Baby You Can't Drive My Car
"Baby You Can't Drive My Car" is the 644th episode of The Simpsons and the fifth episode of season 30.
| "Baby You Can't Drive My Car" | |
|---|---|
| The Simpsons episode | |
| Episode no. | Season 30 Episode 5 |
| Directed by | Timothy Bailey |
| Written by | Rob LaZebnik |
| Production code | XABF18 |
| Original air date | November 4, 2018 |
| Guest appearance(s) | |
Tracy Morgan as Tow Truck Driver | |
| Episode features | |
| Couch gag | The family rushes in to the room and sits on five exercise bikes respectively. Suddenly, Marge, Lisa, Maggie, and Bart use their bikes to leave the room, leaving Homer as the only one still in the room. As his bike is not moving, Homer expresses his frustration once again. |
Plot
Homer Simpson picks up "chicken" nuggets at Krusty Burger's drive-through and eats them while singing a parody of Jim Croce's "Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels)" about the meal.[1] His distracted driving and eating, continue to the Springfield nuclear plant. At the entrance the car jerks as it hits a speed-bump sending the nuggets airborne from the dashboard, with one lodging in his throat. Still driving, he tries dislodging the food by thrusting himself against the steering wheel, and somehow the car itself becomes airborne, and upside down. The car crashes into Mr. Burns' office while Burns is showing Waylon Smithers the only Fabergé chicken, based on the eggs of the same name, Burns fires Homer.[1]
At home Marge Simpson scolds Homer as time lapses and his beard grows, she insists he has to find a new job.[2] Just as Homer shares his new passion, watching Korean soap operas, a television news item for a startup company, CarGo, airs including a press event where Mayor Quimby touts the jobs that will benefit the city.[2] At CarGo, Homer interviews to be a "highly passive human" road tester of their self-driving autonomous vehicle.[1] The company founders see his bad driving record as an asset,[1] and he gets the job after passing their final test, sitting for hours doing nothing.[2] He is hired and in a montage his work amounts to enjoying various activities —including a second parody of "Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels)"—while the self-driving cars road test themselves.[1] One day after work, Marge arrives at CarGo to drive him home, and they stop by the company's cafeteria for some bánh mì to take with him. When told all the food is free,[2] Homer binges (while the music "Pure Imagination" from the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory plays). Marge is impressed with the high-tech campus, and Homer gives her a tour of the high-tech campus, they note recreational employee perks like a rock-climbing wall, and game room go unused because the coders never stop working.[1] Marge says "we should help them enjoy themselves". They call the nerds to join them instigating a foosball tournament, which the founders see as a "paradigm-blasting", team-building exercise which invigorates creativity.[2] The founders want CarGo to be the leader in employee satisfaction,[2] so promote Homer, and make him and Marge a team to help the other employees have fun, forgetting they want or have families.[2]
At CarGo, Marge and Homer talk employees into trying out the company's regulation ice hockey rink, but none of them can skate.[2] Marge solves the problem by having them use office chairs which is a hit. Homer videophones the activity to Lenny and Carl, who become the start of a mass exodus of employees who quit the nuclear plant to work for a fun employer.[2] In response, Burns and Smithers work undercover at CarGo, where Burns commends the success of making the workplace pleasant so no one wants to leave, without raising their salaries. Meanwhile, Marge and Homer head home in a CarGo vehicle, but realize it listens to them and takes them to buy things they randomly talk about.[2] They report the problem to the founders, but are told it is a part of CarGo's Sponsored Rides program selling users' data to corporations,[2] and that this insider information is covered by the non-disclosure agreement.[2] Horrified, Homer quits and vows to sue the company.
Back at home, Homer is conflicted about the unethical manipulation, but Marge loves their fun jobs.[1] He goes to Moe's Tavern, and is surprised Burns is there, delivered to the bar because Burns said one of the phrases from Moe's keyword optimization list with CarGo.[2] Homer, Burns, and Smithers team up to stop the cars to end the company.[3] With their CarGo credentials, they breach the main computer server room where Smithers works to reconfigure the deep neural network and disable the cars' fuel cells, but Marge confronts them.[1] After pleading with Homer not to destroy the fun she is having, she goes to report the situation to the founders but notices CarGo's next phase, Sponsored Lives, an effort to use the cars' keychain fob to eavesdrop everywhere the keys go, even the bathroom.[2] Marge decides the company really should be shut down, and helps Smithers do so back in the server room.[1] After the cars shut down, Springfielders are relieved and CarGo is bankrupted. Homer asks Burns to consider hiring him and Marge to work together at the plant, but Burns refuses and angrily begins to remember why Homer was fired until Marge shoots him in the head with a toy Nerf bazooka dart, causing him to forget.
In the epilogue, the founders cite CarGo as a "bump in the road", and announce to their employees a new way to reach consumers: multi-lingual talking tattoos. During the closing credits, a scene from earlier in the episode shows Homer and Marge putting their CarGo car in "snuggle mode". They begin to make love in the car until it stops at the church, much to Reverend Lovejoy's frustration.
Reception
"Baby You Can't Drive My Car" scored a 1.9 rating with a 7 share and was watched by 5.08 million people, making "The Simpsons" Fox's highest rated show of the night.
Tony Sokol of Den of Geek gave the episode a 4 out of 5 points ranking, stating the episode is "maybe the closest to a classic 'The Simpsons' have offered in a long time. It is purely episodic. The subtle tweaks at the ruling class are timely, and the struggles at the center of it are universal. It's all about jobs. It's the economy, stupid. 'Baby You Can't Drive My Car' works specifically because the workplace is what we all have in common. Left, right and center, we all line up to earn a paycheck. We all want the perfect job. Many people have to drive to work, so we want the perfect car. Whether we like smoothies or not, we could all agree it would be fun to be able to make them while driving. In a driverless car society, the only thing to worry about is real drivers. This reviewer would like to know what the DWI laws will be, because a lot of cars ride on ethanol and, having drunk ethanol on the advice of Moe the bartender, it can be quite impairing."[1]
Dennis Perkins of The A.V. Club gave the episode a B-, stating that "Homer is the one who gets up in arms about the data-mining, while Marge, swept up in all the good their joint venture is having on their marriage, at first decides that a company secretly stealing every scrap of Spiringfielders' personal information is an insignificant price to pay. 'I can't be the ethical one!' protests Homer at one point, and, well, he's got a point. It's sweet to see Marge and Homer dancing a graceful waltz in a virtual reality ballroom, and Marge's anguished excuse that 'we were having so much fun!' is pretty heartbreaking when you think about it. But the conflict just doesn't land, and when Marge (horrified that CarGo plans to extend the listening-in to the cars' key fob—even in the powder room) finally decides to help Smithers, Burns, and Homer's sabotage, it's too thin a motivation."[2]
Screen Rant called it the best episode of the 30th season.[4]
References
- Sokol, Tony (November 4, 2018). "The Simpsons Season 30 Episode 5 Review: Baby You Can't Drive My Car". Den of Geek. Retrieved 2019-07-23.
- Perkins, Dennis (November 4, 2018). "Marge and Homer's new self-driving car collides with a moral dilemma in a near-miss Simpsons". AV Club. Retrieved 2019-07-23.
- Vargas, Michael (2018-11-11). "The Simpsons: Baby You Can't Drive My Car, Review". The Game of Nerds. Retrieved 2019-07-23.
- Sim, Bernardo (2019-09-22). "The Simpsons: The Best Episode In Every Season, Ranked". Screen Rant. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
