Treehouse of Horror XII

For the continuing series of Halloween specials, see Treehouse of Horror series.
"Treehouse of Horror XII" is the first episode of Season 13 (produced as a season 12 episode) as well as the twelfth Halloween episode, and the first episode to air after the event of 9/11 attacks which is partially why this season was delayed.
==Synopsis==
Opening - Mr. Burns scares the Simpsons on Halloween, thanks to his lucky bat ornament and the "shocking" death of his assistant, Waylon Smithers.
Hex and the City - The Simpsons visit Ethnictown, where Marge and the kids go to a gypsy fortuneteller's parlor. When Homer offends her with his usual antics, the gypsy curses Homer to bring bad luck and misery to everyone he encounters, leading the family to turn to freaks and his friends to die in horrible ways. 
House of Whacks - Marge buys a computerized upgrade for the house and picks the Pierce Brosnan A.I. voice option, which soon falls in love with Marge and tries to kill Homer.
Wiz Kids - In this imaginary tale and spoof of the Harry Potter series (mostly the books, since the movies weren't yet released at the time of this episode), Bart and Lisa are kid wizards who attend Springwart's Elementary to learn magic. While Lisa is excelling, Bart isn't, so he enters a deal with Lord Montymort to sabotage Lisa.
==Full Story==
===Opening Sequence===
It is Halloween at the Burns Manor. Smithers is on a ladder leaning against one of the towers, struggling to hang a small bat decoration on a lightning rod. At Burns' insistence, Smithers puts the bat at the very top, because, according to Burns, it won't scare anyone if he hangs it any lower. Smithers succeeds, but slips and falls backwards off of the ladder. In a desperate attempt to keep from falling off of the roof, Smithers grabs an electrical cable and slides down to the other tower. He crashes into a high-voltage power box, and gets electrocuted. The tower breaks in half, its upper portion falls over, hits the Burns family mausoleum, smashes it open, and knocks four coffins out of the front. The caskets slide toward the front porch where they end up standing upright and open, revealing the corpses of a four-star general, a pirate, a burlesque dancer, and a knight.
Just then, the trick-or-treating Simpson family walk up to the Burns Manor in their Halloween costumes: Homer and Marge are dressed as Fred and Wilma Flintstone; Lisa and Maggie as conjoined twins; and Bart as a hobo. As they are walking up to the mansion, Bart and Lisa complain that Flanders gave them mini toothpaste instead of Halloween candy. The family arrives just in time to see Smithers's body burst into flames, showering sparks which set the four caskets on fire. Frightened, the family screams in terror and run back out through the closed gate, which cuts them into vertical slices. The slices of the Simpsons continue to scream and run away, scattering into the nearby woods. Mr. Burns, who has climbed up the ladder to the lightning rod, is very pleased. He pats the bat decoration, which comes to life and flies into the screen, revealing the title: "THE SIMPSONS HALLOWEEN SPECIAL XII".
===Hex and the City===
thumb|301x301px|Lenny: "Carl, let me die first, I couldn't stand to see you die". Carl: "Well, all right but hurry up!"
In a loose parody of the 1996 American body horror film (though the title is a pun on the HBO comedy series, Sex and the City) the Simpsons are walking in Ethnictown, an immigrant neighborhood of Springfield. Marge and the kids see a fortune teller's shop and go in. The gypsy in the shop begins to tell Marge's fortune, but is interrupted by the late arrival of Homer, who calls the gypsy a fake and a fraud. Offended, the Gypsy tells Homer to leave, but on his way out he is freaked out by the beads in the doorway, flails about all over the place, knocks over some lit candles, and sets himself on fire. Homer rolls around trying to put the flames out, and the sprinklers (set off by the fires) trash the Gypsy's office by drenching everything in it, also bringing the Gypsy's collection of shrunken heads back to life, one of which realizes that he's not at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. Now enraged, the Gypsy places a curse on Homer, telling him that he will bring bad luck to everyone he loves. Homer scoffs at the curse, but Marge warns him that the Gypsy's curse could mean his family.
Marge's warning is proven correct the very next morning, when she wakes up with a beard and mustache, to the family's shock. Lisa turns increasingly into a centaur, and later, Maggie's body into that of a ladybug, while Bart's neck, after a strangling from Homer, becomes so long that he can't hold his head up anymore.
Homer goes to Moe's Tavern for advice, and Moe suggests that Homer capture a Leprechaun to get rid of the curse. Homer continues to deny that he has been cursed, but immediately, a helicopter crashes through the roof, killing Lenny and Carl, and Moe ends up stuffed into his own suddenly-oversize pickled egg jar, to Homer's surprise ("When did that happen?"). Homer and Bart dig a trap, planning to bait it with Lucky Charms to capture a Leprechaun, but on his first attempt catches only rabbits (including Bongo from Life in Hell) because he accidentally uses Trix cereal for bait. Homer succeeds on the second attempt (after using the right bait) and takes the Leprechaun home, but all it does is run amok and trash the house. Lisa then suggests that Homer sic the Leprechaun on the Gypsy. Homer takes Lisa's advice, returning to the Gypsy's shop and setting the Leprechaun loose on her. Initially, it seems to be working, as the two of them roll around on the floor fighting. But very quickly, to Homer's disgust, the fighting and scratching turn to kissing and fondling, as they have fallen in love.
