30 years on the air, The Simpsons has always laughed in the face of continuity. Particularly in its classic early seasons, the anarchic animated sitcom seemed hell-bent on subverting, twisting, and straight-up breaking every rule of the TV writing handbook.
The series had a built-in disdain for golden moments, hugging and learning, and anything resembling a family-friendly moral at the end of each episode. The satire of The Simpsons extended into its approach to TV writing, with the show often messing with its continuity and canon in Treehouse of Horror specials and future-set installments. But despite its apparent disregard for the rules of TV, one thing The Simpsons has remained relatively straight-faced about is death.
The Simpsons rarely kill characters in canon and usually when a character is killed off on the series, they stay dead for good. That’s how the show was able to pull off genuinely moving moments like the death of Homer’s estranged mother Mona Simpson (a rare solid post-season 12 outing) or the poignant ing of jazzman Bleeding Gums Murphy. But what about the rare cases when The Simpsons kills off a character only to bring them back with no justification or explanation? That’s where the likes of Dr. Marvin Monroe, Dr. Nick, and Ralph Wiggum end up, with each character having a surreal revival on the show at one point or another during its long run.
Ralph Wiggum
The most recent temporary casualty of The Simpsons’ strange non-continuity, The Simpsons' gradual decline).
Dr. Nick
This one is a little complicated since there’s the issue of TV show versus movie continuity to address. It may have taken them eighteen long years, but Dr. Nick cropped up again in a season twenty episode a few years after the film’s 2007 release only to be reinstated as a series regular in the seasons since.
Dr. Marvin Monroe
The gravelly-voiced psychiatrist may be the strangest case of miraculous revival in the history of The Simpsons, as Marvin Monroe seemed very much dead after season seven of the show. As in the series named two locations, a school gym and the “Dr. Marvin Monroe Memorial Hospital” in his honor, and showed his tombstone onscreen. Yet despite this, Dr. Marvin Monroe nonetheless cropped up in a season fifteen outing where he explained to Marge that he’d simply been very sick when presumed dead.
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