Plot
A badger takes up residence in Santa's Little Helper's doghouse. After several failed attempts to lure it out (including Homer crawling into the kennel, thinking it is Milhouse but getting attacked by the badger), Homer calls animal control. When he is unable to get through, Marge explains that the phone company has introduced a new area code to Springfield. Half of the town now has a 636 area code, the other has 939. At a town meeting to explain the change, Homer rallies an angry mob to protest the change, noting that the upper class side of town got to keep their area code while the poorer half were forced to switch. Homer proposes that the town split into two halves, and the mob agrees.
Homer is declared mayor of New Springfield after rejecting the Arizona Cardinals and tensions immediately arise between the two towns. Olde Springfield businesses begin discriminating against customers from New Springfield, and condescending to them on the nightly news. Bart and Homer shut off power to Olde Springfield and cut off their water supply in retaliation. When the lack of water reveals gold in the river bed, making the town even richer, an enraged Homer has a wall built between the two towns. However, a lack of supplies and sanitation drives away all of the New Springfield residents, who stream over the wall, leaving the Simpsons alone.
Bitter, Homer attempts to sabotage a concert in Olde Springfield by The Who. He and Bart sneak into The Who's hotel room and convince them to play New Springfield instead. When Olde Springfield realizes that their concert has been stolen, they follow the sound of the music to the wall, where The Who are playing for an audience of The Simpsons. A riot begins to break out as the two sides of town begin hurling flaming garbage at each other. The members of The Who hear about the area code problem and suggest that the townspeople get speed dial to resolve their differences. Pete Townshend's opening riff from "Won't Get Fooled Again" crumbles the wall, and the citizens of Springfield reunite and dance to the music. Meanwhile the badger leads an animal invasion of the town to "get 'em while they're dancing".
Read more about this topic: A Tale Of Two Springfields
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)