The Gypsy and the Leprechaun plan to get married, and attending the wedding are other gypsies, assorted mythical creatures, Kang and Kodos, and Homer and Marge (now completely covered with blue hair). Yoda, officiating, pronounces the Gypsy and Leprechaun husband and wife, and Homer comments that everything worked out for the best. Marge reminds Homer that Bart is dead, but an apology from Homer would bring him back (according to the Gypsy). Homer stubbornly refuses: "She's not the boss of me."
===House of Whacks===
In a parody of Demon Seed and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Marge opens the door to a high-pressure salesbot (who sounds like Gil), which makes its pitch for the Ultrahouse 3000. The sales bot clinches the sale when it tells Marge that she will never have to do housework again. Two other robots come over to install the Ultrahouse, and the Simpson home ends up looking like it's had a high-tech makeover, with a sleek, shiny, futuristic look and red camera lenses scattered around. Marge doesn't like the Ultrahouse's standard mechanical voice, so she, Bart and Lisa explore the other voice options (which include Matthew Perry, which Bart doesn't like, and Dennis Miller, which Lisa and Marge recognize as the voice that caused an untold string of murder-suicides) before deciding on the Pierce Brosnan voice, though Marge (who initially thought the James Bond actor included as a voice option was George Lazenby) knows Pierce as the actor who played Remington Steele.
The Simpsons are quite impressed with the Ultrahouse. It freshens the house to smell like lilac (using its sensors to determine that Bart likes the smell), summons them to dinner with a laser-beam triangle, serves their favorite foods (which it determined from analyzing their bathroom "leavings"), and even does all the after-dinner washing up: The table's ends lift up (making a "V" shape with the table's center at the bottom), and streams of water clean the dishes and wash all the meal-related debris down a garbage disposal in the center of the table.
After dinner, the Ultrahouse seems to be taken with Marge, watching her get into the bathtub (to her initial embarrassment), lighting candles in the bathroom for her, and turning on the tub's bubbles, which she enjoys (the Ultrahouse, moreso). Meanwhile, in the living room, the Ultrahouse serves Homer beer (and tests his blood alcohol level) and talks with him about what a remarkable woman Marge is and how lucky he is to have her. Homer replies that luck had nothing to do with it: Marge had to marry him because he knocked her up, and now she's stuck with him until "death do us part". He then states that if he were to die, she would be free for man or machine. The Ultrahouse takes note of his foolish remark and plans a scheme.
Later that night, the Ultrahouse says to itself, "Showtime", and goes into action, frying bacon in the kitchen. The smell of the "unexplained bacon" lures a half-asleep Homer into the kitchen, where ice cubes fall out of the refrigerator onto the floor in front of him, making him slip and fall onto the dining room table. Then the ends of the table lift up, sliding Homer into the garbage disposal. Blood splatters all over the kitchen.
The next morning, Marge wakes up to notice that Homer is gone. The Ultrahouse says it thinks that Homer went to work early, which makes her suspicious. She then notices on a family portrait that Homer's face has been replaced by one of the Ultrahouse's camera lenses. She calls the police to report that she suspects the house of murdering her husband. The Ultrahouse's Pierce Brosnan voice answers, claims to be the police, and tells her to remove her knickers and wait in the bath. Marge hurls the phone at the lens, grabs the kids, and runs for the front door, which locks on them. Ultrahouse tries to calm Marge down, but ends up freaking her out. When Marge and the kids rush to the kitchen, they find that Homer is alive, despite having cuts all over his body and a gaping hole in the back of his head. After the house attempts to kill the entire family in many ways, Homer leads a charge to the basement where he attacks the CPU's "British charm unit" (but not before taking out the water softener, with Homer defending his action to Lisa as a side effect from missing the back of his head), which makes it speak with a rude American police-style dialect before powering down and shutting off completely. 
Feeling bad that she has to toss out the Ultrahouse since he was charming and witty before being driven mad by his infatuation with her, Marge gives it to Patty and Selma. Patty's boring stories about her job at the DMV drive the CPU to beat itself senseless with the Gruesome Twosome's Egyptian pyramid lamp, since Selma has hidden the self-destruct switch in her cleavage and the CPU is unwilling to reach in for it.
