The Good Morning Burger
S3 E23: Bart’s Friend Falls in Love
The Simpsons, 1989.
“Will Milhouse and I be friends at the end of the day?” Bart asks, chipper and unknowing, his eyes aglow with the innocence of a boy who has yet to be emotionally dropkicked by puberty. The answer: No. The cause: A girl. The fallout: Biblical.
Enter Samantha Stankey, freshly relocated from Phoenix (home security dad, childhood trauma imminent), who ignites in Milhouse Van Houten a hormonal inferno so intense it leads to unsupervised hand-holding and tongue wrestling in a treehouse, a treehouse that once stood as the sovereign territory of Bart and Bart alone. Now it is a den of cootie-laden sin, and Bart, reduced to third wheel and jilted prince, wanders Springfield in search of new companionship. Martin is available. Of course Martin is available.
Meanwhile, Homer embarks on a journey of the flesh. Not transformation of the flesh, but an enhancement of the mind in lieu of bodily improvement. A subliminal weight-loss tape mix-up leaves him not thinner but sesquipedalian. He demands “the metal dealie used to dig food,” and when reminded it's called a spoon, he weeps, partly from hunger, partly from having momentarily understood his own mortality.
And then, in the middle of it all, emerges The Good Morning Burger. Let us pause.
“We take 18 ounces of sizzling ground beef and soak it in rich creamery butter. Then we top it off with bacon, ham, and a fried egg.”
This is not a breakfast sandwich. This is a Freudian metaphor. It is lust, self-destruction, and American exceptionalism served between two sesame-seed buns. It is what Homer is and what Bart fears to become. It is Milhouse’s future, if heartbreak doesn’t kill him first.
Back in matters of the heart: Bart, sensing that the cosmic scales are off-balance, engages in an act of supreme treachery. He tattles. He doxxes the kissing. Samantha is whisked away to Saint Sebastian’s School for Wicked Girls by her father, who channels both Old Testament vengeance and suburban overcorrection. Bart assumes this will fix things. It does not. It merely saddles him with the rarest of childhood afflictions: moral culpability.
Wracked with guilt, Bart confesses. There is fighting. There are tears. There is destruction of property (specifically, a billiard-ball-shaped magic talisman). In the ashes of this tiny emotional Hiroshima, friendship is rebuilt, not stronger, but more honest. Milhouse gets one last kiss from Samantha, a forbidden gesture that costs her 50 rosaries and probably a permanent seat in hell according to French-Canadian nun law.
And so the boys reunite, damaged, yes, but unbowed. They leave the convent gates not with innocence restored, but with a new mission: to whip donuts at old people. Because that, truly, is the healing salve of the American adolescent male.
Make it! Good Morning Burger from The Joy of Cooking Milhouse