Episode 3F01
Written by Jon Vitti
Directed by Susie Dietter
Also starring: Pamela Hayden, Tress MacNeille, Maggie Roswell, Frank Welker
Special guest voice: Marcia Wallace (as Ms Krabappel)

Premise: While Homer and Marge are away on a three-hour trip to the Mingled Waters Health Spa, the Child Welfare Board swoop. Bart, Lisa and Maggie are taken to a foster family - the Flanders. Bart and Lisa are appalled by the religious regime - but Maggie looks like succumbing...

Features: Grampa, Ms Krabappel, Nelson, Milhouse, Groundskeeper Willie, Principal Skinner, Ned, Maude, Rod and Todd Flanders, Female Judge, Mrs Skinner, Cletus, Rev. and Mrs Lovejoy.

Couch: The Simpsons are occupying the squares normally reserved for the Brady Bunch.

Trivia:

• There's an equestrian statue of 'Swartzwelder' outside the town hall.
• Titles on the Flanders' bookshelf include Today's Family Gnostic Bible, Aramaic Sentencing and Who Begat Whom.

Notes for Brits: My Three Sons was a very long-running, and rather anodyne, US sitcom. Poco were a folk-rock group of the seventies.

Itchy and Scratchy in: Foster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Song: We Got You, Babe sung by Ned and Maude Flanders to Maggie.

Notes: Possibly one of the most disturbing episodes, as Bart and Lisa are dragged into the Flanders' sinister lifestyle. The ending, as Ned tries to baptise the kids, is nail-biting stuff - and Maggie's second first-word is a truly shocking moment. It's astonishing that anything this radical made it on to prime time TV. The final moments are perhaps the most moving in the entire series, a wonderful affirmation of everything the series, and the Simpson family, are about.