TV Recap / Review: Bart Becomes a Lab Assistant In "The Simpsons" Season 37, Episode 6 - "Bart 'N' Frink"

This evening saw the debut of the sixth episode of The Simpsons' 37th season, entitled "Bart 'N' Frink" (a riff on the 1991 Coen Brothers black comedy film Barton Fink) and below are my recap and thoughts on this installment of the long-running animated sitcom.

"Bart 'N' Frink" begins with Bart Simpson (voiced, as always, by Nancy Cartwright) and his sister Lisa (Yeardley Smith) excitedly running into the local Springfield game store, only to find it overrun with nerds. Lisa explains that modern boards games are not about having fun, so much as they are about math, which confuses poor Bart. Nearby Martin Prince (Grey DeLisle) plays a fantasy roleplaying game with the likes of gamemaster Comic Book Guy (Hank Azaria), the Squeaky-Voiced Teen (Dan Castellaneta), and Professor John Frink (also Azaria). Martin really has to go to the bathroom, so he asks Bart to take over for him in the meantime, which the oldest Simpson child is happy to do as long as he can kill Martin's bard character as quickly as possible.

So Bart has the game's party rush into a conflict with a fire-breathing dragon, but when Frink's 25th-level wizard rushes into save the bard, he manages to roll all ones, and immediately gets charred to a crisp. Frink has a meltdown over losing "his only friend" and later Marge makes Bart go to the professor's house to apologize for something she says she still doesn't understand even though her kids explained it to her several times. Bart ends up loving Frink's home laboratory, and Marge suggests that he become the professor's lab assistant. We get a fun montage of Bart actually enjoying this experience, and then the doorbell rings and Frink finks a mysterious black box on his front stoop.

Cut to the Simpsons' living room, where Frink explains that it's an invitation to his college reunion that says families are welcome, and because he is fiercely literal, he invites Bart's family to join him as they travel toward an undisclosed location-- there's a running joke throughout the episode where a character gets bleeped and a black box appears over their mouth whenever they say where this trip sends them. So next we're at that picturesque location and a giant mansion where the Simpsons meet Professor Frink's old college buddy Peter Linz (no relation to the Muppet performer, voiced by It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia star Glenn Howerton) and learn that during their university years he actually stole a number of inventions from young John.

Frink doesn't really seem to mind it, however, as he believes in science for science's sake and not as a way to make money. I want to point out here that the flashback to Frink's college years includes a poster on a dorm room wall referencing The Simpsons season 19 episode "That 90s Show" in which Homer is in a grunge band called Sadgasm. Anyway, while Frink is catching up with his somewhat devious old friend, Homer talks with another reunion goer named Johnson Bryans (Danny Pudi from Community) who is obsessed with prolonging life. He has Homer's blood tested and the results say Homer is biologically 26 years old, so Bryans and all of his colleagues turn to Homer to learn more about how he stays so medically young.

Frink gets a tour of Peter's mansion, which he only lives in four days out of the year, and sees a set of Star Wars stormtrooper armor, Gandalf's costume from Lord of the Rings, a live Komodo dragon, and even the ancient organism that Pac-Man was based on. Meanwhile, Homer has a Krusty Burger franchise flown in via helicopter and instructs all the science-y types on how to overeat and drink beer like he does. When this doesn't work out, Homer admits that he used Bart's blood for the test, and Lisa points out that this means Bart is biologically 16 years older than his actual age, which causes all the scientists to freak out and get back on their treadmills, injecting baby tears into their arms via IV.

Bart and Frink get into a fight after the latter insists that the former is smart and not "dumb" as Bart claims, which Frink says the boy is using as a defense mechanism to avoid potential failure. Angry, Bart decides to give the schematics of one of Frink's new inventions-- a pair of glasses that can detect emotions-- to Linz, but just as he's about to do so, Johnson is thrown from his treadmill into the Komodo dragon's enclosure, shattering the glass and setting the animal free. Here's where Frink springs into action, borrowing the Gandalf costume and fending off the beast from attacking Bart. Having been saved by the professor, Bart apologizes for his plan to give away the invention, but Frink is so impressed that Bart drew the schematic from memory that he doesn't care whatsoever, and cites it as definitive proof that the boy is smart.

Of course, Marge loves this declaration, but Lisa is flummoxed that Bart gets a full scholarship to college out of the deal while she leaves empty-handed. Then the family boards a sea-plane to leave, and Frink spills the beans that they were in New Zealand all along, not having signed the NDA that prevented the Simpsons from uttering the country's name. The credits sequence sees Frink inventing a device that reads the Komodo dragon's thoughts, which are surprisingly intelligent except for its desire to eat Bart. I actually quite enjoyed this episode, with the pairing of its two titular characters a winning one, and would say it's definitely above-average for recent seasons of the show. But I haven't even mentioned my favorite gag yet-- there's a fantasy sequence where Marge imagines Homer living to a much older age than anticipated, and the twist is that he still has only survived into his mid-fifties. I laughed pretty hard at that one.

New episodes of The Simpsons air Sunday evenings on FOX.