It's a good episode but I still feel it's were the show jumped the shark because it was where the show decided it had to start to develop the characters a little more because they had ran out of situations to create episodes around. Now this was a good idea and if they had followed it up, then maybe the show would still be hilarious today, but they didn't. I can't think of one other major character who ever got character development on the show. It just stagnated after Lisa.
Has Bart changed at all, Marge, Maggie? I guess they at least tried to with Marge in a couple of cases at the end of the show's good years, but it feels like they've abandoned her.
Homer has changed, but not for the better, if anything they have made him a more and more one dimensional character as time has gone on, that's the whole problem with him actually. Homer was actually the only complex character in the first season of that series and they have ruined him after doing a really good job of developing him. Funnily enough I think his height as a character was definately the episode where he met his mother again where as the low point of his character was that dumb "recent" hippie episode where he was trying to be more like his mother.
Fuck, why are the new Futurama's so bad? Godamn cock tease.