User blog comment:Fan4Life/Time to Retire Sideshow Bob?/@comment-2122015-20160404025344

True, true, words. Actually, I liked Funeral for a Fiend, and even The Bob Next Door. They weren't of the quality of the first SB episodes, but they were pretty funny, and the movie parody made The Bob Next Door quite worth it even if it wasn't very realistic.

The Man Who Grew Too Much was a complete dissapointment. Come on, there was no masterplan to foil! The ending was the most rushed, unsupported thing I've ever seen. It was just a series of events that happened one after the other. It was so empty they had to go with a secondary plotline for filler. In a Sideshow Bob episode! The absurdity of the ending would have belonged more in a THOH, to be honest.

And talking about the Treehouse of Horrors, I actually had hopes about that one, if they hadn't ripped themselves off not once, but twice! Sideshow Bob not knowing what to do with himself after killing Bart? Yeah, it would have been a good idea, if he hadn't already realized that at the end of The Great Louse Detective, and that was before doing the deed. And the revive-you-to-kill-you-again device... hadn't we seen that in an Itchy and Scratchy somewhere? Oh, no, forgive me! That had been a clone machine. Totally. Different.

What bothers me most is the character development turn. Sideshow Bob was narcissistic and kind of snobbish, but with reason: He was smart as hell, talented in various areas, and had a heck of a lot of general culture. He was one lovable bastard. Everytime he opened his mouth you knew whatever came out was going to be pure genius. Now he's just a fancy-talking (and sometimes not even that fancy) actual snob with not much to say, really. It's like his character became a parody of himself.

Actually, it feels like when you're watching one of those bad sci-fi, meteor-about-to-stricke-the-earth/aliens-about-to-vanish-mankind movies, and they bring in this scientist/computer geek, and they have no idea what to make him say because they're not scientists/computer geeks, so they put the actor to recite some scientific-sounding-but-not-actually-scientific stuff. An imitation of what a scientist sounds like... Sideshow Bob now is that with Shakespeare quotes. He was smart before, now they're just going with what they think smart looks like without actually, you know, making him smart.

I don't want him killed. I don't think that getting foiled over and over again makes him less threatening. His character being dumbed down made him so. Because, come on, in the earlier episodes, we never actually thought he'd get away with stuff. It really was a "let's-see-how-he-gets-foiled-this-time" game, but it was fun, because it was Sideshow Bob's ability to re-invent himself, to come up with different plans, to raise the stakes, what made him threatening. You never knew what he was going to do. He wasn't the threat. He was the mind behind it, so the threat could change from episode to episode without getting old.

You got the feeling that, even when whatever he had done that time hadn't worked, whatever he came up with next was going to be as dangerous, requiring the same level of ability/luck to foil. You were never safe. It didn't matter if he hadn't killed you the last ten times, if he was around, you were in as much danger as the first time. You couldn't brush him off. You had to beat him every single time, and every single time the risk was the same.

I know he will never win. I don't need closure. What I want him is to be a challenge. He's the best exaple of journey vs destination. In my opinion, they don't need to kill him, they only have to come up with better plots.

But I'm losing hope here.