Treehouse of Horror episode: 4
Year: 1994
Season: 5
Segment: 2 of 3
Segment title: “Time and Punishment”
Writer(s): Greg Daniels, Dan McGrath
Characters:
Main: Homer
Supporting: Marge, Lisa, Maggie, Bart, Flanders
Homage to? A Sound of Thunder, it says here.
Basic premise: After fixing his dodgy toaster Homer finds it is a time machine, and travels back to the time when dinosaurs ruled the earth. However while there he manages to change the future. Repeatedly.
Best quotes:
Homer: “I’ve travelled back to a time when dinosaurs weren’t just confined to zoos!”
Flanders: “Oh I see we have a negative Nellie in sector 2! I’m gonna have to ask the whole family to freeze and prepare for re-Neducation!”
Flanders: “Now, in case all that smiling that didn't cheer you up, there’s something that never fails: a nice glass of warm milk, a little nap and a total frontal lobotomy!”
Homer: “Hmm. Fabulous house, well-behaved kids, sisters-in-law dead, luxury sedan - Woo-hoo!”
Type of ending: Inconclusive
Synopsis: Having trouble with his toaster, Homer accidentally turns it into a time machine. He returns to the time of dinosaurs (yes, you’ve heard it before; I wrote it in the “basic premise” above, shut up) and kills a bug, which alters the future so that now Ned Flanders is the unquestioned master of the world, and everyone has to obey him. Going back to the past he tries to avoid killing anything, but sits on a fish coming out of the water - first mammal on earth I guess - and this time when he gets back to the present his family are all giants. Third time lucky; this time he sneezes and wipes out all the dinosaurs. On returning, everything is perfect, even better than before, except nobody seems to know what a doughnut is! Screaming, he runs off, as Marge notes “It’s raining again.” Raining doughnuts.
Next he goes wild, killing everything in sight, and after several returns where really weird things happen, he finds himself back in a more-or-less normal universe. Of course, his family all now have reptilian tongues, but as he says himself, close enough.
Rating: A
Score
Story: 6 (I haven’t read the Bradbury story but it’s clearly not an original episode)
Laughs: 4
Originality: 3
Ending: 5
Longevity: 2
Total: 20
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1hmiaNReCg