Summary SCREENRANT VIDEO OF THE DAY SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT While The Simpsons season 35 didn’t necessarily commit to changing one of the show’s strangest patterns, episode 2 did at least address this odd mystery. The Simpsons has a so-called “Elastic canon.” This means that any given character’s backstory, age, country of origin, or name can change without warning solely for the sake of a gag.
While The Simpsons season 35 did not quite put a stop to this approach, the best episode of the season so far did address one major mystery that this narrative style causes. Viewers can understandably end up a little confused about the age of the titular family from time to time. After all, Bart and Lisa were both young children during episodes that were canonically set in the 1990s, but later episodes depicted their teenage, unwed, childless parents attending high school in 1999.
This would be tricky since The Simpsons would need to set the birth dates of the show’s main characters in stone for them to age. The Simpsons season 34 mocked this very idea with a playful scene where Homer nodded to the camera while trying to remember whether he was born in the ‘60s or the ’80s. However, since The Simpsons season 35 already successfully repeated Homer’s best story, the show does seem like it is prepared to offer viewers some more solid canon.
The Simpsons Season 35 May Change One Of Its Oldest Rules It seems unlikely that the characters of The Simpsons would start to age after so many decades in stasis. However, the fact that the entire plot of “A Mid-Childhood Night's Dream” revolved around Bart getting older proved it is possible that the series could finally start to age up its cast, particularly when the episode was one of the show’s most poignant outings in years.