"Dog Of Death"(Season 3, Episode 19, originally aired March 12, 1992)
Kris Kristofferson wrote, and Janis Joplin sang, that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. That may be true, but there are limits to the freedom inherent in having nothing left to lose. Lots of them. The rich can always slum. Millionaires can eat at McDonalds and chill at the Holiday Inn. The impoverished however do not have the option of crashing at Donald Trump’s home or switching things up a little by eating at a five star eatery.
For the Simpsons and all of Springfield in “Dog Of Death”, money equals power. More specifically, money equals the power to say goodbye to the gloomy rules and strictures and power structures of their old lives and blast off into a new existence bound only by the limits of their imagination, and to a lesser extent, the dictates of morality, legality, etc.
The source of this free-floating money lust is a lottery windfall that has reached that strange tipping point where the fact that someone might win an insane amount of money stops being a regular, uncommented-upon element of everyday life and becomes a news story full of B-roll footage of long lines outside liquor stores and man-on-the-street interviews with common folk kibitzing about what they’d do if they won.
Why is this? Why does a 79 million dollar lotto prize inspire bored yawns and a 140 million dollar prize incite mass hysteria? Obviously 140 million dollars is substantially more money but you’d have more money than you’d know what to do with if you won 79 or 140 million. For some reason, however, there are certain magical numbers that transform the sad fleecing of the poor that is the lottery into something worth talking about.
In “Dog of Death”, money lust isn’t limited to those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder; everyone dreams about winning the big payday, even the very wealthy. A running joke has the wealthy likes of Mr. Burns and Krusty the Klown angling for a payday but it’s Kent Brockman who ends up winning big. The rich are never quite rich enough.
In my favorite joke in the episode, Homer fantasizes that winning the lottery will allow him to become a giant, fourteen-karat gold Man-God who towers over his flesh-colored subjects like a colossus. There’s no real rhyme or reason to Homer’s desires; there are no practical benefits to having gold skin as there would be to possessing say, laser-beam eyes, it’s just the crassest conceivable form of consumerism, greed rendered surreal. On the commentary, the writers and producer herald it as the ultimate John Swartzwelder gag, an insane non sequitur that takes an ugly human impulse and exaggerates it to grotesque extremes. All hail King Homer indeed.
For teachers, the lottery is a double lie. It offers the illusion of instant, unimaginable wealth but it also promises to pump money into public school coffers and frequently comes up short. Principal Skinner is cruelly and unconscionably denied the funds to build his dream school-prison where children are held to place in magnets, a betrayal every bit as profound and dispiriting as what happened to ol’ Skinny Boy when he came back from 'Nam.
The lottery subplot turns out to be something of a dead end, for as the title suggests, the real subject of “The Dog of Death” is the furry, adorable little sentient plot point that is Santa’s Little Helper. The episode begins with Santa’s Little Helper on the precipice of death. Santa’s Little Helper needs an operation that costs seven hundred and fifty dollars. At first the family does the only reasonable thing, which is to consign the dog to death so that the family can maintain their current quality of life.