The Simpsons Season 36 Finally Revealed Why Homer Will Never Lose His Job

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Beware, there are spoilers ahead for "The Simpsons" season 36 episode "Shoddy Heat."

The floating timeline, or "continuous present," is the idea that even if a story goes on for years and years, the status quo remains static, and the characters are incapable of aging. Every sitcom has it, especially animated shows. As Bojack Horseman once put it, you can't have changes in sitcoms, because then the show would be over, and the show has to keep going: "You never get a happy ending, 'cause there's always more show."

That is why, for the season 36 premiere of "The Simpsons," the writers literally have Bart pull a meta fight against the very idea of the show ending, by fighting his reality and preventing his own birthday from happening.

Perhaps more than any other show, the idea of the floating timeline and fixed status quo are most noticeable in "The Simpsons," given the many decades it's been on the air. Homer is always 39 — even if it means he went from being a high school student in the '70s to being a high school student in the '90s instead. Lisa went from being born in the '80s to becoming Gen Z. Maggie is technically a pandemic baby if the show is set in 2024. Most recently, the season 36 episode "Shoddy Heat" has Abe Simpson working as a private detective in the '80s and looking like a young man despite the character being a World War II vet.

The episode is a fun parody of the '80s neo-noir "Body Heat," with a mystery involving Abe's former partner. What makes the episode significant, though, is that it answers a question that's plagued some fans for three decades: Just does Homer keep getting away with making egregious mistakes at his job without consequences?

Homer has full immunity at work because of Grampa Simpson

The start of season 35 already gave us an answer as to what exactly Homer does at the nuclear power plant, showing that his office is actually fake and his console doesn't do anything. Still, that doesn't explain how he hasn't been fired after messing up so much that Mr. Burns needed to fake his station.

Instead, "Shoddy Heat" reveals that Grampa Simpson discovered that Burns was responsible for the disappearance of his old partner. In exchange for keeping quiet about it, Burns promised to give Abe's incompetent son Homer a job when he grew up, and that he would never fire him, "no matter how often and how badly he messes up." 

"And that's why your son wasn't fired for screwing up 742 times," Mr. Burns tells Grampa. Homer then thinks back to all the times he messed up: the times he endangered himself and others, even blowing up the nuclear power plant once or twice. It leads to an emotional embrace between Homer and his dad, but the reveal does raise some questions.

For one, this is a weirdly positive portrayal of Mr. Burns, who surely didn't have to uphold his end of the deal after so many years, and it's not like we've known Charles Montgomery Plantagenet Schicklgruber Burns to be an honorable man of his word before. But there's also the fact that we have actually seen Homer get fired many times before, as well as the running gag in the early seasons about Burns not remembering Homer's name (yet somehow remembering this old verbal agreement). 

You could argue that this reveal undercuts that running gag, diminishing the (very effective) joke that the only reason why Homer still has a job is that his boss is an old billionaire who doesn't even care about remembering the names of his employees. It also could be argued that the reveal takes away from the show's long-standing satire about incompetent people keeping their jobs after messing up.

Having a reason for Homer keeping his job still captures the early satire of The Simpsons

There's a different way of looking at the reveal, however. Rather than it being Mr. Burns forgetting about Homer that forgives all his mistakes, Homer still has a job (and will always have a job) because of undeniable corruption on Burns' part. No matter how many catastrophes Home causes, not to mention how his presence on the payroll prevents someone with proper qualifications from doing the work, he will always have his job. This satirizes an increasingly recognized issue in America of white men getting away with nearly everything because of systemic problems in our institutions. Homer is a nepo baby — not the son of a powerful parent, mind you, but the son of a parent who managed to blackmail a powerful man into giving his son infinite chances.

It's part of a trend in recent seasons of "The Simpsons" of redoing plots, themes, and messages from earlier seasons, but updated them to have specific, timely messages. This is how the show got away with doing another episode about the importance of unions in season 35, only this time the jokes were specifically about Amazon. Is this better? That's debatable. There is a timelessness to early "Simpsons" that is simply not there anymore, both in the jokes but also the satires. 

Did we need an episode about Marge getting involved in a union, and showing the dirty tricks corporations resort to for union busting when we already have "Last Exit to Springfield," a perfect half hour of TV and one of the show's best episodes? Probably not, but you can argue that most TV nowadays is not meant to be timeless. At least "The Simpsons" is trying to remain timely and relevant with every passing decade.

At the very least, there are some mysteries (accidental or not) that still remain unanswered as of season 36 – like the location of Springfield.