YMMV / The Simpsons S 8 E 6 A Milhouse Divided

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Was Kirk responsible for Southern Cracker falling from the No. 1 cracker factory in town to tied for sixth? Or was Kirk's uncle actually responsible (as he believes that single people don't eat crackers and doesn't even care to find out if he's right or wrong) and had been lying to his daughter Luanne about Kirk to cover his own incompetence running Southern Cracker?
• Aluminium Christmas Trees: A number of people thought that Love Is... was something Homer made up, or at least totally misunderstood the concept of.
• Angst? What Angst?:
  • Milhouse is understandably upset and depressed about his parents divorcing during the bus scene, but the rest of the time, he seems perfectly okay. In fact, a dropped storyline for the episode had Bart wanting to similarly break up Homer and Marge after seeing the perks of Milhouse's situation, such as being spoiled by both parents and sympathetically befriended by Nelson and his crew.
  • Kearney's son had to witness his (likely teenage) parents divorce so young and sleeps in a drawer. He cheerfully mentions this without a hint of irony.
• Broken Aesop: Kirk and Luann Van Houten's divorce leads into an Aesop about Homer needing to respect his wife, which is what Kirk tells Homer after losing his home, his job, and his car. But the way losing Luann caused those was utterly contrived: he lost his home because he apparently got absolutely nothing in the divorce settlement, he was fired for being single (which is actually discrimination and grounds for Kirk to sue), an earlier comment from Luann also heavily implies his employer was her father^note which, from Luann's tirade, may have been the reason he wasn't fired sooner, as she suggests that he was bad at his job. If so, his incompetence would be a perfectly valid reason the company could've cited for firing him, but they don't., and his car was stolen by a woman he met on the rebound who claims to be in the music business (which was his fault, but was more general incompetence as he was dumb enough to hand over his keys to someone he just met while waiting in a bar).
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Homer and Marge's second marriage becomes this for two reasons:
    • Due to Status Quo Is God, Homer inevitably backslides into being a poor husband again following this episode despite his determination to make his second marriage with Marge perfect this time around.
    • In Season 20's "Wedding for Disaster," we'd later learn that due to an error with recertification, Reverend Lovejoy's ministerial certification hadn't been renewed at this time and thus he had no authority to marry them, meaning that the second marriage was invalid and Homer and Marge are still technically divorced at the end of this episode.
  • Later episodes reveal that Kirk and Luann are cousins. This means that Luann's father was also Kirk's uncle, and that in firing Kirk he was firing a member of the family. That arguably makes Kirk's firing even harsher than it already is.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Marge telling Homer before the party "I only asked you to do one thing for this party and you didn't do it" can come off as a predecessor to the "You Had One Job" meme. ^note The request? She wanted him to put his nice clothes on; he instead was sitting in his underwear playing with remote control racing cars
  • Kirk trying to win Luann back with a terrible song has been compared to Robin Thicke's disastrous Paula album.
  • Kearney's son casually mentions that he sleeps in a drawer after the former tells Milhouse about his divorce. In The Movie, after the Simpsons have to go on the run and hide out in a motel due to Homer's antics, when he comes in to apologize, Maggie can be seen sleeping in...you guessed it, a drawer. This YouTube Poop highlights the connection.
• Informed Wrongness: Kirk is characterized as an Entitled Bastard in how he treated Luann, even though it's explicitly stated that their unhappiness with each other is entirely mutual.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The Dignity picture that Kirk drew during the game of Pictionary is a frequent in-joke among the Simpsons fanbase.
  • Somehow, the scene where Bart uses a chair to smack a bathing Homer in the tub has become the subject of many edits in video form.
  • The line from Kirk's manager, "I don't recall saying 'good luck'", gets a lot of use.
• One-Scene Wonder: The cracker factory manager. He only shows up in one scene where he fires Kirk, but what a quotable scene it is.
• Signature Scene: Bart hitting Homer with a chair while he's bathing.
• The Woobie: Kirk, due to the unwarranted Trauma Conga Line he suffered after his divorce.