YMMV / The Simpsons S8 E1 "Treehouse of Horror VII"

• Accidental Aesop:
  • Kang and Kodos are revealed to be aliens impersonating Clinton and Dole, but people vote for them anyway and Kang wins against human third-party candidates. This makes a good case against blindly voting for a party, no matter how bad the candidate.
  • Bart, despite being "evil", is merely an obnoxious troublemaker while Hugo, despite being "good", kidnaps Bart and tries to to do experimental surgery on him without his consent and has done it to animals. Bart was raised in a (mostly) loving family while Hugo was imprisoned. One could make an aesop about Nature Versus Nurture.
• Ass Pull: Lampshaded by Bart in "The Thing and I." He doesn't believe the story about having a conjoined twin at first, since that would mean he would have to have a big hideous scar on his side. Then he pulls up his shirt and is shocked to see a big hideous scar underneath for seemingly the first time in his life.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: The twist of "The Thing and I" is that Bart is the Evil Twin, not Hugo. Most viewers should be able to figure that out long before the end of the episode, since the flashback shows that the left twin is the evil one, but Bart has a scar on the right side of his torso.
  Bart: Oh, don't look so shocked.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Bart's non-canon twin Hugo Simpson combines Creepy Child and The Woobie in a way that's made him memorable to many fans, and fanworks inducting some version of him into the main continuity aren't hard to find.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • "Citizen Kang" ends with Kang, who was impersonating Bob Dole, winning the election, possibly a Take That! at how President Clinton's chances for re-election were considered slim due to his popularity being low at the time.^note (At the time the episode would have been written, anyhow; by the time the episode actually aired, Dole's popularity was even lower than Clinton's, which had rebounded a little) Clinton ended up winning the election in a landslide.
  • The tub ships that attack Bart◊ look a lot like the Planet Express ship from Futurama.
  • In "The Thing and I", we see that a beloved character is actually an impostor and the "true" counterpart returns. Sounds similar to the infamous "The Principal and the Pauper", only with the opposite ending. Matt Groening even argued that episode would have worked better if it were a "Treehouse of Horror" story.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Dr. Hibbert's mirror punch is something of a hit these days.
  • Homer's "Don't blame me: I voted for Kodos!" is also pretty popular, especially in the aftermath of presidential elections. I Voted for Kodos was also the name of a ska band.

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