Marge on The Lam (aka Welcome To The Jungle)

Before we begin, I'm going to take it as a given that you know how Thelma & Louise closes. It boasts one hell of an iconic final shot, and even if you haven't seen the movie itself, I presume that you're at least familiar with the affectionate parody they did of it in Wayne's World 2. So yes, the gist of it is that those women evade Harvey Keitel and co for a while, and then they go right over a cliff edge. They die at the end. Or do they? It's important that you never see them hit the ground, which makes a heap of difference in terms of how we're to interpret that closing image.

Ridley Scott's picture about two unlikely outlaws on the run made quite a splash when it debuted in 1991. Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon starred as the titular women, a housewife and a waitress who go out for a night of partying, only for things to escalate and push them far across the point of no return, whereupon their only option is to leave everything behind and try to reach Mexico before the law catches up with them. Reaction was wildly split between those who celebrated it as a ground-breaking work of female empowerment, and those who condemned it for its positing of violence as redemptive (because Hollywood, of course, does not make a ton of films that do that every year with male protagonists). The film proved such a vital part of the early 1990s zeitgeist that it was basically inevitable that The Simpsons would get round to putting their own spin on it eventually, particularly since there is unquestionably something of Thelma, the stifled housewife, in our very own Marge. That spin came with "Marge on The Lam", aka episode 1F03, which first aired November 4th 1993 as part of the show's fifth season, a time when the series was lifting quite a few of its premises from famous movie plots (we also had "Cape Feare", "Rosebud" and, though it wound up being held over into Season 6, "Bart of Darkness"). Thelma & Louise is a powerful film that holds up great, but there's still something that feels distinctively more flavour-of-the-month about parodying it than, say, Citizen Kane or Rear Window - chiefly because it was so ingrained into contemporary zeitgeist, and everyone was doing it - which, coupled with emphasis on other timely fixations of the early 90s (clear cola, smart drinks, underground raves), marks "Lam" out as a conspicuous product of its time. Not that that detracts from it in any way; on top of everything else, it has a really strong and substantial Simpsons story, one that finally takes advantage of some of the narrative possibilities set up by the previous season's "New Kid on The Block". I would say that "Marge on The Lam" is one of the most egregiously overlooked episodes from David Mirkin's era as showrunner, but then it is a Marge episode, so that much should probably go without saying. This one, I feel, is predominantly remembered for arguably its most inexplicable gag, which comes up early on - Homer's mind-boggling misbelief that a night at the ballet consists of watching a miniature bear in a fez drive a car endlessly in circles. (On a personal level, the bear in the car stands out for being one of two Simpsons gags that drove BOTH of my parents absolutely crazy, because they couldn't even begin to fathom the logic behind the joke - if you're curious, the other was "He spelled Yale with a 6" from "Burns Baby Burns".) Actually, I think the funniest detail about Homer's bear fantasy has less to do with the sheer absurdity of his misconception (which Lenny apparently shares...must be something in the plant's drinking fountain) or even his drawn-out whistling of "Entry of The Gladiators", than it does the depressingly (upliftingly?) low turn-out he visualises for the bear's performance. I've no doubt that this was a case of the animators looking to cut corners, as opposed to any intentional comedic choices, but it's a brilliant touch nevertheless.

When I covered "New Kid on The Block" earlier this spring, I noted that as an episode it feels like it ought to have had greater consequence than it ultimately did. It goes to the lengths of establishing a brand new set of neighbours for the Simpsons (even jettisoning the Winfields in the process - a sacrifice that was technically never necessary, as they weren't established to be the family's immediate neighbours in prior appearances) and showcasing the various rapports between the respective family members, only for single mother Ruth Powers and her teenage daughter Laura to fizzle pretty much straight out the gate. "Marge on The Lam" is effectively our sequel to "New Kid on The Block", giving pay-off to Ruth (a returning  Pamela Reed) and building on the connection previously suggested between herself and Marge - all of which is accomplished beautifully, but this is also where her arc as a character culminates. Laura is mentioned, albeit not by name, and in some respects is integral to the plot (it's Mr Powers' failure to pay four months' worth of child support that prompts Ruth to make off with his car), but she's already out of the picture as an active presence (apparently, the Simpsons no longer use her babysitting services; it comes up in the plot that the children need a babysitter, and Laura's right next door the whole time, waiting for a naked talk show to come on, but isn't considered as an option). Ruth, for the time being, is holding on, and about to attain the exceptionally challenging feat of getting Marge to embrace the world far beyond her comfort zone. And if you thought Jacques introduced Marge to life on the fast lane, that's nothing compared to the wild ride Ruth's about to take her on. It's a slippery slope all the way over the edge, which begins with Ruth convincing Marge to stay out after 21:30, then showing her how to fire a gun, and finally persuading her to accompany her on an adrenalin-packed flight from the law. Uncommon character team-ups abound all over the episode, Marge's adventure being interwoven with a B-story in which Homer gets to do some unlikely bonding of his own with Police Chief Wiggum. There's also a C-story, in which Bart, Lisa and Maggie are left at home with the dubious oversight of Lionel Hutz (or Miguel Sanchez, as he'd now prefer us to call him), who shows up rather randomly and inserts himself into the dealings for the sake of earning eight dollars, two popsicles and a dented birdcage. The episode doesn't have time to do much with this particular narrative thread outside of a few brief cutaway gags, but Hutz's presence proves indispensable to the resolution. A good deal of care went into structuring this one.

