The Simpsons uses its post-Golden-Age trademark schmaltzy, emotionally-manipulative trickery to convince the audience that the ending of "The Saga of Carl" makes sense as a satisfactory resolution -- but please read further to decide if I have a point before reflexively rejecting this evocative statement out of hand. At one point, The Simpsons' stories and their conclusions were genuinely heartwarming and emotive, but for a long time now, the show has been faking it -- shamelessly combining unearned pathos with insincere interactions, all underpinned with sound cues designed specifically to give even the laziest Hallmark movie the appearance of emotional depth. And it works. It's devilishly effective - like the jump-scare in horror - as shown by the response to "The Saga of Carl" (and the typical real-time reactions to the average romcom, whose sappy Machiavellianism was smartly satirised by The Simpsons itself in "HOMR").
In reality, we have a character in Carl who thinks so little of his "friends" that he rips them off for a life-changing amount of money and then flees the country. Worse: apparently, Carl doesn't consider Homer, Moe, or - yes - even Lenny to be his friends. That putative realisation flies in the face of 24 seasons of world-building and character development. Lenny and Carl are consistently shown to be inseparable, to the point where there have been question marks over the true nature of their relationship. The Lenny of the past 24 seasons (minus two episodes) would've known that Carl had come from Iceland (which, as an addendum, is completely out of left-field and comes across as the progressive writers challenging the viewer not to ask the perfectly logical question: "isn't that incredibly unlikely?"(*1)). Hell, it's well-established that Lenny and Carl know each other and each other's families in quite some depth, meaning that this episode retcons many other, better episodes. The Simpsons has never been great at continuity, nor does it try hard, but this episode is very deliberately throwing out 23 years of character development groundwork and spitting on its corpse.
Carl is not a good guy here. Even if the people he screwed over were literal nobodies he'd never met before, stealing $150k from them for any purpose is a big antagonist move. Exploiting the trust of people who believe you to be a friend in order to steal $150k from them for undisclosed purposes is a massive antagonist move, sufficient to destroy almost any friendship (yet, weirdly, not the one that isn't even a "real" friendship according to both Carl and the show's writers -- who, by the by, can't seem to make up their own minds regarding the implicit, quasi-feminist critique of male relationships and bonding as allegedly shallow and void of meaning). Carl's treachery is to a height befitting his adoptive family -- perhaps in a smarter-than-the-episode moment of dramatic irony. Moreover, by the denouement, we're supposed to believe that the listing of a few trivial good deeds - the kind of things only a friend would do for a friend in the first place - is enough to simultaneously (a) paper over Carl's grand theft lottery, (b) cause the cessation of a near-blood-feud against his family, and (c) demonstrate to Carl, via wholly circular logic, that the friends he robbed are, in fact, friends. It only makes sense if you really want it to make sense and/or are easily taken in by melodramatic exploitation (don't worry: I'm usually straightforward to sucker too, with my readily-suspended disbelief, but this was a bridge too far for me).
The final scene goes full-bore on the aforementioned, played-throughout "hollowness of male friendship" angle, by having them sit and drink in stone cold silence. However, once again, we've never seen a shred of historical evidence to suggest that the only thing these four amigos do together is sit in silence and drink -- quite the contrary. It's yet another massive contrivance for the sole purposes of this canon-shredding episode. An episode that, if taken seriously, is perfectly capable of ruining a popular recurring character. An episode, I might add, in which a solid 5-10 minutes are consumed - wasted - by variations on the one-two-note dialogue theme of "Carl stole our money!" followed by "Let's make him pay!", whereby each pairing of utterances is contributed by a different permutation of characters.
