YMMV / The Simpsons S 6 E 11 Fear Of Flying

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The Simpsons watch Alive to help Marge with her fear of flying, but the version they watch (at least from what can be heard of it) is sensationalistic shlock that focuses mainly on the cannibalism involved ("Pass me another chunk of co-pilot.") While Alive is obviously not like that actually, there really is a '70s film about the Andes disaster that was an Exploitation Film focused on the cannibalism aspect, only it was titled Survive!.
• Critical Dissonance: Whereas many fans complained that the initial plot with Homer looking for a new bar was more interesting than the eventual main plot of Marge's aviophobia, a lot of professional critics actually had the opposite opinion, feeling that the initial plot with Homer was mostly padding that got in the way of the episode's exploration of Marge's backstory, something that the show hadn't really done before without going into her shared backstory with Homer. That being said, Homer's visit to Cheers still got a lot of praise among the critics.
• Franchise Original Sin: A common complaint about modern Simpsons episodes is that many of them start with one plot before switching to the "actual" plot halfway through and completely drop the first plot in the process. This episode is also guilty of that, but it doesn't come under as much fire since the trope wasn't nearly as prominent at this point in the show's run.
• Fridge Brilliance: Homer quickly leaves the lesbian bar upon finding out it has no fire exit. While that may seem like an overreaction and/or Comically Missing the Point, keep in mind that, last season, he and his coworkers almost died because the emergency exit in the power plant was painted on. Homer probably didn't want a repeat of what happened in that episode.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Homer doesn’t want Marge to go to therapy because he's afraid the therapist is going to brainwash her and turn her against him. In "Specs In The City", he finds out that she has been going to therapy in secret and he is her biggest complaint.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • When Homer is banned from Moe's the first time, Marge suggested he pretend the house was a bar, so he could spend every night at home. He responded he wasn't even going to dignify it with an answer. In "Dumbbell Indemnity", after Moe's Tavern gets burned down, Homer lets Moe use his garage as a bar. And also, in "Homer the Moe", when Moe remakes his bar as a post-modern nightclub, Homer and his friends start their own bar (actually, a "hunting club"), located in the garage.
  • There's a joke in this episode about Marge being worried that Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II never got married and that they've been "living in sin": come "Whistler's Father", and the two are apparently engaged in an actual Interspecies Romance.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The image of Homer in a lesbian bar gets posted a fair bit, and is often used in reference to somebody having an unpopular opinion or being Locked Out of the Loop on the internet.
  • Young Marge's school bus interaction with the other girl is common as well.
  • Jacqueline telling Young Marge, "This is what a cornfield looks like, honey" before a biplane attacks the two of them as becomes a meme for how incredibly strange it is out of context (in context, this is just one of many incidents that made Marge afraid of flying, plus it's also a reference to North By Northwest).
• One-Scene Wonder: Guy Incognito, Homer's Identical Stranger, is fondly remembered despite being only present for a gag. Fans have completely seriously questioned if he's another of Homer's half-siblings. He also gets invoked for the Play-Along Meme about Mr. Snrub not being Mr. Burns — fans use him as evidence that seemingly identical characters with painfully obvious aliases could be genuinely different people.
• Signature Scene: The scene in the lesbian bar is one of the most remembered gags of the entire franchise.
• So Okay, It's Average: Despite having the well-received Cheers reunion and a lot of great jokes (including some of the show's most famous, like the aforementioned lesbian bar scene and the Guy Incognito Bait-and-Switch) the episode is generally seen as this. Reasons are generally due to the particularly drastic and jarring Halfway Plot Switch, weak therapy plotline (with a fairly underwhelming resolution), and the fact that the writers clearly hadn't quite cracked how to make a Marge-focused episode.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A lot of viewers stated that the "Homer tries to find a new bar" plotline would have made a better episode than Marge going to therapy for her fear of flying.
• Woolseyism:
  • The Spanish dub has a different version of the joke where Homer asks Bart for his wallet. In the Spanish, he asks Marge instead, making it funnier when Bart produces the wallet.
  • The Latin American dub renames Guy Incognito as "Cosme Fulanito". "Cosme" is not punny on its own, but "Fulanito" is a dismissive way of saying "Fulano de Tal", a Spanish term that has the same connotations as "John Doe" and sounds equally like Homer blatantly improvising an alias.

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