A great part of my appreciation for "Marge on The Lam" stems from that fact that it is fundamentally about Marge embarking on a friendship, something that happens with distressing rarity in the Simpsons universe. Think about it - in the three and a half year gap between "Life on The Fast Lane" and "Marge on The Lam", how many episodes had we had that were centred on Marge going out and experiencing any kind of meaningful social interaction outside of her family? The only other that fits the bill would be "A Streetcar Named Marge" of Season 4, which gave her a welcome opportunity to rub shoulders with various Springfieldians, but didn't really dwell on the possibility of her developing a tighter bond with any of them. The art class she attended in "Brush With Greatness" possibly qualifies, but there I didn't get the sense that she was in it for the social aspect. It begs the question as to what this show has against the idea of Marge having friends? I get that, to an extent, Marge's loneliness and her near-total absorption in her chaotic family is integral to her characterisation; it is, nevertheless, a shame that the series was often content to limit her to that vital but thankless role as her family's emotional adhesive, when she has so much wisdom and compassion to share around. A more cynical perspective, but one I suspect contains more than a nugget of truth, would be that the Simpsons writing team was made up of predominantly male staff, and they weren't within their element writing female friendships. We'd already seen one prior example of the show touching on such a narrative development but failing to fully realise it in "Marge in Chains" of Season 4 where Marge's unlikely bond with Phillips arrives too late for it to go anywhere beyond a handful of brief verbal exchanges. A wasted opportunity, that one. Still, the sparsity of such stories means that, whenever Marge does go out and gets to discover more of the world beyond Evergreen Terrace, and that hidden potential she's always had inside of her, it always feels like such a revelation.

In some respects I'm inclined to see "Marge on The Lam" as less a sequel to "New Kid on The Block" than the last (and most successful) of a spiritual trilogy of episodes that began with "Homer Alone" of Season 3 and continued with "Marge in Chains". What these episodes have in common is that they all entail Marge ending up on the wrong side of the law, whether purposely or not. The notion of Marge, an upstanding citizen for whom keeping her family's various excesses and eccentricities in check is basically a full-time job, even being perceived as a lawbreaker seems inherently startling. And yet these episodes are at their most interesting wherever they suggest that Marge, for all of her natural cautiousness, harbors a latent affinity with the transgressor; that there is something deep within her that's not only passionate and powerful but very wilfully rebellious. Admittedly, this is not an idea that either "Homer Alone" or "Marge in Chains" ran particularly far with. In the former, she started her rebellion by blocking the Springfield Memorial Bridge and ended it by ordering a hot fudge sundae and tequila, an indulgence that is posited as an act of insurrection through its juxtaposition with Marge watching none other than Thelma & Louise. The implication is that Marge identifies with these women, but their assumption of the open road and the liberative possibilities it offers is safely retained within the realm of media fantasy; for Marge, a bubble bath and a wad of junk food is about as far as she can realistically hope to take those urges. "Marge in Chains", for the most part, has no higher narrative ambitions than to fart around the courtroom with Lionel Hutz, but the friendship Marge forges with Phillips - the only bright spot in an episode otherwise dedicated to all of Springfield being phenomenally shitty to Marge and then being forgiven way too easily at the end - is a nice bit of confirmation that she is capable of empathy for those whose own bad relationship choices have led them down darker paths than herself. In Phillips' case, very dark, since she claims to have killed her husband with a screwdriver, although we never learn about the circumstances of her crime (murder or manslaughter?), and Marge is able to suspend her judgements to connect with Phillips as a person. In Season 6, we'd get "The Springfield Connection", an episode where Marge actually becomes a part of the law for a change, and while it is a fine installment on its own terms, there's a part of me that can't help but see it as a betrayal of the fact that, elsewhere, Marge feels like such a natural born outlaw. When Lisa asks about the police being a protective force that maintains the status quo for the wealthy elite...yeah, Marge's response makes for a perfectly funny gag, but after everything she went through in "Alone", "Chains" and "Lam" I would expect her to be fully attuned to what Lisa is saying. The way to look at it is that, wherever she stands, Marge possesses a desire to right the injustices of the world; it's in "Lam" that she most displays the wisdom that law and justice are not necessarily one and the same, and that standing up for the vulnerable and disadvantaged sometimes requires you to go against authority.

