Separate Vocations

Season 3
September 19, 1991 – August 27, 1992
"Stark Raving Dad" "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington" "When Flanders Failed" "Bart the Murderer" "Homer Defined" "Like Father, Like Clown" "Treehouse of Horror II" "Lisa's Pony" "Saturdays of Thunder" "Flaming Moe's" "Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk" "I Married Marge" "Radio Bart" "Lisa the Greek" "Homer Alone" "Bart the Lover" "Homer at the Bat" "Separate Vocations" "Dog of Death" "Colonel Homer" "Black Widower" "The Otto Show" "Bart's Friend Falls in Love" "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?"
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"Separate Vocations" is the 18th episode of The Simpsons' third season. Nancy Cartwright won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance.[1]

1 Plot
2 Continuity
3 Cultural references
4 External links

Plot

Lisa rebelling due to her aptitude test results

After taking career aptitude tests (which were scored by a malfunctioning computer), Lisa discovers that the occupation she is best suited for is homemaker while Bart is pegged as a future police officer. Each takes the opportunity to explore their options as Lisa spends the day doing chores with Marge and Bart goes on a ride along with the police. Lisa hates her role (and the impovershed isolation therein) and rebels by becoming a troublemaker at school. Police life fits Bart like a glove (he even ends up stopping Snake Jailbird during a car chase, thanks to an alley that gets narrow in the middle) and he becomes a hall monitor, handing out demerits to his classmates for minor infractions. When Lisa secretly steals all of the teachers' editions, it is up to Bart and Principal Skinner to figure out who did it. Realizing his sister is the culprit, Bart takes the rap and returns to his life as a bad student and detention regular, while Lisa goes back to playing her saxophone.

Continuity

Bart imagines himself as a Mafia narc who is shown with Steve Allen's voice. Allen would appear again in "'Round Springfield". Dr. Pryor (the school psychiatrist who first appeared on Bart the Genius) would not speak again until "Lisa's Sax".

The episode features the first reference to Principal Skinner having fought in the Vietnam War ("I saw some awful things in 'Nam..."). This would later become an important character trait in such episodes as Bart's Friend Falls in Love, I Love Lisa, and the controversial season nine episode The Principal and the Pauper. His Puma Pride belief would be seen again in the later episode "Pokey Mom". The Puma was also used in early stories for Simpsons Comic Books. Ralph's paste eating habit is mentioned again as well in Team Homer.

Cultural references

When Principal Skinner is questioning Lisa about her newfound sense of irresponsibility, he asks "What are you rebelling against?" She responds "Whaddaya got?" like Marlon Brando in the movie The Wild One.
Bart imagines he is a drifter who is thrown out of a town by a sheriff, just like Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo character was in First Blood.
This episode's plot is similar to South Park episode "Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy" where a typically rebllious main character develops a taste for authority as a hall monitor, emphasising the point of another South Park episode "Simpsons Already Did It".