The Simpsons: Fans Stunned By Show's Accurate Prediction Of Titan's Destructive End
"The Simpsons" has, eerily, predicted a lot of things that ended up coming true. Donald Trump's presidency. Several different Super Bowl outcomes. Smart watches. Sigfried getting attacked by his own tiger during a show. The FIFA corruption scandal. Donald Trump running for the presidency again, specifically in 2024. The list, honestly, goes on and on. Now, fans think that the long-running animated series also predicted the Titan submersible imploding underwater while searching for the wreckage of the Titanic.
In Season 17, Episode 10, titled "Homer's Paternity Coot," Homer — voiced by Dan Castellaneta — thinks he's found his "real" father, a guy named Mason Fairbanks (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 just means "wet floor" in Spanish), and 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. Fans definitely took notice, and some took to Twitter to recognize that, once again, the Simpsons can see the future.
Fans can't believe how accurate The Simpsons can be about real-life events
On the one hand, "The Simpsons" has been on the air for so long — since 1989, to be specific — that it feels like an inevitability that they'd end up predicting real-life events. That said, it's still freaking fans out that they were so specifically on the nose with this scenario. Over on Twitter, @Qurandale recognized just how eerie it is that The Simpsons managed to predict this event: "The Simpsons really predicted the titanic submarine situation .. and that they would completely run out of oxygen (watch till the end) this is actually scary." @xsn was clearly unsettled, making this simple proclamation: "we live in a simulation."
A few days before experts determined that the submersible had imploded and its fate was still unknown, @NotABigJerk felt personally targeted by the whole situation, bringing in every bizarre factor of the situation and writing, "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.'"
The writer of this episode has an extremely strange connection to the Titan
Wait a second — someone from the creative team of "The Simpsons" has a personal connection to the Titan submersible? Yeah, that would be Mike Reiss, former showrunner and writer on the series. On June 19, he told BBC Breakfast — which was reported by outlets including Deadline — that he wasn't hopeful about the fate of the passengers on board, and he knew better than most.
"I know the logistics of it and I know how vast the ocean is and how very tiny this craft is," Reiss said. "If it's down at the bottom, I don't know how anyone is going to be able to access it, much less bring it back up." So how does he know this, exactly? Well, 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,' Reiss shared. "This is not to say this is a shoddy ship or anything, it's just that this is all new technology and they're learning it as they go along," he said. "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."
What happened with the Titan submersible?
On Sunday, June 18, the Titan submersible embarked on a journey to explore the wreckage of the Titanic with five passengers aboard: Stockton Rush (the founder of OceanGate), Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood, and Dalwood's and his 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, and on Thursday, June 22, it was determined that the five passengers had perished.
During a press conference and after an extensive search, Rear Adm. John Mauger, who serves as the commander of the First Coast Guard District, delivered the sobering news. The experts believe that a "catastrophic implosion" happened shortly after communications were lost, especially after they found debris from the Titan itself near the Titanic's wreckage; Maugher specifically said the debris they found was "consistent with the catastrophic loss of its pressure chamber."
This conclusion comes after days of speculation over whether or not the men on board were still alive, but 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 remains scarily accurate.