About a month ago. which feels like approximately 500 years in 2025 time, The Simpsons aired their 36th season finale, “Estranger Things” which took the bold step of showing us Bart and Lisa’s future — not to mention the bold step of hiring Sarah McLachlan to parody her sad-as-hell Toy Story 2 ballad.
Apparently, a lot of people are just catching up to the episode now, because one of its plot points is suddenly going viral: the death of Marge Simpson.
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The internet is currently crammed with claims that the show dramatically “killed off” Marge in the season finale.
And countless fans have expressed shock over the devastating news/thing that happened in a cartoon several weeks ago.
The Simpsons obviously has a long history of killing off characters, beginning with “jazzman” Bleeding Gums Murphy, but would they really bump of the Simpson family matriarch? As anyone who watched the actual episode is already aware, Marge is only dead in the flash-forward portion of the show, which is set 35 years in the future. We learn that she somehow passed away before Homer via McLachlan’s song, which bridges the gap between timelines.
If The Simpsons were really saying goodbye to Marge forever, they probably would have given her character more than an off-screen death and a tombstone reading: “Marge Simpson, beloved wife, mother, pork-chop seasoner.” And, incidentally, nobody on social media seems all that concerned by the episode’s implication that Moe took his own life prior to Marge’s death.
Although it’s nice to imagine that Marge eventually found peace in a blissful afterlife in which she’s watches over her family from the heavens and is constantly hooking up with the ghost of her teenage crush, Ringo Starr.
This episode was hardly the first time that a Simpsons episode included a flash-forward that audiences were never meant to accept as the literal, definitive future for the characters. Marge’s death is only as canonical as Lisa’s presidency, Bart’s career as a Supreme Court Justice and Ned Flanders’ decision to replace his dead wife with a robotic doppelganger.
Marge’s sad demise wasn’t even the only tragic death that was foreshadowed by an episode last season. “Stew Lies” ended with future Lisa making first contact with aliens Kang and Kodos, only for Bart to tease her, leading to an altercation that causes the Rigellians to destroy the entire planet, killing the Simpson siblings and all of humanity.
So even if Marge hadn’t already died, she would have just blown up along with the rest of us anyways.
