It took 36 seasons, but The Simpsons finally did something no one ever expected: it killed off one of its iconic family’s core members. Don’t worry, technically this death won’t happen for a very long time.
The Simpsons began its 36th season with the show’s “series finale.” It ended the year with a different kind of flash forward. It was the long-running cartoon’s latest installment to jump far ahead into the family’s lives, as it took viewers 35 years past the “present” day, where Bart and Lisa are/have always been in elementary school. Unlike previous episodes set in the future, this one showed one of the Simpsons dead.
And we mean dead-dead. It showed the family’s beloved matriarch Marge in Heaven with her old/new again crush, (the still alive in 2025) Ringo Starr.
The episode revolves around how Bart and Lisa grew apart when they stopped watching Itchy and Scratchy together as kids. Decades later we then learn Marge died years ago, Lisa became commissioner of the NBA (the new name of the WNBA), Bart remained in Springfield, and, like his dad before him, Homer was living in a retirement home.
Or at least, that’s where Lisa thought Homer was living. The truth of father’s living arrangement then leads to a fight between the two siblings. Fortunately they eventually reconcile in a very Simpsons-esque manner after finding a recording Marge left behind for them.
Learning Marge Simpson died—or rather, will have died—is unsettling. She hasn’t aged a day in almost 40 years! We thought she’d live forever. But it’s hard to get too worked up over this. The show has long treated flash forward episodes as fun gimmicks rather than hard and fast canon. Stories set in the future are never beholden to previous episodes that also showed what might happen to the family. So viewers can take comfort in knowing that even if The Simpsons finally did the seeming impossible by killing off Marge they didn’t really.
Content shared from nerdist.com.