Rate and Review: "Holidays of Future Passed" (NABF18)

[Blobulle]

That was a good episode, but I don't understand the love for it. 4/5 (now my favorite Christmas episode, and my second favorite futurist episode, Lisa's Wedding is better)
I loved the photo montage at the beginning.

EDIT : 4.5/5

[hammster]

Ermm... I thought it was inoffensive. And would have made a decent finale. I'm not particularly onboard with quite the level of praise it's recieved though. It was still full of some awkward ass dialogue and, although it was amusing in places, I only actually laughed once. So yeah, first episode I've watched of season 23 and it was alright but I wasn't blown away.

[EthanRunt]

Lovely, splendid, well done, a little light on pacing at points, Lisa's plot didn't seem interesting and Bart's kinda started and stopped but the jokes were good, the ideas even better and the heart stronger than usual. I'm hopeful for The Simpsons when I see an episode like this, or a season as mostly strong as this, it makes it seem possible to bring back genius.
4/5

[irvine_11]

I'm starting to think that I have maybe been a little too rough on this episode. I'll give it a rewatch sometime before I officially stick with my B-

[Tab]

This episode isn't better than Lisa's Wedding, however it did make me smile and it's the only recent Simpsons episode to achieve that feat.

[Captain_Smiley]

"The Benny Hilton"

Is that a Dalek outside the Benny Hilton?

[hammster]

By the way for the first time in FOREVER, I thought the Ralph gags were the best gags of the episode.

[Mr. Krikt]

While it had a lot of problems, this episode kept me engaged. I was interested in finding out what happened and I was so pleased when Homer brought Grandpa home for Christmas.
I wish it had stuck with a more grounded version of the future though. Random bits of technology isn't the same as magical gloves, the Devil and talking trees.
I've got to say, I agree with a lot of the points raised over at Dead Homers Society. I don't think the episode was terrible, but a lot of the choices were.

Maybe they thought this would be the last episode?

It feels like they were treating this as the last future episode so they just went all-out with the future jokes. I think they relied a bit too much on them, though.

[THUG LIFE]

This episode got a bad ratings (3.0)
last week the ratings were (4.0) !!

[Blobulle]

1.Holidays of Future Passed A- Lisa's wedding A- (tie)
3.Future-drama C+
4.Bart to the future F

[Comicshow MolemanBob]

I've never really been a fan of the future episodes (The dialogue in them usually feels so forced 'It hasn't been the same since {Character} died {Place}' or 'I really wish {Character} was alive to see this, but of course he died {Time or place}' They just feel so lazy to me) I don't think it deserves the high praise it's been receiving (Defiantly shouldn't be considered better that Lisa's Wedding) But it's really not bad, just pretty adequate...

Score: 7.5/10.0

[Mr.]

LOVE IT!!!!!!
It felt very fresh. Showing Bart and Lisa children was a brilliant and cute idea to the point I wish they would do a spin-off "Simpsons - Generation 2"

I love how many jokes they put in one episode, not a second fet like waste.

[Captain Squid]

I'll bet this episode throws a lot of future based fanfics all out of whack. lol

Great watch! I thought the future jokes would be awful, but they were equal to Futurama levels. I watched Lisa's Wedding not too long before this, so a lot of the over the top gags didn't seem so over the top given how nutty Lisa's Wedding went.

5/5 from me.

[cloneasaurus]

Well...... that was disappointing. I mean, considering the heaps of praise it was getting, I was actually looking forward to watching it. But now that I have, I'll reveal what I thought.

I guess the idea of this episode was to show how the whole family's lives had changed in 30 years. But there were so many plots it was hard to follow and a lot of stuff ended up being resolved quickly. Lisa is explained to be some kind of pushy mother, but we barely ever see her like that. Lisa's daughter acts like a moody teenager the whole thing and suddenly says that she looks up to Lisa with no real hints. Bart's kids were also pretty clichéd and the dialogue fairly predictable. And the "Maggie doesn't talk" joke was executed so awkwardly. In Lisa's Wedding, it actually felt like she was going to speak before Hugh interrupted her. Here, she leaves her mouth open for ages before something interrupts, both times. It just felt very forced. And the sweet moments were all too often interrupted by some joke, some harmless, some annoying, the worst being Bart's kid's: "You've taught us the true meaning of Christmas" - [INSERT JOKE HERE] - sweet moment continues. The dialogue was corny as it was before being damaged further.

The sweet moments all had good intentions but just were executed poorly as a result of such things. I could feel this episode really wanted to be sweet but I didn't really ever connect with it. I sorta liked Bart saying Lisa was the one he looked up to but even that had some stupid future gag rammed in before and after it which certainly hurt it, not to mention the "awkward ass" dialogue that is such a staple of modern Simpsons.

As for jokes-wise this episode didn't succeed, really. I didn't laugh once but I didn't cringe at any jokes, so it was fairly mediocre in that respect. But all the future gags were sort of annoying, some just because of the nature of the joke (the talking tree was a lame idea to begin with), others because of their placement as I mentioned earlier. The gags got in the way of some potential emotional moments way too often.

I didn't hate the episode though. What I thought was done best was Marge and Homer's relationship. I liked how Homer obeyed Mirkin's theory that as he got older, he "mellowed out", which Mirkin said was the theory in the Lisa's Wedding commentary. Homer was in good character and it was a nice break from the loud-mouth writers mouthpiece Homer we get so often. Marge also seemed in solid character (though she looked very young for 60 something). In fact to be honest most people were in good character. But there was so much going on this almost got pushed to the side and I never really engaged with the characters or the story. And on a side note, this episode never felt Christmassy, which was a shame. Could have used more music.

