The Simpsons: "Thanksgiving of Horror"

The Simpsons: "Thanksgiving of Horror." Through-number episode 670, season 31, episode 8. First aired 24 November 2019.

Online tvtv.us summary (also on Simpsons Wiki): "The Simpsons are forced to face various Thanksgiving nightmares, including the first Thanksgiving, an A.I. mishap and a dangerous space mission complicated by a sentient cranberry sauce."

Relevant here, the segments — “The Fourth Thursday After Tomorrow”: AV Club reviewer Dennis Perkins notes Black Mirror sourcing, and we'll add HER and other TV and movies with AI-strength Siri/Alexa-like personal assistants. Perkins summarizes in part "Homer buys this future’s version of an Alexa, a cylindrical prison for a tiny virtual Marge he created by stealing some of his wife’s DNA and handing over to Williams Sonoma. The segment takes its cues from Homer’s unknowingly knowing asides about movies where A.I. runs amok and robots" — in the industrial-robot sense — "murder everybody, as his efforts to help Marge in the kitchen wind up [figuratively] tearing the family apart." Perkins correctly notes that the segment places the audience "directly on the side of virtual Marge over the flesh-and-blood Simpsons, who naturally begin to treat this simulacrum of a loved one like the electronic slave she was designed to be." Quoting Perkins still, VR Marge desperately tries "to get past the A.I. firewall (literally, the wall’s on fire), and into the family’s router. But, in the one truly poetic twist of the segment, she eventually succeeds because she’s able to win over Maggie by playing her the first sound Maggie ever heard—Marge’s heartbeat," which we will note nicely images and sounds out a loving gesture between the cybernetic Marge and thoroughly organic and human baby Maggie.

"The Last Thanksgiving": Perkins (see note above), sees sources in LIFE and PANDORUM[] with touches of the ALIEN (film) series, which we'd modify to a good deal of ALIEN. In Perkins's summary, "A future space-ark defrosts all Springfield’s kids in time to prep for their parents’ un-suspended suspended animation. (Earth was destroyed when humanity caused an Ice Age while fighting global warming [...])" — a bit of irony Perkins finds ethically and politically off-base. "Bart and Milhouse immediately fulfill their roles as supposedly smart future folk who do the first, dumbest thing possible by first jettisoning the ship’s supplies of unappetizing vegetables and then trying to clone the last known can of canned Thanksgiving cranberry sauce. When the seemingly curious little glob responds to Milhouse’s touch by dissolving the bones in his arm, we’re off and running, with a relentlessly gloopy ship-wide massacre (of children), as the gelatin-based cran-o-morph slurps away every tiny skeleton in sight, leaving Springfield’s supporting kid cast flapping limply as empty skin-bags." After a less-successful ALIEN-style attempt to jettison the cranberry Blob (sic on capital) and the surviving humans land on a planet, where that cranberry Blob can fulfill it's destiny as a side-dish (and possible junk-food drink) at an alien Thanksgiving.

In "The Last Thanksgiving," note with the space-ark a twist on the generation-starship theme and strong imagery of humans inside chambers like those of the hybernauts in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (film) and, more so the crew and Marines in ALIEN and ALIENS (film). Unlike SPACE ODYSSEY, the high-tech environment is not the threat, but a mostly-mindless creature, goo-ily organic.

RDE 24Nov19