Breaking Bad: Springfield
Seymour Skinner has fallen on some hard times.
He’s only a few years away from retirement, but he still finds himself devoted to caring for his dear old mother, now completely within the clutches of senility. He knows she’ll soon need to be put into a nursing home, but unless he’s content with letting her rot in a state facility, he’ll need to shell out some serious coin to get her a spot somewhere nice. Over the years, Seymour has managed to provide for himself and his mother on the salary of a public school administrator, plus the occasional cheque from Uncle Sam on account of his service days. Now, however, he’s looking down the barrel of a financial nightmare.
Spending so much time caring for his mother, Seymour hasn’t paid too much attention to his own little nagging health concerns, like that persisting cough. However, when the coughing produces blood one morning, Seymour decides to bite the bullet and get a physical.
Then, his world is destroyed.
Cancer.
A diagnosis of lung cancer.
He’d smoked what, maybe 6 or 7 cigarettes in his entire life … How could this be?
Maybe Superintendent Chalmers was right. Maybe there was more asbestos in the insulation around his office than any other room in Springfield elementary. And Seymour was the one who had decided not to have it removed because it would take money away from the school’s cafeteria budget. Cruel irony.
He was told by the doctors that he had maybe had a year to live with treatment.
Three months without.
Visibly dejected, Seymour tries as best he can to go about his day-to-day life while attempting to conceive of some plan that could miraculously fix everything. At the Laundromat, he finds himself waiting in front of the dryer next to an off-duty Chief Wiggum.
Learning of his state of desperation, Wiggum decides to take Seymour’s mind off of things, if only for a little while. He suggests that Seymour join him for a ride-a-long in the squad car. Willing to take the risk of dying via stray bullet over cancer, Seymour agrees and that very weekend the two unlikely friends hit the streets of Springfield. As Wiggum explains, most of his work is routine. Traffic stops. Drunk and disorderlies. Cat-throwings.
Lately though, Wiggum says he’s been getting calls about violent breaking and enterings, gaunt bodies washing up in the ravine and an overall spike in drug trafficking. His theory? Meth had found its way to their fair city.
Attentive but mostly uninterested, Seymour listens to Wiggum, half convinced that the chief is exaggerating for the sake of drama. As if to prove the theory wrong, the police radio squaks at that very moment, calling all cars to respond to shots fired in a remote location out in Springfield’s badlands.
Wiggum tells Seymour to put his seatbelt on. With a flick of a switch, the siren is wailing and suddenly they’re burning red lights en route to the scene.
Just past the constant tire fire, Wiggum hangs a quick left, going off road into the desert-like terrain. In the distance, Seymour can see an old school bus with smoke seemingly coming out of every part of it. As they get closer, he sees a standoff taking place at that very moment. The police are exchanging fire with a long-haired freak sticking out of the driver’s window.
Wiggum tells Seymour to stay in the car. Putting on a Kevlar vest, Wiggum runs/waddles over to the bus, telling the long-haired man to lower his firearm.
In a drug-addled rasp, the man in the bus screams ‘YOU’LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE PIGS!!!’
That voice. Seymour recognizes that voice. Looking closer, he realises that the man is none other than Otto, the school bus driver who had seemingly made the jump in the last couple of months from smoking a little grass to making and pushing crystal out of beat-up old bus.
Pausing to reload his gun, Otto spills his ammunition everywhere. The police use the opportunity to seize upon Otto, pulling him out of the bus and handcuffing him. In the ensuing fracas, no one notices the bus’ rear emergency door swing open, except for Seymour, still seated in the car.
Seymour watches as a young man wearing a gas mask jumps out of the back of the bus, narrowly avoiding the police as he runs off to safety. Before he clears the scene, however, he turns and sees the man still sitting in the police car who is looking right back at him.
Whereas Seymour hadn’t recognized Otto right away, he instantly recognises the boy. Although the gas mask covers his face, it does not conceal his spiky hair …
OK, so yes, The Simpsons have made a couple of Breaking Bad references but how awesome would it be if they did a full episode devoted to spoofing the show? Maybe just a Halloween episode segment? Granted it would be really dark and upsetting but shit, what’s FOX gonna do? Cancel them?
The whole mash-up idea came to me while watching Bob Odenkirk in action as lawyer Saul Goodman. Morally ambiguous and smarmy through and through, Saul is one of the only characters in Breaking Bad who constantly offers comedic relief, even in the most tense of situations. And then it occurred to me: Saul Goodman is the spiritual successor of Simpsons Lawyer Lionel Hutz.
Voiced by the incomparable Phil Hartman, Hutz was one of the greatest reoccurring side characters in the Springfield universe. Not only is Goodman similar Hutz but Odenkirk himself seems to have a lot of the same comedic sensibilities as Hartman. Just like Hartman did so many times on SNL and in his voice work, Odenkirk is great at depicting the absurd straight man.
While the Simpsons played it classy by retiring all of the characters voiced by Hartman following his untimely death, I don’t think it would be crass or shark-jumpy at all to introduce a new Saul Goodman-esque character voiced by Odenkirk who the show could claim is a relative of Hutz.
There’s an episode for you, Simpsons writing staff. Free of charge.
