Has "The Simpsons" predicted the future once again? Some fans think the events of a 2006
episode are eerily similar to the real-life 2023 catastrophe of the Titan submersible.
Fans have often noticed that "The Simpsons" has eerily predicted a
lot of things that have ended up coming true. For one, Donald Trump's presidency.
"As you know, we've inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump."
The show is also thought to have predicted several different Super Bowl outcomes, smart watches,
Sigfried getting attacked by his own tiger during a show, the FIFA corruption scandal,
and Donald Trump running for president again in 2024. The list goes on and on. Now,
fans are saying that the long-running animated series also predicted the
Titan submersible imploding underwater while searching for the wreckage of the Titanic.
In the Season 17 episode "Homer's Paternity Coot," Homer thinks he's found his "real" father,
a guy named Mason Fairbanks, who's voiced by guest star Michael York. Inexplicably,
the two set out to find underwater treasure in the wreckage of a ship called the "Piso Mojado"
which is Spanish for "wet floor." Homer, predictably, gets stuck in the wreckage.
He loses oxygen in the deep ocean and wakes up in a hospital a few days later — meeting
a very different fate than the five people aboard the Titan submersible. Yet fans took
to Twitter to claim that, once again, "The Simpsons" seems to have predicted the future.
On the one hand, "The Simpsons" has been on the air for so long — since December 1989,
to be specific — that it feels like an inevitability that the show would end up
predicting some real-life events by coincidence. And that seems to be the case with all the
instances fans have noticed. That said, it's still freaking fans out how similar this instance was
to the real-life tragedy. One fan on Twitter wrote, before the determination was made that
the sub imploded and experts were thinking the people inside were running out of breathable air:
"The Simpsons really predicted the titanic submarine situation .. and
that they would completely run out of oxygen [...] this is actually scary."
Another was clearly unsettled, making the simple proclamation:
"we live in a simulation."
But it's worth pointing out how different the real-life incident was from the story of "The
Simpsons" episode. The Titan submersible embarked on its journey to explore the
wreckage of the Titanic on Sunday, June 18, 2023, with five passengers aboard:
OceanGate founder Stockton Rush, Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood,
and Dawood's 19-year-old son Suleman. The problems started pretty much immediately,
with the craft's communications failing within the first two hours of the voyage. On Thursday,
June 22, officials determined that the five passengers had perished, likely in an implosion.
In a press conference after an extensive search, Rear Admiral John Mauger,
who serves as the commander of the First Coast Guard District, delivered the sobering news.
"The debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel."
The experts believe that the implosion happened shortly after communications were lost,
especially after they found debris from the Titan itself near the Titanic's wreckage.
Despite the differences, another Twitter user seemed to feel personally targeted
by the similarities to the "Simpsons" episode, writing before the Thursday press conference,
"every new detail of this story feels like it was engineered to drive me specifically insane.
mike reiss, previous visitor to titanic wreckage and author of simpsons episodes 'moaning lisa'
'stark raving dad' and 'the way we was', says on chance for survivors he's 'not optimistic.'"
That's right: Mike Reiss, former showrunner and writer on "The Simpsons," has a personal
connection to the expedition. On June 19, he told "BBC Breakfast" that he wasn't
hopeful about the fate of the passengers on board, and he knew better than most.
"I don't know how anyone's going to be able to access it, much less bring it back up."
Reiss has actually gone on three separate expeditions with OceanGate, the company that made
the Titan, and he knows that their safety measures weren't always great from personal experience. He
even said that, during all of his dives, the crafts lost communication with ground control.
"I got on the sub and at the back of my mind was 'well,
I may never get off this thing,' that's always with you. [...] You have to just
remember the early days of the space program or the early days of aviation,
where you just make a lot of mistakes on the way to figuring out what you're doing."
There's still a lot of unanswered questions where the Titan is concerned — and many of
those answers might never come. In any case, "The Simpsons" has the weirdest possible connection
to this entire situation, and its prediction streak continues, at least in the eyes of fans.