“The Joy of Sect” is the thirteenth episode of The Simpsons’ ninth season. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on February 8, 1998. In the episode, a cult takes over Springfield, and the Simpson family become members. It has been listed as one of the top 10 episodes of all time.
About The Joy of Sect in brief
“The Joy of Sect” is the thirteenth episode of The Simpsons’ ninth season. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on February 8, 1998. In the episode, a cult takes over Springfield, and the Simpson family become members. The writers drew on many groups to develop the Movementarians, but were principally influenced by Scientology, Heaven’s Gate, the Unification Church, the Rajneesh movement, and Peoples Temple. The show contains many references to popular culture, including the title reference to The Joy of Sex and a gag involving Rover from the television program The Prisoner. The episode was later analyzed from religious, philosophical, and psychological perspectives; books on The Simpsons compared the Movementarian to many of the same groups from which the writers had drawn influence. The ending of the episode was a poke at the network as “being the evil mind of Fox”. The episode’s script was written in 1997, roughly the same time that the members of the Heaven’s gate cult committed mass suicide. It was the second and last episode written by Steve O’Donnell and was based on an idea from David Mirkin, who had been the show runner during seasons five and six.
The title was pitched by Jace Richdale, and Steven Dean Moore directed the episode. It has been listed as one of the top 10 episodes of all time by both USA Today and The A. V. Club in their lists of important episodes of The Simpson’s show. It is one of only two episodes in the show’s history to have been made into a movie, the other being “The Simpsons” (The other was “The Simpson’s Secret” in 1991). The episode is about a cult that takes over the city of Springfield and brainwashes the residents into worshipping a mysterious man known as “The Leader” The episode ends with the family watching Fox television and mechanically repeating after the announcer that they “are watching Fox’”. It is the only episode in the series to feature a character who is not a member of the cult, and it is the last episode in which Marge is not the only family member to escape from the heavily guarded compound. It also features a reference to Scientology, Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, and other cults and religions that the writers drew influence from.
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This page is based on the article The Joy of Sect published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
