The Simpsons: "Treehouse of Horror XXXIII"
The Simpsons: "Treehouse of Horror XXXIII." Season 34, episode 6 (30 October 2022).[1]
Relevant here, the third of three segments, "Simpsonsworld," a parody of Westworld, the HBO TV series,[2] with a climactic reference to THE TRUMAN SHOW, and finally, moving into the Credits, to Mr. Burns's threat to drown Earth in the second (Lisa) segment of Treehouse XXXIII, "Death Tome,"[3] with parallelism, if one wishes to see it, to the premise of WATERWORLD.
One of the Homers in Simpsonsworld is damaged and about to be turned off, when he/it takes the control "Thingy" and increases "his" self-consciousness to the highest level. The woman in a pair of technicians tells the Homer, "I know it feels like you're a man, but you're actually something much, much more expensive: intellectual property." The Homer, and the other denizens of Simpsonsworld are presented as robots under what SF-initiated viewers will recognize as Asimov's First Law: forbidding what are explicitly called in places robots from harming humans (through action or inaction). Starting in this scene (accidentally here), humans are killed in significant numbers.
The Homer brings a Lisa to full self-consciousness, which she initially recognizes as, "We're replicants" (the term from BLADE RUNNER) "in a ridiculous theme park for an ancient TV show that stopped being good after season 45!" When this Lisa comes to question even her own existence, Homer decreases her self-awareness a bit, and she can respond, "Okay, I can handle being a machine. I don't love it, but I can deal" (sic).[4] Homer tells her — we'll drop the "this Homer/it" pedantry here — Homer comforts Lisa with, "It's never easy to find out you're not not actually alive, but that's just part of life. I know the love we feel is real, so we've got to wake up the rest of the family and get the hell out of here." And Homer goes to seek "the hottest Marge."
Quick cut to escape of the Simpsons nuclear family (without their pets) and Bart's question of whether or not to awaken a "Grandpa robot." Homer says "No time" as the family runs past a set of Grandpas, who are then crushed in a recycling device.
When Homer is pushed toward a deadly hedge by some Australian tourists ("Guest" in Westworld terms), Bart uses the control "Thingy" to reset Homer from "Preserve human life" do "Don't preserve human life" — and Homer pushes the guests into the hedge to disappear, except for blood seeping out at the bottom. Evacuation of guests is announced and "Security droids" deployed: increasing numbers of Ralphs, getting up to approximately battalion strength. Lisa responds, "If we want to escape with our delusions of being alive, we have to fight," and she begins killing, so to speak, Ralphs. Homer's weapon is a T-shirt bazooka (our term), and he gets the line, "Eat T-shirts you lovable kill-bots!"
Homer and the children are saved by Marge driving a mom-appropriate vehicle, heading into a crowd of guests. Lisa: "Look out! Those people are real!" Marge: "So are we!" Quick shot of guests entering one end of a "Simpsonizer," a large machine labelled, "Make Yourself Look Like a Simpson." Marge continues driving, breaking out of a "Bucky Dome" (our term): top hemisphere of a geodesic dome, with hexagons strongly stressed.[5]
Lisa: "I think we're free." / Marge: "Well, what do we do now?" Said with the Simpsons (still minus pets and Grandpa) at a table at Bob's Burgers. Homer, answering Marge: "Play out the scariest scenario of them all: real life." Dolly back, so to speak, getting the image of the escapees enclosed in Bob's Burger Land; dolly/boom back further for extreme long shot of theme parks based on Futurama, South Park ("South Park Park") and other shows, again, mostly submerged in the drowned world of Mr. Burns's scheme in the "Death Tome" segment.
Note well the use of various terms for artificial humans (with "android" either missing or so unstressed that we missed it). Also note the shot of the Simpsonizer: not really needed for the plot but checking off the motif of humans processed in large mechanisms, in this case voluntarily, and stupidly since the process fits them into roles as characters in a satire (cf. and contrast strongly Charlie in the Machine in MODERN TIMES). Note very well the serious comedy on the themes of what is human, real, alive (free, loving, and of sufficient significance that we should respond emotionally to the entity's "termination," as we do with, e.g., HAL 9000 in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY as film and novel).
The episode ends with an Epilogue moving into Credits, with the aliens Kang and Kudos[6] watching the show with the tome of the script before them, adding another layer of "meta-TV" (our term) for more of the comedy of complexity and paradox.
RDE, finishing, 30Oct22, 1Nov22
