"I looked at the script in bewilderment," Shearer recalled...

That reminds me of that Pinky & The Brain episode where he decides to melt the polar ice caps and drown the planet and Maurice LaMarche said what the fuck man? Brain isn't supposed to actually kill people. And the writers told him "Yeah, so? Let's get this thing recorded, time's a-wasting."

And? It's already season 9. Series was over at that point.

Harry Shearer wanted to leave at the end of season 3, and has been recording at home since season 4 as a result. He's very happy with the money. Circa season 8 he was making $25m a year from his involvement with the show, on top of his earnings from other work.

Nothing. It's a stupid, cartoony episode of fairly conventional plotting. It turns out the real Skinner was the guy they had all along because the other guy, through no fault of his own, was an asshole nobody liked. So they got rid of him at the end and kept Armin Tamzarian, the basically decent guy who didn't want his old sergeant's mother to grieve for her MIA presumed-dead son and lived a fairly awful home life with her as a result. Real Skinner never even tried to come back so that's fine, there's nothing unresolved and nobody needs to go on about how Skinner wasn't the guy he always claimed to be (and Agnes Skinner claimed he was).

For all the outlandish framing, it's still just a "you don't choose your friends, they choose you" moral with a plot that was, at one time, not common but certainly occurring. People do just come back from war and settle with their dead buddies' families, though usually not by pretending to be the dead guy. In earlier centuries it was even relatively common for people to just set up as someone else a few streets away from where they'd previously lived - not even after a war, just because it was easier than divorce or bankruptcy or whatever and nobody was likely to pursue them.

But there's nothing particularly wrong with the episode because Armin/Skinner is still the same guy we've always known, we just have a little extra backstory for him.

Oakley and Weinstein thought so anyway, which is why they overdid it with meta episodes.

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The Skinner thing was nowhere close to being as bad as the Fat Tony thing.

Armin was still in Vietnam and his actions and interaction as 'Skinner' were more real to the townsfolk than those of the actual Seymour.
There was actual emotion involved between the character in wanting him back.

>and has been recording at home since season 4 as a result
Actually it was Season 15 and he says he doesn't read the scripts anymore, just his own characters' dialog. And Al Jean did invite him to write an episode to prove he was smarter than the writers, it just resulted in an average HD season script.

Was he in Vietnam? That'd make him too old now right? Are you sure he wasn;t in the gulf war, and that Grandpa was in Korea instead of WW2?

Of the dozens of problems, the most petty, and thus most powerful, is that we're supposed to give a fuck about his past in future episode.
>oh I ruined mom's figure skating dreams by kicking in the womb
Wasn't you, retard, so I have no emotional connection to this.
>oh mom hid my acceptance letter to Ohio State
Wasn't you, retard. The other fag liked marching bands, I guess, not you.

And so on and so on any time the desperate writing try to make an episode about his history.

Your two examples are the problem, not Armin. The writers of later episodes simply didn't care.

>Are you sure he wasn;t in the gulf war, and that Grandpa was in Korea instead of WW2?

even those wars are too long ago now to really work

So what would they be veterans of respectively now? Vietnam and the war on Terror?

You're partially right, but the earlier writers are just as complicit for making a hackneyed reveal in the first place.

So doing the math, if the Show was rebooted today, Skinner would be a vet of the 2003 Iraq War, and Grandpa would be a vet of...uh...what was America doing in the late 70s earlier 80s war wise?
Lebanon I guess?

Somalia?

Just use Vietnam.

Mr. Burns is still a World War II vet.

Regardless of any opinion on this episode, I do not value Harry Shearer's opinions on these things.

Generally you should not be taking opinions from voice actors.

>everything we've worked to build over the past 7-8 years
Why is he talking like The Simpsons had strict continuity and was weaving some intricate story?

If they'd "built up" anything by that time, it was a gag show where the audience understood that if something was funny, it was allowed. If this episode had more memorable jokes, I bet no one would've cared about the kinda-sorta-retcon.

It greatly comprises character for a single joke that isn't really that funny.

Performers know their characters better than anyone.