Treehouse of Horror X

For the continuing series of Halloween specials, see Treehouse of Horror series.
"Treehouse of Horror X", also known as "The Simpsons Halloween Special X", is the fourth episode of Season 11, as well as the tenth Treehouse of Horror episode. The episode aired on Halloween of 1999, and would be the final Treehouse of Horror special to air either before or on Halloween until Season 21's "Treehouse of Horror XX" in 2009, a full ten years later. This is the last Treehouse of Horror episode to air in the 1990s (originally going to air as the first episode of Season 11).
==Synopsis==
Celebrate ten years of macabre, yet hilarious stories with these tales of terror:
Intro: The Simpsons watch a bad 10th anniversary special hosted by Kang and Kodos.
I Know What You Diddily-Iddly-Did: After coming home from an off-screen adventure involving vampires and retrieving a box of Sugar Crisp cereal, Homer runs over Ned Flanders, who's been out walking in the woods. After tricking Maude into thinking Ned's alive and well, Homer throws Flanders' body in Maude's house and thinks The Simpsons got away with murder following his funeral...until the messages of someone knowing that The Simpsons killed Flanders start appearing.
Desperately Xeeking Xena/Stretch Dude and Clobber Girl in "Enter the Collector": Lucy Lawless (the actress known for her character, Xena, Warrior Princess) guest stars in this imaginary tale where an accident at a Halloween candy checkpoint turns Bart and Lisa into superheroes, Stretch Dude and Clobber Girl. With their respective powers of super stretching and Hulk-like strength, Bart and Lisa are called to rescue Lucy Lawless from The Collector (Comic Book Guy), a supervillain who collects celebrities associated with geek entertainment.
Life's a Glitch, Then You Die: During a New Year's Eve party to celebrate the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st century (though, technically, the start of the 21st century wasn't until 2001), Homer discovers that his computer at the nuclear plant wasn't made Y2K compliant, leading to a chain of disasters that cause a technological apocalypse.
==Full Story==
=== Opening Sequence ===
Kang and Kodos open the show in front of an alien audience, in the style of "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In". No one laughs, and canned laughter is played instead. The Simpsons witness the whole thing on television while in the forms from previous Halloween episodes (Homer as a Jack-In-The-Box from Treehouse of Horror II, Marge as a witch from Treehouse of Horror VIII, Bart with a fly head from Treehouse of Horror VIII, Lisa with an ax in her scalp, and Maggie with alien tentacles from Treehouse of Horror IX) and Lisa questions what aliens have to do with Halloween. Maggie uses her alien ray gun to silence Lisa and zap her.
===I Know What You Diddily-Iddly-Did===
In a parody of , on a foggy evening with a full moon, The Simpsons are driving down the road until Marge accidentally runs over Ned Flanders, killing him. The next day, Homer climbs to the top of his house with Ned's body, calling down to Maude in her front yard. Maude then goes indoors when her pies are finally done, and Homer throws Ned's corpse off the roof onto the dog house, but Maude fails to notice. Homer then dumps Ned's corpse in his house, waiting to hear Maude's horrified scream. Shortly after Ned's funeral, the Simpsons return home. Homer gloats about how easy it was to get away with murder and considers driving over Milhouse, Marge stops him.
The family then discovers that someone knows that they murdered Ned, writing "I know what you did" on their front door. Late at night during a storm, the Simpsons are sitting on the couch, when the phone rings. Homer answers it and a male voice says, "I know you're alone." The voice turns out to be Moe, who was trying to call Maude Flanders, but dialed Homer by mistake. A shot of lightning fills their living room with light, showing that the inside of the house is covered in the phrase "I know what you did". After a confrontation with a mysterious cloaked figure wielding a butcher's hook, the Simpsons flee their house. They get into the car but discover that it's covered in the same phrase. They escape the figure, but the car runs out of gas after Homer prays for God to save his life.
But as the figure closes in, Homer tells them to hide in various places. He tells Marge to hide in an old, abandoned amusement park, Lisa to hide in the pet cemetery, Bart to hide in the spooky roller disco, and that he will skinny-dip in the lake where sexy teenagers were killed exactly one hundred years ago. And the figure catches them. They then discover that Ned Flanders was their assailant. Ned was not killed by Marge's accident, and he tells them, by an incredibly coincidence, he had been bitten by an un-dead werewolf moments before Marge hit him, and werewolves are near impossible to kill (“you can’t kill what’s un-dead”). Lisa then puts together that Ned was going to kill them, and they all laugh, but as the clouds drift past the moon, its luminous light engulfs Ned's body, and he rips off his clothes as he is now the un-dead werewolf Flanders. Marge and the kids ran down the street in terror while Ned mauls Homer to death, with Homer still mocking him "Ooow! Ah. (Flanders struggles to pack Homer into his mouth) "Eyes bigger than your stomach, eh wolfie? Heh heh... OWWW! Oh God, no!"
