‘The Simpsons’ Just Referenced the Show’s Creepiest ‘Deleted’ Scene
The Simpsons returned this week with “Abe League of Their Moe,” an episode satirizing the gambling app frenzy that’s swept professional sports, and in particular, Major League Baseball. After a baseball superstar decides to play for Springfield, Isotope Stadium is soon cluttered with garish ads for betting apps such as “Bookiemonster,” “Carrot Top’s Prop Bets,” and perhaps most cleverly, “Vig Notaro.”
Instead of hot dogs, the newly-popular, increasingly yuppie-fied stadium now sells Crème Brûlée, and the vendor is none other than Raphael, aka the “Sarcastic Clerk.” This character has held a truly staggering number of jobs over the years, he’s worked at the pet store, the gun shop and the high-tech gadget place in the mall, just to name a few.
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But weirdly, in “Abe League of Their Moe,” there are two Raphaels. Or, if you’re seeing double, four Raphaels. While some might assume that this is simply a goof, and therefore the fault of a wizard, seemingly this a reference to the character’s disturbing origin story…
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In Season 34’s fourth wall-breaking “Lisa the Boy Scout,” hackers seize control of the broadcast and begin airing some of The Simpsons most “ill-conceived” unreleased scenes, which include the revelation that Martin is an undercover cop and Lenny is secretly Carl’s Fight Club-esque hallucination.
In one particularly grotesque “deleted” scene, dubbed “Rise of the Wiseguys,” Homer runs into Raphael at Moe’s and questions him about his multitude of professions. At this point, viewers are let in on the shocking truth: There’s a whole army of “Raphael” clones, each one began as a larval monstrosity, birthed by a subterranean Raphael queen. But they all eventually grew into a bald, mustachioed, unnecessarily sassy customer service worker.
While this was obviously just a one-off meta joke, this week’s episode revealed that there really is more than one Raphael, therefore implying that he really is some kind of Lovecraftian affront to nature.
Of course, if Raphael’s “Lisa the Boy Scout” twist is, in fact, true, that means that there’s a pretty good chance that this episode, and every other episode since Season Two, is just one of Homer’s coma dreams anyways.
