With episode 695 coming out January 3, titled “The Dad Feelings-Limited,” The Simpsons will be a little over halfway done with season 32. Its first episode debuted in December of 1989, which means the show has been around for 31 years (33 if you count its original run as shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show).

The finale is debatably the most important part of any story, just like the getaway is the most important part of any bank robbery. The Simpsons, like with everything, will eventually have to end sometime. When the Simpson family does finally sit on the couch for the final time, what might it look like, and will it be able to satisfy longtime fans of the show who started watching back when its aspect ratio was 4:3?

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The Simpsons has come close to ending before. Back in 2011, contract negotiations between FOX and the voice cast were not going entirely smoothly, and the future of the show was uncertain. Episode 9 of season 23, “Holidays of Future Passed,” is a Christmas episode that shows what life is like for the numerous characters of the show 30 years into the future and was written to serve as the finale to the show if negotiations failed.

Things did work out and the show would keep on keeping on, but the episode would have been a fitting end as it showed Bart and Lisa Simpson dealing with their own problems connecting with and raising their kids, which is parallel to what is the central conflict of a lot of the show. It also would have served as a fitting bookend, considering the first episode of the series was a Christmas episode.

That’s the main issue concerning a finale for The Simpsons. Life never wraps up with a nice shiny bow and that doesn’t mean a TV series has to either, but a finale is ideally supposed to resolve the conflicts that the show has set up. Questions need to be answered and emotional arcs need to find some form of catharsis. With The Simpsons, the show has been running for so long that any overarching plot has either been rendered moot in the writers’ search for untrodden ground or has been obscured by the mountain of episodes the show is buried under.  Beloved Simpsons characters have been written out of the show over the years, making it harder to tie the finale back to its roots in meaningful ways.

New consistent plot points have been introduced to the show throughout the years to keep things fresh, and the show has no doubt survived as long as it has by drawing in newer, younger audiences who weren’t there to watch the show back during its humble beginnings. As it’s unlikely that anybody is going to be able to watch 700+ episodes of the show in preparation, a finale for an audience still watching the show is more than likely going to leave those who remember the show from back in the glory days feeling a little left out. The show can always pull a “retcon”, slang for “retroactive continuity”, meaning a show undoes a lot of the more recent developments in favor of going back to how things were before, but then that leaves fans who have been watching the recent episodes of the show feeling like their time was wasted. No matter what, somebody loses.

The Simpsons, a spin-off of The Tracey Ullman Show

Since The Simpsons is a cartoon, does it ever really need to end? Can’t the show just go out of production and, with reruns and syndication, feel like it’s still going on forever? This was the Nickelodeon rule for some time around the early 2000s (and may still be), where an ending to the show was never alluded to and the kids watching the channel would just watch the reruns without question.

Nickelodeon has its own long-running show to answer these questions with: Spongebob Squarepants, which has been on the air since 1999 and is now getting ready to premiere a prequel series. When it comes to The Simpsons, though, a large conceit of the show is its skewering of modern trends, technology, and popular culture. This makes the shelf-life for a lot of its reruns a bit shorter, since not everything discussed in previous episodes is going to feel relevant anymore. Maybe the series really will go on forever, finding soundalike voice actors to replace cast members who leave the show.

Perhaps the best way to close things out is to go with what Calvin and Hobbes did. Calvin and Hobbes was a critically-acclaimed newspaper comic that ran for 10 years. It was beloved by many because its creator, Bill Watterson, had a reputation for sticking to his guns when it came to the comic, refusing to compromise when it came to artistic integrity and never giving in to the specter of merchandising. When the series finally came to an end, in a way it didn’t. The final strip shows Calvin and his tiger pal Hobbes ready to go sledding down a hill, a familiar scene in the comic. As they sled off one final time, the comic makes it clear that these characters have plenty more adventures in their future, but the reader simply won’t be there to see them.

When it comes to The Simpsons, maybe this is the way to go. Rather than closing the book on a family that has gone through countless life-or-death situations, embarrassing faux pas, celebrity cameos, and touching family moments, perhaps saying that there is a conclusion to all of it would be the most out-of-character thing they could do. Maybe the best way to end The Simpsons is to say that it doesn’t end, the viewers are just not going to be privy to the life experiences of the family anymore.

No matter how The Simpsons end not everybody is going to be happy, but then, not everybody has been happy with The Simpsons for a long time, from confusing jokes to episodes that just haven't quite caught on right away. TV audiences are notoriously fickle, and the slightest thing can send them into a tizzy. When the Simpson family sits down at the couch one final time, it’s sure to be a historic moment in television history, and one can only hope that the show is able to leave viewers with some form of closure.

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