YMMV / The Simpsons S8 E2 "You Only Move Twice"

• Accidental Aesop: The moral of the episode seems to be "treat people well and they'll do well." Homer's productivity and drive improves because he has a nurturing boss who rewards him for his hard work. Homer slacks off at his own job partly because Burns is an abusive boss who can't even be bothered to remember Homer's name.
• Alternative Joke Interpretation:
  • This episode has perhaps the most divisive Simpsons joke in history: When Hank Scorpio throws a moccasin, he asks Homer if he's ever seen someone say goodbye to a shoe, and Homer responds, "Yes, once." To this day, there's debate over whether Homer was talking about another time he saw someone say goodbye to a shoe or what he just saw Scorpio do.
  • The line where Hanks asks Homer what country is his least favorite; Italy or France. Homer responds with France and Hank laughs to himself: "No one ever says Italy." Was this joke supposed to be a "Everyone hates the French", is it saying Italy is the more favorable country of the two, or given that Scorpio suddenly stops smiling does he have a unspecified irrational grudge against Italy?
• Crosses the Line Twice: The idea of Homer working for a professional villain is pretty ludicrous, but make the said villain a genuinely nice person to his workers, and you've got one of the show's best-received episodes ever.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Scorpio is such a Nice Guy, it is easy for average viewer to ignore his blatant acts of terrorism and murder.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Hank Scorpio. He only ever appeared in this one episode, but he since became one of the show's most beloved characters thanks to the hilarious contrast between his super-friendly and super villain sides.
• Genius Bonus: Scorpio's letter at the end refers to his doomsday plot as "Project Arcturus". Scorpio is a constellation and Arcturus is one of the brightest stars in the sky. It isn't a part of that specific constellation, implying Scorpio just names a lot of stuff after stars.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • At the time of this episode, the Denver Broncos were the epitome of So Okay, It's Average, having an exact .500% record over their last four seasons (hence Homer's disappointment in becoming their owner), while the Dallas Cowboys had won three out of the four previous Super Bowls. By the end of the 1996 season, they would tie with the Green Bay Packers for having the best regular-season record at 13-3, and would go on to win the Super Bowl the following year, and again at Super Bowl XXXIII in 1999, which Homer went to in Season 10's "Sunday, Cruddy Sunday". As of 2016, the Denver Broncos have been to the Super Bowl four times, winning three, the latest in 2016. The Dallas Cowboys haven't even reached the Conference Championships since the airing of the episode (and after this episode aired, they would win one more playoff game before going 13 years without winning another). Hilarious, indeed. And for extra hilarity, the Bronco's sole loss in those four games, a crushingly disappointing defeat of 43-8 at Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014, allowed the end of episode scene to be memetically mutated again. Football history has gotten a lot of mileage out of this joke.
  • In a Simpsons comic book issue that featured Scorpio, he asks Homer about the Broncos. He replied they won a Super Bowl and Homer got to pay off Moe's bar tab.
  • As he dreams of owning the Dallas Cowboys, Homer spends part of the episode trying to emulate their legendary coach Tom Landry, right down to wearing the same sort of hat. Shortly afterward, King of the Hill premiered with its protagonist, Hank Hill, also idolizing Landry.
• Magnificent Bastard: Hank Scorpio is the president of the Globex Corporation whose passions include his employees' wellbeing, fun runs and world domination. Threatening the UN with a Doomsday Device, Scorpio holds the world ransom while at the same time becoming friends with new hire Homer Simpson, actually managing to make Homer productive. Executing the escaping Mr. Bont after Homer tackles the agent and successfully repelling an attack on his lair, Scorpio amiably parts with Homer when the latter decides to return to Springfield for the sake of his family. Conquering the East Coast, Scorpio gives Homer the Denver Broncos as a farewell gift and assures him they will always be friends. Emulating the best aspects of the classic Bond villains he parodies, Scorpio also cares just as much—if not more—about his employees' happiness than he does about conquering the world. The height of Affably Evil and perhaps the show's most successful villain, Hank Scorpio is a beloved character years after his single episode.
• Rooting for the Empire: Who didn't want the Affably Evil Hank Scorpio to win?
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Hank is an immensely likable and badass Affably Evil supervillain whose relationship with Homer makes him an interesting Foil to Mr. Burns. Being a guest character however, he only appears in the single episode, though material outside the show would feature him more prominently.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The concept of the episode, a normal guy working for an Affably Evil supervillain, could probably work as an independent show, even if it weren't in the Simpsons universe.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Cypress Creek Elementary School is shown to be incredibly advanced because they have their own website. On the DVD Commentary, the writers admit that this is one of the show's most-dated jokes, as anything and everything (legal or otherwise) has a website (or, at the very least, an account with a social media site, like Twitter or Facebook), and the novelty of advancement has worn off significantly.
  • Homer tells Hank Scorpio that he dreams of owning the Dallas Cowboys, and is very disappointed in the end after he discovers that Hank Scorpio got him the Denver Broncos instead. At the time, the Cowboys had recently won 3 Super Bowls in a 4-year span, while the Broncos were a Butt-Monkey in the NFL, having lost all their prior Super Bowl appearances in blowouts and were exactly a .500% team in the same time frame. Since this episode aired, the Cowboys haven't even made their conference championship, while the Broncos have had 4 Super Bowl appearances, winning 3 of them (one of which, Super Bowl XXXIII, was the subject of season 10's "Sunday, Cruddy Sunday" in 1999). So, to modern viewers, it seems like Homer did well after all.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Homer is driven to quit his lucrative dream job (one of the very few he has ever been successful at) because all of the other Simpsons are unhappy with their new lives. Marge has all the housework done for her by automated systems so she's bored and sits around doing nothing, Bart is put into a Special Education class where he has to deal with other rambunctious and annoying students because he's not up to Cypress Creek Elementary's standards, and Lisa is allergic to everything on the town's nature trails. What makes this the trope is their problems could all be easily solved, such as Marge getting a job, taking up a hobby or even looking for friends, Bart getting his parents to get him out of that Special Education class, meanwhile Lisa could just take anti-allergy medication. Plus, once they tell Homer about these issues none of them try to come up with any solutions and just tell Homer they want to go back to Springfield.

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