I stand by what I said prior: Carl is not a good guy here. In fact, I've seldom seen anything throughout the series to suggest that Carl is a good guy in general, so this episode acts as something of a decider. In my eyes, by the end of the episode, nothing he's said or done has redeemed him. I'm part of better groups of friends than the four portrayed here and, in both of mine, the events of this episode would be enough to result in the instant and permanent excision and ostracism of the betrayer. If "Carl" (or whomever) had supposedly had deep feelings for us all along but had failed to recognise them, I'd be asking how the hell his conscience permitted him to steal such a sum of money from people he loved on any level of consciousness. If "Carl" had never considered us friends, I'd be wondering why the heck he was still part of our group and why we'd invested so much time in him. And in either case, I'd never again be able to trust someone who could steal something so significant from me, notably without even feeling capable of coming to the group and asking for the money with integrity. Irrespective of the circumstances, we'd be incapable of hanging out again without the rest of the boys attaching chains to their wallets. And what kind of friendship is that?
I firmly believe that those who've given this episode glowing reviews and high ratings over the years have failed to consider the significance of the "heartwarming" events in light of their practical and ethical implications. And, yeah, absolutely, it's a fictional cartoon programme, but part of what made the Golden Age so poignant and special - and different to most other cartoon sitcoms on the air - is that it was based entirely in realistic emotional valence, realistic character interactions, and realistic themes and feelings underpinning the sometimes-outlandish scenarios. "The Saga of Carl" loses whatever tenuous grip the show still had on its thematic realism(*2).
Finally, was anyone really crying out for a Carl origins story anyway? I certainly wasn't. Lenny and Carl work best when used as a classical comedic double act: pure setups and punchlines, taking turns as the straight man (as a figure of speech!). They aren't - and I'd contend they were never intended to be - suited to deep, introspective exploration of their psyches. I suppose it makes sense and is appropriate that when an origins tale does come along for one of them, it's far out, far flung, and superficial. But I'd at least expect it to be funny, and this episode doesn't even deliver that to any notable extent (N. B. the focus of my fellow reviewers on the nicety of the plot as opposed to the humour). I'd suggest that a more obvious and grounded origin for Carl might've left more room to focus on tighter, funnier, faster jokes, as opposed to a weak "mystery" half comprised of accusations and threats ad nauseaum, followed by a second half comprised of a warped short-form Simpsons-on-holiday episode. The most damning indictment of both the episode and Carl as a character is that he makes Homer and Moe (in Season 24, no less!) look like beacons of magnanimous morality as they not only refuse their right to destroy the paper on which Carl had frittered away their money but lie regarding the contents of that paper in order to spare Carl's feelings and the reputation of his adoptive family.
(*1) It is, naturally, extremely unlikely (especially given that we've previously seen his sister, who looks like a feminine version of him). It's interesting to note that Carl casually refers to himself as a native of Iceland; one wonders if this would've flown by unscrutinised had Lenny declared himself indigenous to Somalia in an alternate universe inversion of the plot. Carl is adopted, of course, which would have to imply the same for his biological sister, but how that very improbable sequence of events came to be is never explained. Nor is his implausible devotion to his adoptive family's absurd, millennia-old lineal sin. As is tradition, we'd never received the slightest hint towards any of the huge revelations in "Saga of Carl" in any previous episode. If Carl were so desperate to buy the goldmine of evidence in his place of birth, you'd think he would've scrimped together the cash by living like a miser in Springfield. But no, stealing from his friends and/or acquaintances was, seemingly, the better option.
(*2) Groundedness had long since disappeared with episodes like "Saddlesore Galactica". But it's debatable whether The Simpsons was ever "grounded". Season 1 made liberal use of artistic license in portraying the environments in accordance with concurrent plot points. And the very fact that the characters are, by default, yellow is a sure sign that naturalism was never a goal. Frankly, to have a cartoon be totally grounded in reality is to waste the opportunities of the medium to do stuff you couldn't in live action anyway (e.g. Does anyone think that Homer strangling Bart would make good sitcom material for filming in front of a studio audience?). But there was nevertheless an essentialist realism to the Simpsons and the characters, dialogue, interactions etc. That, at one point, made them far more like an extant American household than any cheesy '70s family comedy (as admittedly idyllic as many of the latter were and, especially today, are).
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