Basically this episode was covering so much ground that it never really got under the skin of any of the new relationships posed in the episode, and it would have been much better as an hour long episode, or just simply simplified. Coupled with too many jokes in the wrong places and the main faults of the episode have been covered. I just never ever really, y'know, got in to it.

Decent, but best of the season? best future episode? best Christmas episode? best of the Jean era??? No.

C+/B-

[D DEBBS]

Somehow, seeing Lisa wind up with Milhouse is the equivalent of a fan-fic writer's bad 'shipper story.'

I'd rather she'd gone gay a la her Aunt Patty-it would have made it more interesting.

Maggie as a rock star...seeing that she sang at Lisa's future wedding to that British guy, it would have made sense. Her tour plane looks like it could have been Dethklok's first mode of transportation.

[The Governor]

Somehow, seeing Lisa wind up with Milhouse is the equivalent of a fan-fic writer's bad 'shipper story.'

Eh, that's TOO obvious. In my version of the future (ala 20 years from now) Maggie, age 21, ends up with Milhouse, age 30. Sadly, Lisa's still single and is a bit of a lone-hearted soul looking for her place in the world.

[LittleMissLisaSimpson]

I really loved this episode. One of the best future episodes along with Lisa's Wedding and one of the best season 23 episode! (so far :P). I loved Bart's kids they're adorable , Lisa and Milhouse's daughter was cool with her blue streak in her hair.

Maggie's baby looked like her which is cute, but I really wanted her to speak though

5/5

[Cartoonnetwork]

I agree with some of the things SpeedWay has just said, but I thought Bart's kids were pretty decent characters. They didn't have a lot of personality but they felt more natural than Lisa's daughter. They felt like real kids. Not extremely peculiar in their personalities, but cute and spontaneous.

I think the gags I dislike the most are both the pure fantasy ones, especially when they were bad placed. The talking tree was terrible and bad placed after the rather emotional scene in the treehouse, while the cat/dog evolution at least was placed at the very end and was a funnier joke.

Also, the "this character being gay" jokes. I wouldn't really mind if they didn't make it so often, but here Lisa had that lesbian period and Martin changed of sex. Recently they showed Martin acting like a gay in Replaceable You. It seems that they use that for shock value, sometimes without a very good reason behind it.

In Lisa's Sax Milhouse was said to be gay in Loren Prior's opinion, but it was an isolated gag, and it was his opinion. Nothing indicates that he was right. Now way too many characters are shown to have gay attitudes, sometimes in more than one episode. I wouldn't say Martin acts or sounds extemely masculine, but I wouldn't assume he's gay for that, just extremely nerdy.

[Toomanygrandmas]

- Bah humbug -

Wow. Just wow. I haven't seen all the Rate and Reviews for all of the newest episodes to be fair, but this is the first new (i.e. late Jean) episode that has received such positive reviews. There are some really glowing reviews all around for this episode. Does it deserve all of this praise? I have two answers - a short answer and a long answer.

Short Answer: No. No it does not.

Long answer:
No, because whilst there isn't much inherently wrong with this episode, I don't see what it does that's so right. It was probably a mistake looking at the reviews for this episode, before actually watching it, but I don't think I would have loved it if I had gone in with no expectations.

So how bout dat premise. Interesting, but not my cup of tea, to be honest. What I mean by that, is that once I knew of the premise of this episode, I looked forward to it mainly out of interest in seeing the characters a fair bit older. Yes, we had seen it before, but this was the first time there were Simpsons grandchildren about. However, whilst the premise in one respect is interesting, I didn't feel like I would enjoy the actual episode. I just don't like future episodes much. Bart to the Future is dire, Future Drama is very so-so, and even Lisa's Wedding, I find to be quite overrated.

The first reason I don't enjoy them is due to the jokes. There's not really anything terrible about making jokes about the possible future, but the jokes tend to be not very funny. Even if there is the odd bright spark, when the majority of jokes in the episode are about the same thing ('what if...'), it gets tiring. Any episode that had the same kind of joke would get tiring. Holidays of Future Passed is guilty of this. The humour wasn't 'anti-humour' (i.e. OH GOD THIS IS SO CRINGEWORTHY, CHANGE THE CHANNEL), but I don't think I laughed, once. There were some alright background jokes, I guess. Like seeing all of the schoolkids grown up. Or some of the silhouettes in Moe's Tavern (Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes - now there's a joke they're running into the ground). However, they were more of a 'Heh, that's cool', than a 'Haha that's funny'. Some future episodes are more or less guilty of samey jokes than the others. Lisa's Wedding is probably the least guilty of it, hence why it is probably the best one.

The second reason I don't enjoy them is because well... I don't really care about the characters. That's not to say I don't care how they act or are characterised, I just don't care as much as usual what happens to them. The characterisation in this episode was not too shabby, to be fair. Homer was quite good. There was nothing much to complain about his characterisation. Marge was fine too. As for Lisa and Bart, there wasn't much that was wrong, either. I'm just thankful that Bart wasn't an irritating manchild like he was in Bart to the Future. Yeah, he was a bit of an immature deadbeat dad in this, but nothing compared to the loser he was made out to be in you-know-which-episode. Lisa, as I said, was fine. It was a bit depressing seeing her end up with Milhouse, but nothing that bothered me too much. So how about dem Simpsons grandchildren, eh? Sorta boring. Yeah. That's all there is for me to say about them, really.