So I've been sitting through this episode where the Youtuber describes why Mobile Homer is worse than Co-Dependence Day, and it made me realize that there is a distinct, simple difference between old Simpsons and shitty Simpsons, and that difference is the old Simpsons episodes are about writing stupidity whereas the shitty episodes are about stupid writing.
I decided to rewatch Mobile Homer for myself and I found that there's a seeming lack of focus in the writing, and the biggest indicator of this lack of focus comes at the halfway point where the episode stops being about saving money for Homer's untimely demise and it becomes about the stupid RV driving a wedge between Homer and Marge. Bart even says that the whole situation
started with the RV, which is untrue. It feels like two incomplete scripts mashed together to make two thirds of a full script, with the ending being this confused "stop caring about money, be a wasteful Chinese bug person instead lmao YOLO!" This is after Homer's spiteful spending nearly got his family killed in a near-fatal car crash, if anything it should end with Homer coming down to Earth regretfully reflecting on his selfish actions, rather than Marge getting drunk and caving to Homer's spending. The learn-nothing ending really just underlines how "nothing matters" this episode really is, like a college professor getting tenure and becoming a raging alcoholic immediately after.
This episode doesn't read nor feel like a well rounded episode, it feels like a car put together with scraps from different cars that somehow starts and runs.
This touches back on something I've been noticing over and over any time I think about or watch anything Simpsons related, and remains to be the ongoing theme with zombie Simpsons, and it's a simple lack of focus where the narrative fails to unfold in a natural way.
Compare Mobile Homer with King-Size Homer. They both carry the same basic formula, Homer's selfish irresponsibility nearly costs people their lives. In King-Size Homer, the episode structure is straight forward and maintains the same motivation, and that's Homer wants to get out of coming to the office and work from home, but he can only do that by becoming legally handicapped and intentionally gains weight until he accomplishes his goal, however Homer's motivation is out of laziness and irresponsibility and he leaves his house during work hours only to come back to find that there's a nuclear explosion imminent, at which point he has to hijack an ice cream truck to race to the nuclear power plant to perform a manual shut down before the explosion occurs. Homer fails to reach the shut off switch, but he falls into a man hole just after the cover blew off of the tank that's bound to explode, causing his obese body to plug the hole and save the town.
King-Size Homer is the perfect Simpson's episode, it stays focused & everything comes full circle. When the consequences of Homer's choices emerge, Homer answers a call to action to save the day in a way only he can, he can't contact anyone to solve the problem for him and he even solves it by failing upwards where his key character flaws become instrumental in saving the town. But more than that, Homer realizes he fucked up and backs out of his terrible decisions of his own accord.
Then there's Mobile Homer, where Homer's so incompetent & unreliable at anything that he ends up nearly killing himself just by cleaning out the garage. As an aside, I've noticed from comparing these two episodes that Homer is written to be profoundly dumber in zombie Simpsons than in any of the golden age Simpsons episodes. The only character who outcompetes Homer in the Darwin Olympics is Ralph Wiggum. Homer is tantamount to an adult toddler, and his adolescent kids save him from nearly dying. The first act of the episode revolves around Homer being a walking disaster of elephantine proportions where he's getting injured in the most contrived ways imaginable, like suddenly getting his head trapped in a window. Marge starts penny pinching to save money for Homer's inevitable demise and Homer gets fed up with it and decides to make an impulse purchase to spite Marge. This is where the gears shift to a totally different tone where Homer acts radically different from before, in which he bought the RV to spite Marge and they end up in a bitter rivalry. It gets so bad that Bart and Lisa decide to return the RV themselves in an attempt to reconcile their parents' marriage. This leads to a car chase in which Marge and Homer are forced to make up through an emergency situation, which shifts gears to a third tone where Homer and Marge act as though they never had a conflict and Homer stops acting like a retard. Bart and Lisa can't drive, they end up on a highway, they go flying off an incomplete truck ramp and land on the barge of a Turkish supply ship. Marge has to bribe the captain with cheap soup cans (that she bought in bulk and left in the trunk of her car) to get the Turk to dock the ship so they can get their kids back. The episode ends in just about the laziest way you could imagine, with a party on the ship, Marge is drugged by the Turks and caves to Homer's reckless behavior, the RV is destroyed and dropped into the ocean, the end.
Homer is the worst of all worlds in Mobile Homer. Homer can only be sympathetic when he's a hapless human pin cushion, and whenever he's an active agent in his own life he becomes a raging, spiteful asshole who wages a power struggle against his wife for the crime of being concerned about his health. Homer isn't just flawed, he wildly swings between different personalities from story act to story act.
What's more is the inciting incident of the episode is never addressed again after Homer buys the RV, which is that Homer is accident prone to the point he could die in a freak accident at any time. Then the episode becomes about a power struggle between Homer and Marge, with the subject never returning to Homer being a klutz. In the end, all the concerns the episode raises are hand waived away with what amounts to a "whatever."
You could take the first act of Mobile Homer and make into a decent episode, all you'd have to do is center it on Homer's clumsiness and resolve some emergency situation by forcing Homer to become less of a klutz, or for him to solve the problem by leaning into his lack of coordination, like how Homer's obesity in King-Size Homer was both the cause of the emergency and the resolution to it.
But as I've said, the writing is no longer about stupidity, the stupidity is in the writing.