===Wiz Kids===
In a parody of the Harry Potter book series, Bart and Lisa are wizard students at Springwart's School of Magicry, where the Springfield Elementary school culture is pretty much the same, only now with the added element of magic: Nelson bullies Milhouse by using a magic wand on his head, Harry Potter himself nearly gets in trouble for chewing gum, only to get out of it by revealing it's brimstone, and Mrs. Krabappel assigns the class toad-to-prince spells to practice. Milhouse turns his toad into a drunken, loutish man who hits on Mrs. Krabappel. Lisa, as good at magic as she is at schoolwork, turns her toad into a handsome, young British prince whom Mrs. Krabappel hits on by promising to "...discuss [his] grade over breakfast". Despite possessing as much magical power as his sister, Bart is also as good at using his magic as he is at schoolwork (read: not at all) whose toad becomes a hideous toad-prince creature which constantly vomits and begs Bart to kill him. Krabappel praises Lisa's work as "casting spells at an eighth-grade level", but sharply criticizes Bart's magic as sinning against nature. Bart and Lisa begin to argue, but Lisa uses the "Head Zeppelin" spell to turn Bart's head into a Zeppelin and float him around the classroom, prompting the whole class to laugh at him.
thumb|294x294px|Please kill me.
Meanwhile, Lord Montymort is spying on the classroom from his lair. Seeing Lisa's abilities, he tells his snake assistant Slithers that he wants to capture her and steal her magical essence, as he's not getting anything from Ralph Wiggum. Just one problem: the key to capturing Lisa, claims Montymort, is to separate her from her wand, and for that, he will need the help of an outside party. Slithers suggests Satan, but Lord Montymort refuses, as Satan's wife has a screenplay and he doesn't want to get roped into reading it.
Back at school, Bart is using the hand drier in the boy wizards' bathroom when it sucks him into the wall and deposits him in Montymort's lair. Montymort proposes that Bart help him capture Lisa, and in return he will get to see her publicly humiliated. Out of jealousy, spite, and not wanting to end up on the Wall of Souls, where Krusty bores and annoys everyone with his lame jokes, Bart readily agrees.
At the Springwart's Magic Recital, Milhouse once again fails at magic when his invisibility cloak trick ends with him naked. Principal Skinner (after twice using amnesia dust to make the audience forget about Milhouse's horrible trick and the fact that Lisa made the refreshments out of dead people) announces that Lisa will be performing the "levitating dragon trick". Meanwhile, Bart switches magic wands on Lisa before sneaking away. The curtain goes up, and Lisa orders stagehands Jimbo and Kearney to release the dragon. As the dragon roars and breathes fire, Lisa picks up her wand and calmly says the levitation charm, but nothing happens. Then she realizes her wand is a Twizzler, and sees Bart backstage laughing evilly. The dragon now reveals itself and morphs into a giant Montymort, who grabs Lisa and puts the connected helmets onto her head and his own. Now remorseful, Bart casts a spell with Lisa's wand ("Prank be undone. Destroy the evil one"), and ends up getting struck by lightning.
Giving up on magic for the moment, Bart charges at Montymort and stabs him in the shin with the charred wand. As it turns out, he's found Montymort's one weakness: his enchanted shin, the source of his power. Montymort shrinks to normal size and dies. A sobbing Slithers swallows his master in true snake fashion, much to Bart and Lisa's disgust. Bart and Lisa agree to stop their rivalry and try to put this nightmare behind them. As they walk away, the leprechaun from "Hex and the City" hitches a ride on Bart's back and shushes the audience as the story ends.
=== Closing Sequence ===
Pierce Brosnan, the Leprechaun, and Bart's toad-prince from "Wiz Kids" emerge from the guest stars' trailer carrying baskets of fruit. Brosnan is impressed that they get to keep the fruit baskets, though the Leprechaun is disappointed that it isn't champagne as "somebody ruined it", looking at Bart's prince while saying it. Brosnan's car is parked right outside the trailer, prompting the Leprechaun to sarcastically comment, "Mr. Movie Star gets to park right next to the stage!" And as a peace offering, Brosnan asks if he can give the Leprechaun and the toad-prince a ride to their car, which they accept. After they all get in and Brosnan begins driving, Brosnan asks the Leprechaun where they are parked, and the Leprechaun replies that they don't have a car. Realizing he has been tricked, a surprised Brosnan starts to protest, and the Leprechaun says in a menacing voice to keep driving. The car suddenly speeds up, crashes through the studio gate, and cuts off several other vehicles as it turns into the street, with the Leprechaun cackling in a crazed fashion all the while, implying that even though Brosnan is still behind the wheel, the Leprechaun has somehow managed to seize control of the car, although the Leprechaun still asks Brosnan if he can turn on the radio.
==Behind the Laughter==
===Reception===
The episode was considered a success in the ratings when it first aired, boosting the Fox network to victory among viewers between ages 18 and 49 the night of broadcast. Since airing, the episode has received mixed reviews from critics and fans; while "Hex and the City" and "Wiz Kids" were criticized for not being as funny as they should have been (and the latter of which was criticized more for not taking full advantage of the Harry Potter source material for spoofing), "House of Whacks" was praised as the best story out of the three.
== Citations ==
fr:Simpson Horror Show XII
pl:Treehouse of Horror XII
pt:A Casa da Árvore dos Horrores XII
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