This year’s Treehouse of Horror is also the 666th episode of The Simpsons. They do nothing with this, which is telling. Instead of a wrap-around we get a cold open where Maggie is an evil baby swapped at birth for the new Simpson baby because Homer didn’t want another boy. The only worthwhile thing here is a visual gag of stuffed animals vomiting stuffing while their heads spin. The first short is a reference dense Stranger Things parody that plays more like CliffsNotes than comedy. The second sequence (Homer reincarnates repeatedly) feels like they’re trying run out the clock. It closes with a parody of The Shape of Water that plays as you’d expect. It’s hard to criticize a late series Simpsons episode without sounding like an old man yelling at a cloud, but this installment was a big letdown.