===Desperately Xeeking Xena===
In a parody of Marvel Comics, the mother Marge takes the kind-hearted Bart and the beautiful Lisa to the Springfield Elementary gymnasium, where Chief Wiggum is running a portable X-ray machine to inspect children's candy. Whilst inspecting his son Ralph's candy, he tells them what the candy really contains "safe, safe, razor blade, syringe, oh white chocolate!" But as Nelson's extremely bulky pillowcase of goodies is being scanned, the X-ray machine inevitably malfunctions. Before the explosion, Bart does not duck down to avoid it, and only stares in awe. Lisa stands up to try to get him to get down. The machine bursts out a strong radiation ray, knocking Bart into a gym wall and Lisa into a bleacher, which knocks her shoes off and collapses on top of her, much to Principal Skinner's horror, as Lisa's grades qualify the school for grants. The subsequent exposure to radiation gives Lisa extraordinary strength, allowing her to pick up the bookcase. Bart gains strength of his own (though not nearly as much as Lisa's) and the ability to stretch any part of his body. They become a superhero duo, calling themselves the pretty boy "Stretch Dude and the beauty Clobber Girl".
In their first "adventure", Lucy Lawless addresses fans (such as Professor Frink) at a science fiction convention. Suddenly, Comic Book Guy, who has styled himself as a villain called "The Collector", kidnaps her using a magnet to attract her metal breast plate. Lawless goes to remove the breastplate, but decides against it, as every nerd has a camera waiting for her to go topless. He takes her to his lair, where he puts her in an aluminized Pet film bag for "safekeeping" and imprisons her in a room of other similarly-captured celebrities such as Yasmine Bleeth and Tom Baker.
Stretch Dude and Clobber Girl burst into The Collector's hideout, but he manages to knock Clobber Girl out with a working phaser gun that was fired only once to prevent William Shatner from releasing another album. He wastes all his remaining shots on Stretch Dude, who splits in half and does somersaults to avoid the rays. The Collector hurls his empty ray gun at Stretch Dude, hitting him on the forehead and knocking him out as well. He suspends the drowsy duo over a vat of bubbling Lucite, slowly lowering them towards certain doom and mocks them, saying "Goodnight, Retch Dude and Slobber Girl. Sweet screams!" Lucy Lawless, still in her plastic restraint, lures the Collector over by pretending to be attracted to him. When he's close enough she grabs his lips and then attacks him with moves.
Stating that he fell for a "ruse so hackneyed, it would make Stan Lee blush!", the Collector grabs his limited-edition double-edged lightsaber from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and ignites the blades. Lucy reminds him that he has removed it from its original packaging, and it is now no longer collectible. He backs away in horror and plummets into the Lucite, eventually emerging to strike a dramatic death pose (imitating a Lorne Greene pose from Battlestar Galactica) before the plastic hardens around him. Lawless flies Stretch Dude and Clobber Girl home to safety on her back. Clobber Girl is confused and points out that Xena can't fly. Lucy responds that she isn't Xena; she's Lucy Lawless. This explanation satisfies Clobber Girl and the trio fly off to a reprise of the 'Stretch Dude and Clobber Girl' theme song.
===Life's a Glitch, Then You Die===
On December 31, 1999, Dick Clark celebrates his New Year's Rockin' Eve in Springfield instead of Times Square. Homer, the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant's compliance officer, confidently declares that he fixed every computer at the power plant. Unfortunately, Homer didn't fix his own computer, which creates the computer virus that spreads rapidly to other systems all over the world. But as Dick Clark's New Year's ball drops and hits "1999.A.D", the electronic year display reads "1900.B.C". Within minutes, Dick melts to death (he is shown to be a robot) and chaos breaks out as airplanes crash, appliances explode, malfunction and turn evil, including the Springfield Revolving Restaurant's Sit 'n' Rotate room dislodging from its stand and flying off, presumably into space. A widespread looting soon begins and as the family roams the streets observing the damage (including traffic lights that shoot multi-colored beam blasts and mailboxes walking by themselves), Krusty's pacemaker sets itself to hummingbird speed and he collapses in front of them (although he says he's not dead). A letter in Krusty's pocket states that a rocket is being populated with humanity's "best and brightest" and will be launched shortly in an effort to preserve human civilization on Mars. When they reach the rocket, Homer unsuccessfully attempts to bluff his way on board (claiming to be the piano genius from the movie Shine), but the armed guard recognizes Lisa as having a seat reserved on the craft, knowing that she's the ship's proofreader. Lisa is only able to take one parent with her, and she quickly chooses Marge before the guard can even finish his sentence, who then takes Maggie along. Homer and Bart soon find a second, unguarded rocket nearby and climb on board just before it launches. However, they quickly notice that this ship is filled with Ross Perot, Dan Quayle, Tonya Harding, Al Sharpton, Courtney Love, Spike Lee, Tom Arnold, Pauly Shore, Rosie O'Donnell and Dr. Laura and the like: it is deliberately set for a collision course with the sun. No longer fearing death, now actually seeking it and unable to bear the short trip to oblivion with the B-list celebrities, Homer and Bart eject themselves into the vacuum of space, where they sigh in relief as their heads swell up onscreen and explode off-screen while the rocket heads towards the sun, where the passengers sing The Trolley Song before they are killed by explosive decompression.
== Citations ==
fr:Simpson Horror Show X
pl:Treehouse of Horror X
pt:A casa da árvore dos horrores X
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