YMMV / The Simpsons S 11 E 4 Treehouse Of Horror X

• Broken Base: "Desperately Xeeking Xena" to an extent. On one hand it's considered the strongest segment of the otherwise unexceptional episode, but some don't care for it being the first time the series completely eschewed spooky elements despite being a horror series.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Stretch Dude and Clobber Girl, at least to the people in charge of writing the Simpsons comics. Werewolf Flanders has also appeared in merchandise.
• Franchise Original Sin: Part of why "Desperately Xeeking Xena" has a Broken Base. Despite being the first to abandon the horror genre in favor of parodying a completely different one (superhero morning cartoons), there is a Hand Wave in-universe as it begins in Halloween, and Bart and Lisa get their superpowers from an accident with a X-ray machine used to check candy for safety. Had following episodes stuck to the horror/Halloween theme, this might be considered an original spin that subverted expectations rather than the moment Seasonal Rot took over the Treehouse series.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • A Simpson causing the death of a Flanders family member stops being funny after the episode "Alone Again, Natura-Diddly (only replace "Marge" and "Ned" with "Homer" and "Maude"), which aired only a few months later. Furthermore, at one point Moe calls up the (recently widowed) Maude in an attempt to stalk/date her. In the latter episode, after the funeral, Moe then begins to "console" Ned by telling him how hot she was and that if he had died instead, he would be all over her. This angers Ned so much, he starts punching Moe in the face repeatedly as the bartender reacts gleefully, saying for him to "send me to Maude!"
  • The joke about Dick Clark actually being a robot who gets affected by the Y2K glitch, resulting in him melting and decaying in "Life's A Glitch, Then You Die" didn't age too well when he had a stroke in 2004 and less so after his death in 2012.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Collector held a phaser that was allegedly fired once to prevent William Shatner from making another album. Since 2004, Shatner has released eight albums.
  • The show doing a Millennium Bug story in 1999 becomes this after "The Star of the Backstage" had a teenage Marge (and several other characters) involved in a production of an a play based on the bug at around that time (Comic-Book Time strikes again) before putting on a repeat of it during that episode's present day.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: "I Know What You Diddily-Iddily-Did" has been criticized for ending abruptly without ever properly explaining such plot points like why Flanders was stalking the Simpsons dressed like a fisherman or pretended to be dead for so long, leaving the whole conclusion feeling quite rushed.

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