Season Seven - Episode 23-25

Episode 23: Much Apu About Nothing
I don't know.. It had a good message, but it got a little heavy-handed. It had lot of jokes, but most of them didn't exactly hit. Plot was a bit weak overall. It's not really bad, it just feels mediocre on the face of a such great season. Though you gotta give it to this episode that it has stayed pretty fresh - you could air it today and no-one would think it's 14 years old. Perhaps it's just me, but this episode doesn't work on me that great, but it's not bad and certainly deserves as high rating as 4/10.

Episode 24: Homerpalooza
Homer's ankward attempts at being cool were just that, ankward. The episode didn't get funny until they got to Hullabalooza and even then it wasn't that interesting. That said, "Homer Simpson, smiling politely" got me laughing and any episode doing that isn't that bad. Plot was still kind of weak and it hasn't aged at all well. I'm old enough to have grown up in the nineties so I can kind of get back there mentally, it's just that I don't really want to that much. This episode pretty much embodies why. Not terrible, just mediocre. 2/10.

Episode 25: Summer of 4ft 2
This is third or fourth time I saw this episode and it finally hit me that this is a quite an amazing episode. There was something that bothered me during the first couple of viewings. I guess it's the thing that Lisa isn't herself but that's well in-character and understandable. I also didn't like her new design, but again that's no real flaw for this episode. It's great like I said already. There isn't much of a b-plot and Bart acts like a jerk (though within character again), but there's nothing else needed as the main plot is enough. It's highly relatable, full of emotion and there's decent amount of laughs in this episode as well. It's the quintessential Lisa struggling with her lack of popularity -episode. 8/10.

Time to see where Season Seven lands on the seasonal rankings. It had huge number of top quality episodes - 13 episodes got 7 or better, that's over half of the episodes. However this was in the deep end of golden era, and show was starting to lose it's consistency. What it made up in the number of top episodes, it lost in the quality of worse. So, the average in the end was 5,88. Great, but not on the top.

Season Three 6.21
Season Four 6.18
Season Six 6.12
Season Seven 5.88
Season Five 5.73
Season Two 5.59
Season One 4.69

But let's look at the number of top episodes (7 and over) by season:
Season Seven 13 (52 %)
Season Six 12 (48 %)
Season Three 11 (46 %)
Season Four 10 (45 %)
Season Five 8 (36 %)
Season Two 7 (32 %)
Season One 3 (23 %)

Which is the correct way to look at it? I don't know, but if they certainly improved on some aspects when they managed to hit a home run in every other episode. That said, I still prefer Season Three like the ratings say - the best episodes were the show's best ever and the worst weren't that bad. Season Eight next - Some people consider it the last classic season, some consider Season Nine still part of classic era.