While Lisa has had a few good B-stories ("Boy Meets Curl" and "Thursdays with Abie" come to mind here), the 21st season of The Simpsons hasn't really focused an episode primarily on the bright 2nd grader until Sunday's "The Squirt and the Whale". One of the more emotional tales, this one can be hailed as this year's environmental awareness episode. I don't even say that in a negative way, one of my favourite episodes of Futurama is "The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz", which actually deals with a very sticky plot in which baby penguins need to be hunted in order to save the species. The benefit of having Lisa deal with one of these types of situations is her youth. While she's smart enough to ask the right questions and come to logical conclusions, she's still a little girl who can get in over her head.
In a likely attempt to focus on the emotional ties that occur in the latter half of the episode, the first act was chalk full of jokes and gags that once again find a way to be hilarious while still being relevant to the scene. Even the first scene, which begins with a random trailer for probably the stupidest movie in the world "Tic-Tac-Toe: X v. O", still ties in the plot by having Homer rip the plugs out of the wall before giving a rant about the inflated Hydro bill. So, off to the environmental fair to find a new way to power their home. I love when the Simpsons go to fairs, expos or carinivals, like in "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson" where she attended the Franchise Expo, some of the booths were so odd, like the picture straightener. This has a lot of the same while being completely different, my particular favourite being the confrontation between the Switchgrass Power and the Corn Ethanol tables--gotta love science fights. The Simpsons settle on wind power, and erect a enormous fan in their backyard. It even makes their power meter run backward.
The whale story crops up in the second act when Bart and Lisa go around town to see what kind of damage the wind storm did to the town (you can imagine what happened to the backyard fan). They trek down to the beach to find the beached whale. I like what happens here, where Lisa is overthrown with emotion and Bart is dancing around the blow hole, because it separates the two's different characters. I know it's a small detail, but its things like this that ground the characters in their proper emotional categories. Anyway, the episode is unique in that the B-story and A-story are not interwoven, but that's because they don't happen at the same time. The fan story and the whale story are the only two things happening, it's a narrative device that's hardly used, especially in 20-minute episodic comedies.
I was curious to see how they were going to deal with the disposal of the beached whale, because that can be something of a problem when the PETA gets involved--but I thought they did a good job. They don't make a joke out of it, but they still overlay the tragic inevitability with a nice veil of humour. Chief Wiggum again chimes in with a couple great one-liners.
I didn't much like the climb into the dramatic ending, where sharks and whales sort of duke it out. However, they did raise a good point when Homer tries to save the whales by killing the sharks by explaining the trade off between the two innocent creatures. If Homer did harpoon a shark, it would have sent the whole episode into that dreaded "counter-productive" territory.
On the whole, this episode stands out from the rest of the season not only for its environmental message, but also the writers ability to keep the same "Simpsons" spin on each and every issue addressed.
8.5/10
