History Recap / TheSimpsonsS1E11TheCrepesOfWrath

* ComicallyMissingThePoint:
** When Bart returns to Springfield and watches Homer struggle to get a wine bottle open, he quips "My father--what a buffoon" in French... and Homer delightedly brags about how proud he is of his son's linguistic ability. To add to the joke, the French word for "buffoon" is "bouffon", a cognate that even sounds like its English counterpart--but Homer still can't pick up on the insult.
** Also, as the Simpsons say good-bye to Adil, Homer promises to send him the plans he wanted due to them being so close. Despite the fact that Adil's been using him and that doing so would be aiding a spy.

* TheDogBitesBack: After all the abuse he receives from César and Ugolin, Bart eventually gets them arrested.

** Also, Lisa argues with Adil about the worthiness of America, and her behavior is incredibly odd by the standards of her later characterization. Here, she takes a rather conservative pro-American stance, insisting that it is a land of opportunity with promises of equality. Later episodes would emphasize her liberal political values, and one can't help but suspect that nowadays she would likely side with Adil's critiques of capitalism and how the concept of the American dream is unrealistic.

* MoralMyopia: Cesar and Ugolin treat Bart like a slave, then berate him as an ''"ungrateful swine"'' who they've fed and housed, when he tries to eat a single grape from one of the vines.

* FamousNamedForeigner: Adil Hoxha is named after former Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha.

* JustAStupidAccent: While the trope was averted, it was played ''awfully'' straight in the Latin American dub, with all the French substituted with French-accented Spanish. The gendarme couldn't understand Bart because of his accent rather than his speaking a different language. The Quebec French dub, obviously, kept the French and also had the gendarme unable to understand Bart's accent, but there it made more sense, with the gendarme's trouble with Bart's Quebec accent being more realistic.

* GodzillaThreshold: Skinner proposes to Homer and Marge that Bart's behavior has ''"transcended incorrigible"'', and neither suspension or expulsion from Springfield Elementary will make a dent in his behavior. Homer is very receptive to the idea of Bart living in another country for an extended period.

* ComicallyMissingThePoint: When Bart returns to Springfield and watches Homer struggle to get a wine bottle open, he quips "My father--what a buffoon" in French... and Homer delightedly brags about how proud he is of his son's linguistic ability. To add to the joke, the French word for "buffoon" is "bouffon", a cognate that even sounds like its English counterpart--but Homer still can't pick up on the insult.

* ComicallyMissingThePoint: When Bart returns to Springfield and watches Homer struggle to get a wine bottle open, he quips "My father--what a buffoon" in French...and Homer delightedly brags about how proud he is of his son's linguistic ability. To add to the joke, the French word for "buffoon" is "bouffon", a cognate that even sounds like its English counterpart--but Homer still can't pick up on the insult.

* SkewedPriorities: Averted. The police officer treats wine laced with anti-freeze as a serious offense, and he also fulfills his promise to Bart that he'll no longer be mistreated by César and Ugolin.

* KarmaHoudini: Adil gets off scot-free for his crimes of espionage because the CIA and Albanian intelligence do prisoner exchanges. Although, to be fair, he IS a child and more of an AntiVillain than anything else, so possibly {{Justified}}.

* NeverMyFault:
César and Ugolin's interactions make clear they sincerely think they treated Bart fairly and he is just ungrateful. They curse their downfall solely on signing up to the student exchange program in the first place when Bart gets them arrested for their awful treatment.

* NeverMyFault: César and Ugolin's interactions make clear they sincerely think they treated Bart fairly and he is just ungrateful. They curse their downfall solely on signing up to the student exchange program in the first place when Bart gets them arrested for their awful treatment.

Marge makes Bart clean up his room after he paralyzes Homer by leaving his skateboard out near the stairs (causing Homer to fall down the stairs and break his back). While doing so, Bart discovers a cherry bomb, which he flushes down a toilet in the boys' bathroom at school—creating an explosion in the girls' room that drenches Principal Skinner's visiting mother, Agnes. Skinner visits the Simpsons and tells them that a troublemaker like Bart can benefit from the school's foreign exchange program, so Bart goes off to France, where a pair of low-rent winemakers keep Bart as a slave. Meanwhile, the Simpsons host an Albanian boy named Adil, and Homer begins taking a shine to him, but does Adil like Homer, or is he using him to get information on the nuclear plant for his country?

* BrokenRecord: While Homer lies on the floor with a broken back and no one there to help him, he's forced to listen to Bart's Krusty doll say, "I like to play with you!" over and over until the doll's batteries die.

** While driving to the French farm Bart and his chauffeur pass through landscapes which are all references to famous paintings made in France, including works by Claude Monet, Creator/VincentVanGogh, Henri Rousseau and Édouard Manet.

%%* ArsonMurderAndJaywalking: Bart's description of everything César and Ugolin put him through.

Marge makes Bart clean up his room after he cripples Homer by leaving his skateboard out near the stairs. While doing so, Bart discovers a cherry bomb, which he flushes down a toilet in the boys' bathroom at school—creating an explosion in the girls' room that drenches Principal Skinner's visiting mother, Agnes. Skinner visits the Simpsons and tells them that a troublemaker like Bart can benefit from the school's foreign exchange program, so Bart goes off to France, where a pair of low-rent winemakers keep Bart as a slave. Meanwhile, the Simpsons host an Albanian boy named Adil, and Homer begins taking a shine to him, but does Adil like Homer, or is he using him to get information on the nuclear plant for his country?

* BrokenRecord: While Homer lies on the floor with a crippled back and no one there to help him, he's forced to listen to Bart's Krusty doll say, "I like to play with you!" over and over until the doll's batteries die.

* ArsonMurderAndJaywalking: Bart's description of everything César and Ugolin put him through.

* RippedFromTheHeadlines: A somewhat belated example in the bit regarding tainting wine with antifreeze. The plot point is based on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_diethylene_glycol_wine_scandal a real scandal]] from 1985 in which numerous Austrian wine brands were discovered to have been diluting their products with diethylene glycol as far back as 1976, resulting in numerous Austrian and West German consumers suffering liver, kidney, and neuron damage as a result of either long-term exposure from constant drinking or short-term exposure from drinking wine that had been additionally laced with sugar (which prevents the ethanol in wine from counteracting the toxicity of diethylene glycol). The show's staff discuss the incident's effects on the episode in the DVDCommentary.

* BrokenRecord: While Homer lies on the floor with a broken back and no one there to help him, he's forced to listen to Bart's Krusty doll say, "I like to play with you!" over and over until the doll's batteries die.

After Bart gets in trouble for paralyzing Homer by leaving his skateboard out near the stairs and flushing a cherry bomb down the boys' bathroom toilets (and drenching Principal Skinner's visiting mother, Agnes), Principal Skinner visits the Simpson home and tells them that a troublemaker like Bart can benefit from the school's foreign exchange program, so Bart goes off to France, where a pair of low-rent winemakers keep Bart as a slave. Meanwhile, the Simpons host an Albanian boy named Adil, and Homer begins taking a shine to him, but does Adil like Homer or is he using him to get information on the nuclear plant for his country?

* PoliceAreUseless: Averted. The first police officer Bart finds in France can't understand him but does try to at least give him a hand (and offered him a piece of candy). When Bart realizes he can speak French, he tells the cop about how the wine merchants had been abusing him and gets them arrested.

* TeenSuperspy: Adil and his spying activities. Taken UpToEleven with the revelation at the end that the CIA had a pre-teen spy of its own operating on Eastern Europe (that is exchanged for Adil... and the two kids ''know each other'').

* FrenchJerk: César and Ugolin. Oh, so very much.