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Days of Future Future |
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Days of Future Future is the eighteenth episode of Season 25 and the sequel to "Holidays of Future Passed".
Synopsis[]
In this partial continuation of "Holidays of Future Passed", Bart goes to a clinic to rid himself of his feelings for his ex-wife Jenda, Lisa must choose whether or not to cure her zombie husband Milhouse after he gets bitten by a homeless zombie, and Marge (after putting up with years of Homer dying and being cloned back to life by Professor Frink) loads Homer onto a flatscreen monitor and throws him out of the house.
Full Story[]
Marge wakes up one morning and finds remnants of pizza boxes scattered around the living room. She hopes that a bear was the culprit, but instead, Homer's groans lead Marge to the kitchen, where he is on top of the kitchen table in nothing but his underwear. Marge tells Homer she wishes he would take his health seriously. Just when Homer seems to be taking Marge's words to heart, he marches upstairs to tell his wife that he will start taking care of himself, only to have a heart attack and fall down the stairs, because he is out of shape. Not long later, the church has a funeral for Homer, where everyone in town grieves for the Simpson patriarch. Suddenly, Jonathan Frink, Jr interrupts the proceedings to announce that he has made a clone of Homer. At first, he wanted to start out with a sheep, but chose that he wanted to experiment with a simpler subject. Marge warns Homer to take this second chance seriously, to which Homer asks her if she made potato salad for the wake.
Fast forward to the second Homer clone's funeral the next day, where a third Homer clone arrives. Eventually, many multiples of Homer clones die due to his stupidity as a montage starts. The third Homer dies about three years later, the fourth Homer falls into the open grave of the third Homer, and the fifth Homer electrocutes himself with a toaster one year after. However, no one understands what happened to the sixth Homer. Seven years after the original Homer's death, the seventh Homer lands in the hospital before pulling the plug on himself when he hears that he can't eat solid foods for two weeks. Sometime after, a new Homer clone is stacking up dozens of dead clone bodies in order to reach something on a high shelf, only for that clone to fall and die.
Thirty years into the future, the Simpson family, now including Lisa's husband Milhouse and Bart's children Picard and Kirk, but not Maggie, mourns another Homer clone's death, except that this time, Frink cannot bring Homer back since Homer had used up all of his clones from brazen stupidity, making the family surprised. Frink did store Homer's memory in a flash drive, which he plugs into a television screen conveniently in the church, so Homer is now nothing but a face on a screen. Later, at the Simpson house, while Bart's kids chase Homer's digital head around the house, Marge asks Milhouse how he is, and he tells her that except for the squirrel that eats their bird food, he and Lisa have nothing to talk about. Lisa says that she told him during the conversation they had last month that she has been doing a lot of charity work for the undead. Elsewhere in the house, however, when Homer asks Marge to reboot the screen, she realizes that she is fed up with Homer's actions. So she ejects the flash drive to give to Bart, so that Homer can reside with him.
Bart shows Homer his new digs, which is an abandoned classroom at Springfield Elementary. While there, Homer asks him to turn him 3D, which shows that if he had a body, he would strangle Bart. A glum Bart then sends his two sons to the home of Jenda, his ex-wife's home, via a teleporting door, and after seeing Jenda and her new husband, Jerry, who is an alien, Bart tells Homer that he now needs advice more than ever. However, when the monitor freezes, Homer is of no use.
Working at Cretaceous Park, Bart laments that he misses his kids despite Nelson telling him that he should be happy that he is free. Elsewhere, at a zombie soup kitchen, as Lisa feeds the undead with synthetic vegan “brain” food, her husband Milhouse comes to look for her, An annoyed Lisa asks him why is he here, and Milhouse replies that he was concerned that she wasn't responding to her phone, and he thought that a zombie may have bitten her. A zombie is offended by this, and Milhouse tries to take it back, but his rambling makes the situation worse as the zombie bites Milhouse's arm.
Meanwhile, Bart is at Hard Lad (a nightclub) with Nelson, who is trying to set him up and says that it has been two years since his divorce. After failing to impress a girl and being forced to leave the club by Julio (the nightclub's owner) due to making everyone feel depressed, Bart sees a targeted billboard telling him to move on using shock therapy that makes him forget about his ex. After the procedure at MovingOn, Bart sleeps with one woman after another, during which Homer stops freezing up and is back to normal. However, he still has feelings for Jenda. One day, the same day Homer gets a robot body (the body is metal, while his head is the same and can be detached from it), his sons arrive via teleport on hover scooters. Bart says to them that they look happy, but they tell him that their mom is sad, and that Jerry moved out. Jenda is in tears, revealing to Bart that she was a fool for buying her new alien boyfriend, Jerry, a shedding tank he wanted, only for Jerry to humiliate her by ending their relationship and finding someone else. Bart calms her down by reminding her that her crying reminds him of what he lost and that he is really trying to get his life back on track. Jenda is impressed with Bart and invites him for a night out at dinner.
Meanwhile, Lisa and zombie Milhouse are attacked by Jimbo, Kearney and Dolph, but Milhouse fights back by using Ralph Wiggum to knock them out and cook their brains later. Even though Dr. Hibbert can reverse Milhouse, Lisa doesn't want to go through with reversal process, because she actually finds the zombie Milhouse more attractive after seeing him attack the bullies, while a normal Milhouse would not have had the guts to fight them off. Elsewhere, Homer's robot body is set on fire by his grandsons, and his appearance scares them away. Santa's Little Hybrid appears and approaches Homer, where he asks him who he is.