Another concern nestled somewhere within the narrative fabric of "Marge on The Lam" is the possibility that Marge might even have been Ruth, under slightly different circumstances. With Phillips, her situation didn't seem quite so interchangeable (it is hard to imagine Marge killing Homer with a screwdriver, no matter how trying their marriage might get), but with Ruth there's a more obvious parallel to be drawn between the two women and their respective dissatisfactions with the cards life has dealt them. Despite inciting much of the narrative action, Mr Powers never appears on screen, but Ruth's testimony implies that we are to see him as a sleazier version of Homer - according to her, all he ever did was eat, sleep and drink beer (admittedly, that's a little different to what we heard in "New Kid on The Block", where Ruth indicated that her marriage broke down because her husband prioritised his working life over their relationship, ie: the one thing that's obviously not the issue with Homer and Marge). Still, it would be a stretch to call "Lam" a marital crisis episode, and I think that even calling it a Homer/Marge relationship episode would be only half-true. Something I find a trifle questionable about Nathan Rabin's review of the episode on the AV Club is the way he manages to frame the entire story as being about the "intense neediness at the core of Homer’s love for Marge" (then again, he opens with the admission that he isn't so enraptured with the Marge and Lisa episodes, which puts us automatically at odds). And while, yes, there is that element of it, I don't think it is the episode's primary concern. C'mon, is there not something a little disheartening in the notion of Marge's journey of self-discovery having to be filtered through the lens of how Homer perceives her (particularly in a story that gives her the rare opportunity to be defined by a relationship outside of her household)? Rather, I think a central irony at the heart of "Lam" is in the way Homer insists on projecting his own guilt and insecurities onto Marge's narrative, when in actuality it's barely connected to him at all. When Marge makes her all-important decision to stick with Ruth and see through her clash with the law to the finish, she does so not because she identifies with Ruth's struggle against her ex-husband, but because she recognises it as her responsibility as a friend. A failed ballet appointment might have gotten Dillinger started down his life of crime (at least according to Wiggum). But Marge? She was merely being a good waffle.

Marge's relationship with Homer definitely forms part of the backdrop to "Lam", and somewhere at the back of her head, she is implied to have been grappling with the question as to whether or not she got a more-or-less decent deal in attaching herself to Homer, particularly in light of what Ruth is going through with Mr Powers. Yet she seems entirely resigned to her domestic situation either way, her annoyance with Homer not appearing to weigh too consciously on the really essential choices she makes throughout. If writer Bill Canterbury intended for that moment toward the end, when Marge tells Ruth, "You're right, I am lucky to have him", to be one of major emotional revelation...he maybe took the wind out of its sails by having Marge profess to be lucky (that exact word) in her home life when rebuffing the attentions of a couple of rednecks a little earlier. If anything, (the flashback with the skunk notwithstanding) "Lam" downplays Homer's aggravations as a partner, making the seemingly deliberate decision to keep his ill-treatment of Marge as mild as possible so as to create more of a contrast between him and the invisible Mr Powers. The first act involves Homer disappointing Marge by failing to accompany her to a local ballet performance (after realising that it has nothing to do with watching little bears drive around in cars), yet I don't get the sense that Marge is too steamy about this, once she's salvaged the evening by going with Ruth instead. And the script makes it clear that Homer had fully intended to keep his appointment, even if he blew it through inevitably ridiculous means (getting his hands "trapped" inside two vending machines). He later objects to Marge spending a second evening with Ruth, something that could come off as potentially really dickish and controlling (particularly given how infrequently Marge gets to go out with friends), although it's played as him being more like a dog with separation anxiety - Marge going out and having fun with her new friend forces him to confront the painful truth that, outside of her, his life is also kind of empty and unfulfilling. Seeking an exhilarating evening of his own, one of his first instincts is to head to his usual social hang-out at Moe's, buoyantly reiterating the lyrics to the theme from Cheers, only to walk in and immediately see it for the depressing hole it really is. Moe won't even allow Homer to play darts, on the grounds that, "People drink less when they're having fun."

