The Simpsons: 10 More Moments More Important Than You Realised
5. Marge’s Gambling Problem
Every so often in The Simpsons, something will happen to a character that permanently affects their personality.
This happens to Marge in $pringfield (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling).
Aside from having one of the longest episode names in the history of the show, it also shows Marge developing a gambling habit by spending too much time playing the slots.
The ending of this episode is actually quite dark, as Marge's issues don't get resolved. She just has to live with them - a startlingly realistic approach to portraying addiction.
Despite the bleakness of this ending, many fans just assumed we'd never hear about Marge's problems ever again. But oh boy do we.
Her issues with gambling come up time and time again, more often than not for comic effect. There's a joke about throwing vodka in Maggie's face after a game of Candyland that would be funny if it weren't so alarming.
Marge even goes full Danny Ocean and joins a team of card counters to help fix the church in Season 26. Honestly, that is a sentence so ethically tangled that we're not even going to try.