Producer Al Jean Teases the Answer to a 35-Year-Old ‘Simpsons’ Mystery

Even in its 36th season, The Simpsons is still finding ways to keep fans engaged. First it was the fake-out series finale season premiere, then we got an episode that randomly brought back a character who most fans totally forgot existed, and now, well, it’s unclear.

Producer Al Jean recently posted an image from this coming Sunday’s episode, intriguingly suggesting that it will “solve a mystery” that’s been puzzling him “since the beginning of the show.” Presumably he’s not referring to the unsolved case of Smithers’ fluctuating skin color. 

And Jean had previously teased that, after the next episode, “you’ll never look at Springfield the same way again.”

Fans have been trying to figure out the mystery of whatever mystery he’s referring to. The image he includes seemingly depicts a young Grampa Simpson talking with an unidentified woman that resembles a young Agnes Skinner. 

While Jean didn’t clarify whether or not the woman is Mrs. Skinner or not, he did shoot down one person’s theory that the episode will reveal that Abe Simpson is Principal Skinner’s biological father, making Homer his half-brother and further confusing the whole Armin Tamzarian thing.

According to the official synopsis of the episode, “Shoddy Heat,” it’s all about how “an unearthed corpse opens up a cold case from Springfield in the 1980s … as well as a steamy relationship between young Grampa and Agnes Skinner.“

Obviously the title indicates that the episode will parody Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 neo-noir classic Body Heat, which was similarly involved a steamy affair between people who briefly share frozen deserts on a boardwalk.

Body Heat is all about (spoilers for a movie that came out 23 years ago and was, itself, an unofficial remake of a movie from 1944) a rich guy’s wife who seductively cons a horny lawyer into murdering her husband. So does that mean that “Shoddy Heat” will find Grampa similarly killing Mrs. Skinner’s partner, only for the corpse to surface decades later?

But who would Agnes’ husband have been? Perhaps Principal Skinner’s father Sheldon, but he supposedly died in the “Veterans’ Day Float Disaster of ‘79” along with four other members of the Flying Hellfish. Revealing that Grampa Simpson killed off five of his friends just to please his mistress would be a pretty dark turn of events for the show. 

Complicating matters further, in Season 19’s “Midnight Towboy,” Agnes mentioned that she’d been married to three different tow-truck drivers. 

Maybe the whereabouts of Mrs. Skinner’s husband is the mystery to which Jean is referring, but it’s also entirely possible that the show will answer some other conundrum, like who really shot Mr. Burns? What was the deal with that one “Treehouse of Horror” joke? And why does time seem to have no meaning in Springfield?

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