YMMV / The Simpsons S9 E2 "The Principal and the Pauper"

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The revelation that a character's whole backstory was a lie was seen by fans as being very out-of-place in the series, especially one that never particularly cared about continuity.
• Critical Backlash: "The Principal and the Pauper" spent well over a decade as the popular episode to point to when declaring "this is when the show stopped being good", which eventually caused protests against that idea for a range of reasons. This includes the fact that the most common criticism is aimed at the "Skinner is Tamzarian" reveal rather than anything to do with the actual episode's quality, and perhaps a bit of a frustration with the fact that declaring an early Season 9 episode as the cut off point turns potential fans away from plenty of good later episodes. "The Principal and the Pauper" even has its defenders who state that, while the Skinner twist perhaps isn't sustainable for a Status Quo Is God show, the way the reveal itself was handled in this specific episode was good.
• Crosses the Line Twice: As mean-spirited as the ending scene is, the townspeople saluting the real Skinner's "heroism" and the band playing "Stars and Stripes Forever" are good for a laugh.
• Designated Hero: We're supposed to side with Agnes Skinner missing the company of Armin Tamzarian because he was like a son to her but if anything, she seems to only like her fake son because he's as good as a slave to her compared to her real son who didn't bow to her every whim like she was used to.
• Designated Villain: The real Seymour. He never did anything wrong, and yet the episode treats him as an antagonist. He even insists that he's a hero when he is expelled from Springfield. Lampshaded by Springfielders, who are clearly uncomfortable when he points out that Armin!Seymour has no right to come take over his life again. They run him out of town on the rails anyway. Agnes' last words to him are similarly amiable, despite the messed-up situation.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: An innocent man is expelled from his hometown just because he has an impostor. Not only that, a law is made ensuring said impostor remains an impostor for the rest of his life.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Most fans did not take this new take on Skinner's backstory well and most have refused to acknowledge it since. The Show has as well, having only made one reference to it ever since, and that was a Discontinuity Nod at that.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: If there's any audience that is fond of this episode, it's Armenians due to the strong implication that Skinner is Armenian American as Armin Tamzarian is an Armenian name. The first name Armin/Armen (anglicization differs on dialect) being practically the Armenian version of A Dog Named "Dog" and the last name ending with "ian" following Armenian surname conventions. While it's not as explicit as Moe outright saying he's "half-monster, half-Armenian", a number of Armenians, regardless of their problems with the episode as with all others, will still have Watched It for the Representation however implied it may be.
• Heartwarming Moments: Edna was still willing to be together with Armin despite him being an imposter since he was still the man she fell in love with and had the most genuine reason to wanting him to come back to Springfield compared to his mother who just wanted a son that bent to her every whim.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: When The Simpsons revealed a major character to be an impostor in 1997, fans despised it. When Mad Men did the same thing in 2008, it was received more favorably. Of course, it helped that Mad Men had been dropping hints about that plot point from its earliest episodes and allowed the story to come to fruition at the end of its first season, as opposed to it suddenly being revealed after it had been on the air for nearly a decade.
• Misblamed: Many people blame Mike Scully for this episode (he became showrunner starting this season and is often cited as sending the show into its Audience-Alienating Era) since this did air when Scully first became showrunner in Season 9. However, he was not yet showrunner at the time — this episode was held over from the previous season, which was run by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein. Nor did Scully, or even Oakley and Weinstein for that matter, personally write or direct it (Ken Keeler and Steven Dean Moore respectively did). When watched alongside other Season 8 episodes like "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show" and "Homer's Enemy" (the second also seen as among the show's most controversial episodes), it becomes more apparent that this was written to have the same deconstructive/meta approach to the series as those episodes.
• So Okay, It's Average: The episode itself isn't all that terrible. It has a lot of the hallmarks of the Golden Age Simpsons: some decent Simpsons jokes, a guest celebrity who isn't just playing himself, and an interesting plot. But for many, the episode signaled the show was beginning to fall off a cliff, with many of its flaws being even more pronounced in the later seasons.
• Spiritual Successor: To "Lisa the Iconoclast", where an esteemed Springfielder's past is exposed as fraudulent, but in the end, Springfield decides to preserve the lie rather than deal with the truth.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Some fans have theorized that the plot would have worked better if it centered on a character without such a well-established backstory, e.g. Luigi the Italian cook. In fact, it's not all that far off from "Lisa the Iconoclast", which revealed that Jebediah Springfield's entire mythology was made up; the difference being that it was much easier to swallow with a character we didn't personally know.
  • The twist could have even worked for a more prominent character who had an established shady history, like Mr. Burns or Moe.
  • Armin being a rebel punk before becoming Skinner makes no sense and has no purpose other than some cheap jokes about Skinner saying things he would never say (e.g. "Up yours, children!"). The implication is that it was life with Agnes that made him his current self, but shouldn't the real Seymour Skinner also be more submissive and Skinner-like, then, given that Agnes raised him from birth? And why would Seymour voluntarily surrender to Agnes before Agnes broke his spirit, just to spare her the grief of losing her son? The plot would have made a lot more sense (and probably alienated less the audience) if Armin's personality had been like Seymour's before he went to war. The rather Fridge Horror-laden implication would be that Agnes went with The Masquerade not because she couldn't live without a son, but because she would be winning a slave.
  • The story that inspired this episode was a con man pretending to be a dead heir, in order to inherit the deceased's family wealth. This could easily have been adapted in the form of a newcome stranger who claimed to be the son of a rich character like Mr. Burns (although Season 8's "Burns Baby Burns" preempted this), Krusty, Fat Tony or Kent Brockman; or someone claiming to be father of a character, who had been implied to have died but was not confirmed or revealed how, like the father of Marge or of Skinner himself.
  • Matt Groening himself said that he thought the episode would have worked much better as a Treehouse of Horror story than a canon episode.
  • The Youtube channel "Nerdstalgic" mentions in this video review of the episode, that the story does contain one small interesting element that could have been explored further: The reveal that Skinner was a troublemaking rebel when he was younger just like how Bart is. Unfortunately, the episode itself hardly touches on this.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: While the episode is considered infamous among fans of the show, Martin Sheen's performance as the real Seymour Skinner is generally acclaimed, both in his relationship with Skinner in flashbacks and his overly serious, noble and sincere personality clashing with the madness of Springfield.
• The Woobie: The real Seymour, especially at the end. The man gave much of his lifetime for his country,^note He remained a POW in Vietnam from the 1960s up until recently In-Universe (release date of the episode being 1997), which enabled Armin to stand in for him for so long. but he's kicked out of his hometown in the most humiliating way possible by the collective efforts of everybody in it, led by his own mother, who loathes him because he doesn't bend to her every whim.

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