Granted, it’s a little out there, but it’s still worth a read for Simpsons fans.
Despite the show’s obvious decline in recent years, The Simpsons remains arguably the best TV show ever made and to this day it’s talked about in reverential terms by its many fans (including the die-hards in the JOE office).
Internet conversation about the show normally revolves around remembering some of the famous quotes and plot lines, but one Simpsons fan on Reddit has been attracting a lot of attention for a theory about the course of the show and of the path taken by Homer in the last 20 years.
According to the theory offered up by Hardtopickaname on Reddit last week, Homer never emerged from a coma that he lapsed into during the episode So It’s Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show.
You know the one, it’s when Bart shook up the beer can and it exploded when Homer opened it after taking it out of the fridge.
“We need pretzels, I repeat, pretzels.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzh7uH5RaaU
The theory also references an episode shortly prior to that one, Homer the Heretic, in which Homer nearly loses his life and is told by God, in a jocular way, that he’ll tell him the meaning of life when he dies in six months’ time.
The Reddit user theorises that after the clip show episode, the characters never aged and that the plots of episodes became zanier and zanier, with a number of examples provided to support the theory.
You can read the theory in full here and it is well worth a read, but we would have a few holes to pick in it. For example, apart from a few birthday episodes and a few set in the future, we don’t think the characters ever aged.
As for the plots becoming zanier, with our Simpsons anorak on we would claim that the zany plots didn’t really start until Season Nine and Ten and beyond.
We’re talking about episodes like the one when Principal Skinner was revealed to be an impostor known as Armin Tamzarian before everyone conveniently forgot it again before the end of the episode.
It’s a decent stab at a conspiracy theory all the same, we wonder what Homer himself would make of the effort?
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