As the third and final season 8 holdover, Lisa the Simpson originally aired as episode 17 of season 9, but has since been shuffled around to third position after the show went up on Disney+. That might seem like a bizarre and inexplicable change, but it actually corrects an anomaly that never made much sense to begin with. This was the very last episode that Oakley and Weinstein produced, but it was held back for months for reasons I’ve never been able to ascertain which effectively separated it from the rest of their work and conflated it with Scully’s. Consequently, the pertinence of the themes and motifs underpinning the story was diminished.
Now the episode is right where it should be; where it should always have been.
For all intents and purposes, Lisa the Simpson is the swan song of the classic era. Like other meta-textual Oakley and Weinstein episodes, it contains a number of ideas and messages that can be extrapolated to the show itself. The episode is a lovely meditation on the fear of getting older, the inexorable passage of time, the inevitability of decline, and the desire to leave behind a worthy legacy. When Lisa worries that her best years are behind her and the future looks bleak, The Simpsons is reflecting on its own advancing age and expressing anxiety about its possible atrophy. When Lisa exalts intellectual virtues and warns against taking one’s faculties for granted, the show is venerating its own defining qualities and imploring its future stewards to treat it with the care and respect it deserves.
The allegory is a powerful and prescient one given the subsequent downfall of the series. With dialogue like “I've hit my mental and creative peak at the tender age of eight; what will my life be like after I descend into mediocrity?” and “I will soon become vapid, sluggish and slow witted”, how can this story be viewed as anything other than The Simpsons reflecting on its own mortality? One can’t help but wonder if Oakley and Weinstein had an inkling of what was looming on the horizon. They could never have known in 1997 that The Simpsons would still be on the air churning out new episodes in the 2020’s, but their anticipation of its decline was frightfully accurate. That outcome has only enhanced the sombre poignancy of Lisa the Simpson, which stands as one of the best episodes they produced and, arguably, the last breath of the golden age firing on all cylinders.