was first broadcast on Fox in the United States on December 16, 2001. Before returning to work full-time on The Simpsons, Jean had worked on a television series called Teen Angel together with Mike Reiss and Freiberger. While working on Teen Angel, Freiberger suggested that, if Jean was ever to run The Simpsons, he should hire Freiberger as a writer on the series. For the thirteenth season, Jean became show runner and assigned Freiberger to write the episode. Freiberger wrote the first draft as a freelance script at his parents' barn in Pennsylvania, and when he returned to the writing staff to rewrite the story, Freiberger took so many notes that the script became 106 pages long. As a result, Freiberger spent more time editing down the script rather than writing it. The episode's main plot, in which Lisa becomes a Buddhist, was pitched by Jean, who wanted to expand Lisa's personality. When he pitched the plot idea to the Simpsons writing staff, they became concerned about the episode's originality. They argued that the series had already explored religious themes in earlier episodes, but Jean assured them that the episode would be about Lisa first-and-foremost, rather than Buddhism. Unlike several other episodes in the series in which a character undergoes a change in their personality, Lisa has remained a Buddhist since this episode, much like her conversion to vegetarianism in "Lisa the Vegetarian". Freiberger pitched the subplot involving the model rockets in the beginning of the episode. He based it on a real-life experience, in which he, as a child, accidentally launched a model rocket into a window in his house. A scene from this subplot was removed from the episode following the September 11 attacks. The scene would show a man named Hassan Jay Salam being arrested by policemen (who tells them to call his cousin Casey Kasem), who think the rocket Bart and Homer launched was launched by him (The rocket bears the abbreviation HJS, which stands for Homer J Simpson). After the attacks, the scene was considered too offensive by the Fox censors, so the scene was removed. Originally, the subplot would involve Marge trying to get Homer to build model rockets with Bart. Homer would not want to at first, but after Marge convinces him, he would soon get more into it than Bart. The plot idea was encouraged by some of the writers who thought