TL;DR: The Simpsons’ latest episode, The Day of the Jack-Up, is a surprisingly sharp, funny, and well-crafted parody of M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap. It blends modern anxieties, smart satire, and classic Bart Simpson chaos into one of the strongest late-era episodes in years. If you like your Springfield with a side of thriller energy, this is your ticket — and unlike the Kneesock Dolls show, you don’t need to fight a bot to watch it.
The Simpsons Season 37
The Simpsons Season 37 just did something I didn’t have on my 2025 pop-culture bingo card: it dropped a full-episode parody of one of M. Night Shyamalan’s most underrated thrillers, and it’s good. Not good in the polite, condescending way we sometimes talk about late-era Simpsons episodes, but genuinely clever, snappy, and self-aware in a way that reminded me why I once believed this show could solve all of humanity’s problems if we just listened closely enough.
The episode is called The Day of the Jack-Up, a title so proudly Shyamalan-coded it practically winks at you before the cold open starts, and the whole thing functions as a beat-for-beat riff on Trap — the 2024 thriller that reminded everyone that Shyamalan still knows how to weaponize paranoia like a chef knows garlic. It’s a flex because the episode commits. This isn’t a blink-and-you-miss-it nod or a B-plot wink. It’s a full-episode homage, structured around the same spiraling tension and hide-and-seek dread, except instead of Josh Hartnett’s quietly terrifying serial killer, we get Bart Simpson using AI to scalp concert tickets so he can bankroll increasingly unhinged anti-Skinner propaganda. It’s absurd. It’s smart. It’s The Simpsons doing that thing where the satire, the jokes, the cinephile references, and the cultural jabs all land in the same frame.
The setup works because it’s rooted in a very 2025 kind of chaos: ticket scalping, resale bots, AI-enabled grifting, and the collective trauma we all share from trying to get seats for concerts that sell out before the webpage even loads. Lisa wants to see the Kneesock Dolls — a fictional K-pop powerhouse that’s basically BLACKPINK wrapped in bubblegum and missile-grade choreography — performing at The Circulus, a planet-sized concert dome that is a painfully accurate jab at The Sphere in Las Vegas. If there is anything The Simpsons excels at, it’s turning real-world excess into cartoon-level dystopia.
Tickets for the show drop online and vaporize instantly. Not just for Kneesock Dolls but for every event booked at The Circulus, including the ABBA tribute extravaganza The Garden of Sweden, which sends Ned Flanders into a spiral only God and Benny Andersson could soothe. Springfield is outraged. Life, once again, mirrors life. Enter the SeatMiser — a mysterious bot-wielding ticket scalper who has hijacked the entire city’s entertainment ecosystem. Enter, too, the FBI agent called in to hunt him down, played with bone-dry steeliness by Paget Brewster, who deserves her own spinoff immediately.
And then comes the reveal we all secretly expected: the SeatMiser is Bart. Not because he wants money for sneakers or fireworks, but because he’s using it to fund large-scale public trolling campaigns aimed at Principal Skinner. There’s something poetic about Bart treating vandalism like a startup with seed funding. It is the purest essence of the character distilled into a 2025 framework.
Once Bart enters The Circulus for the Kneesock Dolls show, the episode stops flirting with Shyamalan and fully moves in. Everything becomes a direct parody of Trap. The structure, the escape attempts, the point-of-view camera angles, the sense of tightening paranoia — it’s all there. Bart has no idea Homer got tickets from Otto thanks to his own bot reselling scheme, and he definitely doesn’t know the FBI has turned the concert into a sting operation to catch him in the act.
What I loved most is how confidently the episode executes the parody. Previous Shyamalan nods on The Simpsons were scattered bits — a Sixth Sense joke here, a Split gag in a Treehouse segment there. But The Day of the Jack-Up sticks to the Trap template with almost scholarly devotion. Bart’s frantic realization that The Circulus is surrounded. The stolen vendor ID card. The infiltration of the control room. The tension of listening to the FBI radio chatter. The profiler who is two steps ahead of him at every turn. It all syncs up with Trap, filtered through the show’s trademark absurdism.
And speaking of absurdism: the Face ID gag. It is quintessential Simpsons — stupid but smart, crass but perfectly timed. Bart tries to flush his phone to avoid being traced, only for the FBI profiler to recover it and scan the faces of every Springfield Elementary student in attendance. The idea that the FBI would use butt-generated biometrics as the twist ending feels like the exact kind of comedy science the writers’ room has excelled at since the Clinton administration. By the time Bart and Lisa walk out of The Circulus with a giant projected image of Bart mooning the crowd, the episode declares victory. The joke is juvenile, sure, but it’s executed with a precision that only a 37-season-old show could pull off.
Underneath all the jokes, though, The Day of the Jack-Up works because it plays with modern anxieties. Ticket scarcity. AI automation. Resale market greed. Surveillance. The creeping fear that the government has more of your digital life than you’d prefer. And the ongoing truth that The Simpsons still knows how to turn the news into something both ridiculous and recognizable.
This episode also sneaks in some sly commentary about Shyamalan’s place in modern pop culture. Trap was one of his quieter successes — not a comeback story, not a mega-hit, but a tight little thriller that deserved more attention than it got. So seeing The Simpsons give it the full-episode parody treatment almost feels like an acknowledgement from the universe: yeah, you know what, Trap was good. Way better than some people gave it credit for. And if there’s one thing The Simpsons has always been good at, it’s using its enormous cultural power to shine a spotlight on things Hollywood overlooked the first time.
As a lifelong Simpsons fan who has lived through every creative peak, valley, plateau, loop, and reboot this show has thrown at me, I found The Day of the Jack-Up refreshingly sharp. It’s not nostalgia bait. It’s not late-era autopilot. It’s a team of writers enjoying themselves again. It has the right energy — clever, fast, referential, and rooted in actual modern culture rather than yesterday’s leftovers.
Does this mean The Simpsons is back? I don’t believe the show ever left. It just occasionally naps with its eyes open. Episodes like this remind you that even after nearly 40 seasons, there is fuel in the tank — especially when the show’s enormous pop-culture brain decides to lock onto something specific and go all in.
