Is There Anything GOOD About Principal and the Pauper?

The Principal and the Pauper is often considered to be the episode that ended the golden age of The Simpsons, fans hated it, critics were...critical of it. Even The Simpsons staff have disowned the episode, but is it really that bad? Or is it really the episode that "killed The Simpsons" as some people put it? Personally I think the prior episode The City of New York Vs Homer Simpson goes more against the usual style of The Simpsons than this one, and there are also plenty of episodes after this that I would consider really good. However, there is no denying that there was definitely a drop in consistent quality from season nine onward, and this is the episode that gets saddled with the blame. After all, it took a beloved character, retconned their backstory so heavily and replaced it with something baffling and illogical only to completely ignore it in the end and pass it off as a joke, and basically, no character came off looking that good, the real Seymour Skinner was a stick in the mud, the fake Skinner now had a different backstory and the rest of the town seemed way too mean spirited in their conclusion. But what works about this episode?

Well, the number one thing: It's funny. I can't really argue that the episode is well written in terms of plot or character, but comedy? Yeah they've still got it. Some highlights include Homer slowly walking towards the cake, anything with Ralph and "Because Jasper didn't want to come alone", that last one in particular always gets me. There have been plenty of nonsensical or even bad plots in The Simpsons in the past, but we tend to let them off the hook because they're just that funny. Can you honestly look at episodes like Cape Feare and say the plot makes perfect sense? No, but we don't mind because the comedy is solid. The Simpsons is a comedy, it should always put the comedy first, and if you just look at the jokes in this episode? They still work. True, it doesn't have me laughing every minute like some other Simpsons episodes do, but its still enough that whenever I watch the episode, I tend to think more about what worked over what didn't.

The second thing about the episode that works is the ending. Now I know that my seem contradictory seeing as I opened this by saying the ending was one of the flaws, but that's really more of in context with the rest of the episode, the ending itself, is very much a Simpsons fitting climax. Taking a problem, and just tying it to a train to disappear forever, never to be mentioned again under penalty of torture, everyone cheers. It's very much similar to an episode like Homer vs the 18th Amendment where the citizens of Springfield literally catapult a human out of the city, and no one bats an eye. The reason why it works there is because the rest of the episode had a tone and script that matched the ending. While here, the majority the episode is actually quite sombre in tone, but with a nonsensical attitude to everything, so a silly ending like this might seem out of place, but honestly, it is probably the best part of the episode, and should the other 19 minutes have had a similar tone to it, the episode a whole might have worked.

Unfortunately, that's all I have to say, the few times I've done posts like this in the past it's usually talking about the positives in a bad film, so trying to find the positives in a bad 20 minute episode of a TV Show, there's less to talk about. To sum it all up, Principal and the Pauper is not irredeemable, nor was it the "death of The Simpsons" as some claim, there were worse episodes before this, there have been worse episodes since, but there have also been better episodes since. If anything, upon reflection, Principal and the Pauper is at worst just kinda "meh", which granted at the time would definitely make it a bad Simpsons episode, but considering the very large pick of bad episodes we have now, I doubt this episode would even make the bottom 100.

-Danny