【The Farmer’s Bride Requires Care! Part 2: The Organic Grand Strategy (2021)】

The The Farmer’s Bride Requires Care! Part 2: The Organic Grand Strategy (2021)sun-blocking shield. The accidental gunshot. Smithers getting fired. Tito MFing Puente.

The two-part "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" episode of The Simpsonsis enshrined among the series' most remembered. But as writer Josh Weinstein, also a former showrunner, now reveals, things could have gone very differently.

Weinstein shared a photo of the original pitch (which he penned with Bill Oakley) for the episodes bridging together Seasons 6 and 7 of The Simpsons. It's dated "6-3-94" and it paints a much-changed picture of what the episode could have been.

"This is very rough," the pitch begins. "The story has to basically be about Mr. Burns making six mortal enemies. Obviously Homer, maybe Bart, and possibly other major characters like, Apu, Barney, etc. Perhaps he fires Smithers."

So far, so accurate. But once the pitch gets to the motivation for having Springfield Nuclear Power Plant owner Monty Burns shot, the story takes a very grounded approach. Remember, in the actual episodes, Burns builds a many-stories-high sun shield to block out all the light, thus forcing Springfieldians to depend entirely on nuclear power for all their needs.

"Usually the way these things happen is there is some big business deal brewing," the earlier version goes. "We thought it could be a big real estate thing where Burns is going to buy this block of downtown area and demolish it to build some crazy Burns new thing, and it includes Moe's Bar, and maybe the Kwik-E-Mart and maybe Patty and Selma's apartment."

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The sun blocking idea of course turned out to be much more useful for establishing motives, since it angered the whole of Springfield. It was also just one of those didn't-see-it-coming Simpsonstwists that made this era of the show so delightful.

Mr. Burns faithful assistant Smithers still takes issue with the evil plan and gets fired in Weinstein and Oakley's original take. And the actual episode did riff on different murder mystery tropes, as the pitch also suggests. But one thing it never mentions: The actual shooter. Maggie's name never comes up once.

"[In] the end we have to decide a character we're willing to sacrifice. It could be Barney, who has been driven to madness by the imminent destruction of Moe's bar," the pitch goes.

The writers then ponder having Barney sent to jail for a short period of time, for attempted murder (never happened). They also consider Marge's sisters, Patty and Selma, suggesting the latter may be having an affair with Burns.

The end isn't clearly plotted out, but the pitch does make one thing clear: "[It] would really be satisfying if it were not some cheap-out guy like Burns' brother who suddenly appeared at the last minute."

The final episodes delivered. Maggie shot Mr. Burns, by accident, while he was attempting to literally steal candy from a baby. There were even clues peppered throughout, echoing one of the original pitch's goals.

"If I was a kid I'd really like it if there were actually clues. If there really was a puzzle that we could solve. Little things that point to the actual person so people could be thinking about it all summer."

That's exactly what happened. In the time between Parts 1 and 2, The Simpsonsteam staged a media blitz, complete with a contest, that focused on a singular purpose: Keep everyone asking "Who shot Mr. Burns?"

(Note: "Collect calls" were something people used to do to place calls on a payphone -- a public phone kiosk -- when they didn't have the coinage necessary to pay for the call themselves. Calling someone collect meant the recipient would pay for it on their next bill, provided they accepted the call. This explanation is mostly a joke, but I have to sadly admit that some of you just might not know about public phone services.)

Weinstein also mentions the possibility of there being a future book on "this stuff." Oh please let it be true.

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