bursts in. The witch zaps him repeatedly, making him part-chicken and part-fish among other things. She tries to stuff him in the oven, but Homer overpowers her and shoves her in, locking the door. As she dies, Homer (almost) reverts to normal, and the family's surprised when a very handsome man named George Cauldron shows up for a date with "Suzanne".

Later, the family is eating supper. Marge says that although they are poor, they will never go hungry again thanks to Homer, who can now lay eggs with his chicken lower-body-half.

Night of the Dolphin
-Every instance of dolphin killing does not need to be reported in an encyclopedia article about the episode. This is not a retelling of the show.-

“''People! Please! We're all frightened and horny! But we can't let some killer dolphins keep us from living and scoring!''”

―Mayor Quimby

In a parody of The Day of the Dolphin, Lisa goes to Marine World, a SeaWorld-like park where she takes pity on a dolphin called Snorky. Lisa sets Snorky free (in a homage to Free Willy), but unknown to her, he is the king of the dolphins, and resents humans for forcing him to do tricks. He plots to take over the world. The dolphins begin their war by attacking Springfield, killing Lenny in the ocean (Chief Wiggum sees Lenny's obviously dolphin-caused wounds and blames rowdy teens for his death) Snorky strikes back and kills the Sea Captain and start marching towards the town on their caudal fins.

The dolphins go all around Springfield killing various characters like Squeaky-voiced Teen, Lenny Leonard, Kent Brockman and Raphael, and Snorky interrupts a town meeting and kills Groundskeeper Willie by breaking through the windows and then right through him, he takes the stage and tells Springfield that dolphins used to live on land, but were banished to the ocean by humans. As dolphin king, he then banishes all humans to the ocean.

After a speech by Homer about mankind's many achievements, the humans decide not to submit to the dolphins' will without a fight. But as the humans are walking out of the hall, Lisa sees a small dolphin with a set of bottle rings around its face. She takes it off and it bites her. A battle ensues between the dolphins and the humans, lots of people are injured, Abe is eaten by one of the dolphins, and a few citizens are killed. In the end, the dolphins win the fight, and the Simpsons and other residents of Springfield are floating in the ocean. Lisa regrets that her actions "doomed mankind", while Marge tells her that she is exaggerating and that they will just have to adjust to living in the ocean. Then Krusty's corpse floats over to her, disgusting her and making her nudge it away. Krusty's body floats over to join many other corpses; an overhead shot then shows the floating bodies are lined up to spell "The End?".

Epilogue
Meanwhile, after the final story ended, the two aliens Kang and Kodos complain that they have been left out of the Simpsons Halloween special. Until they receive a phone call from a store called Old Navy, asking if the Rigellians can do a commercial for the chain of clothing stores, which they accept.

Reception
The episode received generally positive reviews. Den of Geek said "it is probably one of the funniest Halloween episodes of the show's history". The episode got a 4.02 rating out of 5 ranking 69 out of 373 episodes. Matt Groening called the third segment his personal favorite scenes from all the series.

The episode got a 8.4 reader rating from TV.com. Colin Jacobson of DVD Movie Guide gave the episode a positive review saying "Even in the weakest Simpsons seasons, you can count on the Halloween episodes to deliver good amusement. Or at least pretty decent comedy, as evidenced by the up and down “Treehouse XI”. None of the segments excel, but none of them flop either, so they keep us entertained. It’s really hard to fault a mainstream network TV series that references glory holes, so “Treehouse XI” gets a positive appraisal despite a few missteps."