Bart and Jenda have dinner at the Gilded Truffle, and they make a love connection. They tell their kids that they are going to try to make things work again. At first, the boys think that Bart has gone against his word in being lazy and not working. He reassures them he's only taking time off from the Cretaceous Park to help watch them and nothing has changed in his routine. Bart mentions that Jenda has to go to work at Google to rescue victims of driverless cars hacked by unknown hackers. Cut to a scene where a driverless car is holding Abraham Simpson II hostage.
While out on of the dates at the Cretaceous Park, Dr. Hibbert becomes more aggressive and stalks Lisa in trying to get her to take Milhouse to the hospital to be treated at once. She tells Hibbert that she doesn't want to have Milhouse treated for his zombism. To her, the zombie Milhouse is more attractive to her than the normal version of himself.
Later at the apartment, Bart and Jenda has fallen back to their old routine. They are sitting together, where Jenda is talking, but she notices that Bart has not been paying attention and has been watching a sports game. Bart fires back and says that she isn't paying attention, either, because she is texting. This argument leads to Jenda telling Bart she thought that things would be different this time.
Bart goes to Moe's for a drink, but Lisa has already beaten him there. She is drinking away her dilemma of trying to decide whether to make Milhouse human again or not, and she even prefers his rotting meat smell. Marge is there, too, hidden conveniently behind a shrub as tall as her hair on the table, where she points out that they have no idea what a rough marriage is. Bart and Lisa want to know her secret of how she stayed with Homer for so long. She then gives Bart and Lisa advice: when you make a decision with your heart, you stick with it, even the fact that Moe is taking care of Duffman at old age. Lisa asks Marge if this means that she is going to take Homer back, and she states that she is, in fact, going to join him forever as she electrocutes herself and transfers into the TV screen with him. The Goody Gobble game from earlier appears in the background, but as he plays it, Homer eats Marge's head. After the game is over, Moe comments "I can't tell if that was love, suicide, or a really boring video game".
Back at Dr. Hibbert’s, Milhouse is fine now, with no zombie left in him whatsoever. To prove this, Hibbert holds a brain in front of Milhouse, and he faints into Lisa's arms, thus making her disappointingly cheer. Back at the house, Bart is explaining to Jenda (who is on the TV screen) that their relationship is just not working out. She agrees and she says that is the reason why she started to see Jerry again without telling him. Bart comes to the conclusion that he is now officially over her.
Back at MovingOn, everything Bart just experienced was just a neural implant the MovingOn woman placed in his temporal lobe. It was all a dream and now he can go home, but he just wants to make sure that he is cured. The MovingOn woman then explains that they treat a lot of people with obsessions, such as Disco Stu, who is now "Nothing Stu".
Eventually, back at the Simpson house, Homer now has a sophisticated, C-3PO-esque robot body, and he is doing multiple chores, while Marge shows affection for his new form. Bart tells Lisa that in case her and Milhouse don’t work out, he knows a place that can help her. He also points out that Milhouse was cured in his dream, but Lisa reveals that there is no cure for zombie-ism, therefore matters are great. Suddenly, Zombie Milhouse appears behind them and gives Lisa a dead flower, to which Lisa swoons over. Santa's Little Hybrid then asks Lisa if the zombie Milhouse is fake, but Lisa replies that his is real, much to his disappointment.
Ratings[]
Dennis Perkins of The A.V. Club gave the episode a C, saying "Things are even worse for The Simpsons after tonight’s sequel, “Days Of Future Future,” where Burns returns to the (it seems) inevitable sci-fi future of the series and limits the show’s world even more. Losing much of the heart of its predecessor in favor of the sort of ill-conceived and contradictory character arcs the latter, scattershot Simpsons has become notorious for, “Days Of Future Future” reveals a series willing to shrug off what it still could be. Instead, this future Simpsons world seems just a playground for writers to use up whatever Futurama jokes they had left over." Tony Sokol of Den of Geek gave the episode four out of five stars, saying "The Simpsons’s “Days of Future Future” is a laugh every 2.5 seconds, allowing for wind resistance. A very worth entry into what will someday be an even longer running longest running show that has ever walked slowly up a flight of stairs. I absolutely love Jerry, Bart’s future ex-wife’s new soon to be ex-Alien lover. Nelson’s mom still has to strip at the age of 87 because there’s no more retirement. Even with 99 Democrats in the Senate, because the Republican still knows how to get things his way. Of course Ralph Wiggum will be the new chief of police, he’s a chip of the old cop. Santa’s Little Hybrid is an unnatural progression that Cosmo doesn’t teach about."
Teresa Lopez of TV Fanatic gave the episode four out of five stars, saying "I always love The Simpsons episodes that show the possible futures of Bart, Lisa, Maggie, Homer and Marge. And this week was no exception. Even though the future episodes are not technically canon (I mean, who can say what will really happen in their future?), I liked that this one attempted some continuity." She did, however, criticize the episode's plot twist near the end, saying "What didn't work so well for me in this week's future glimpse was the way in which a portion of the show's events didn't actually take place. They were merely the work of the neural implant that the "Moving On" store used to help Bart get over his ex-wife. Although, the series did a nice job referring back to this little plot quirk at the end."
The episode received a 1.7 rating and was watched by a total of 3.64 million people, making it the second most watched show on Animation Domination that night, beating Bob's Burgers and American Dad! but losing to Family Guy with 4.39 million.