YMMV / The Simpsons S 12 E 6 The Computer Wore Menace Shoes

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: When Homer shows off his website and Lisa tells him that he can't use copyrighted images for his site, Bart tries to tell Homer that he got suspended from school because he had a knife in his locker, punched a cop, and that he feels mad all the time. Bart's side story is never brought up again.
• Bizarro Episode: More specifically the second half of the episode, which becomes a full-blown parody/homage of The Prisoner (1967), with there being No Ending to the plot.
• Broken Base: Is this episode a really good spoof of The Prisoner (1967) or yet another sign that The Simpsons has descended into madness and Seasonal Rot?
• Harsher in Hindsight: The accidentally true conspiracy theory that vaccines contain mind-control serum, in light of similar anti-vaccine conspiracy theories that became a public health nightmare during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Before writing his fake news story, Homer tries to acquire online fame by stealing content off other parts of the internet, and posting them on his own website. Had the episode expanded on this and explored the issues of copyright and content theft, it would have been relevant to the leading concerns of the online community, especially given how prevalent these issues are on sites like YouTube. Unfortunately, the episode only goes as far as Lisa reprimanding him for this, which is used as a segue into the actual focus of the episode, which is on fake news.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Comic Book Guy's reaction to Mr. X's fake news is "There's no emoticon for what I'm feeling!" Starting around the 2010s, emoticons were phased out almost completely, with emojis taking their place. The fact that CBG uses emoticons instead of emojis dates this episode to sometime before the 2010s.
• Values Resonance: The part of the episode that focuses on rumors and hoaxes spreading like wildfire over the Internet has become more and more relevant in the age of social media and fake news.

---