As seems befitting for an episode modelled on Thelma & Louise, the subversion of gender expectations provides a comic through line for "Lam" - Patty and Selma show up purely so that the former can dismiss ballet as "girls' stuff", and we later get that hilarious sequence where Homer telephones various male Springfieldians in the hopes of finding someone to join him on his own boys' night out. In contrast to the colourful time that Marge and Ruth are having of it in the wider world, the men are all stuck indoors, their plans for the evening very much bound within the sphere of domesticity. It begins with an odd moment where we see Lenny turn him down on the grounds that he's embarking on that most traditionally masculine of pursuits ("watching the game"), when in actuality he's sheepishly shaving the legs of some mystery woman (presumably intended to be his wife, before they decided he didn't have one), and doing a really terrible job of it too. Although that pales next to the bizarre window we're about to get into the private life of Mr Burns, here seen emulating the lifestyle of a stereotypical teenage girl. Burns initially seems up for a night on the town, until it occurs to him to ask who's calling (shoot, that Homer/Burns buddy subplot sounded like fun). Out of desperation, Homer even considers reaching out to his demure neighbour Ned, only to decide that he isn't quite that desperate and to hang up the instant he hears his voice.

Homer's arc in the middle act works as its own understated bit of beauty because it is such an honest reflection of the way life tends to go once you've hit your mid-30s - most of the friendships you forged in your teens and 20s will have long since run their course, whoever's still around will probably require three weeks' notice before committing to any kind of social outing, and so often you're down to a choice between a solitary stroll in the darkness or an evening in front of the artificial blare of the television. It's something they didn't tell you in The Sunscreen Song. Marge's taking of Ruth to the hilltop where she used to date Homer early into their relationship signifies the promise in the realisation of a brand new bond (something reinforced when Homer thinks of going to the same venue and, apparently failing to recognise Marge, mistakes them for a young lesbian couple), but for Homer it's a retreat into nostalgia, a reminder that he's at a social dead-end and has nowhere to go outside of Marge.

"Lam" takes its time in getting to the Thelma & Louise pursuit, which doesn't actually kick in until the final act. Until then, Marge's evening with Ruth builds at a relatively relaxed pace, giving the two women a couple of quiet moments in which to forge their connection, but is, all the while, tempered by this additional subtext, in that the evening is constantly threatening to take a more dangerous turn than it actually does. There are a number of uneasy allusions regarding what could go wrong for Marge in this precarious new world, but doesn't. One of these occurs when Marge and Ruth go to an ultra-90s underground club, where Marge is approached by none other than Diamond Joe Quimby, decked out in in luminous body paint, who tells her that he's there with his nephews. "Oh, that's nice," says Marge. Little does she know. Nothing untoward happens at the club, and Quimby himself is perfectly amicable. But given that his character was modelled on John F Kennedy, the mention of his nephews is definitely intended to raise a few hairs, by putting viewers in mind of the then-recent case of William Kennedy Smith. In 1991 Smith was charged, tried and ultimately acquitted of an allegation of sexual assault, said to have occurred following a boys' night out he was embarking on with his uncle Senator Ted Kennedy and cousin Patrick J Kennedy at the Au Bar nightclub in Palm Beach, Florida (The Simpsons' interest in the Smith case would resurface, more prominently, at the end of the season in "The Boy Who Knew Too Much", with Freddy Quimby serving as a stand-in for Smith). In another scene, more directly suggested by the events of Thelma & Louise, Marge is approached by a couple of patrons at the Sh_t Kickers bar, who proposition her in distinctly menacing tones, only to back down with a whiplash graciousness when she rejects their advances. The implicit threat of sexual assault, whether directed at Marge or otherwise, is present in both instances, yet it ends up being either glossed over or diverted entirely; the joke is that everyone Marge encounters on her nocturnal voyage is just too improbably polite to follow things through to the insinuated conclusion. It's all followed by a scene where Marge and Ruth go out to a secluded field and Ruth reveals to Marge that she has a gun. This puts Marge in an oddly paranoid mode ("You're not going to hunt me down for sport, are you?"), but apparently all Ruth wants to do is to fire at some tin cans and let off steam about her husband. We'd expect the gun to have some kind of plot significance later down the line (they don't call it Chekhov's Gun for nothing) and it does...but that payoff takes the form of a very silly gag right before the final fade-out, in which the wanton destruction of antique cans ends up being the social violation that wreaks all of the consequences. On the whole, the world beyond Marge's doorstep seems a mite too tame and complaisant for the kind of ugly hostility that spurred Thelma and Louis's transformation to ever enter into it. The nastiest thing going on is the dispute between Ruth and Mr Powers, and that happens largely off of screen.

This culture of incongruous politeness continues into the early stages of the climactic chase (which Homer gets dragged into, since he happens to be bumming a ride off Wiggum at the time). Like everything else in "Lam", it comes down to a series of misunderstandings. Wiggum decides to pull Ruth over for the most ridiculously arbitrary of reasons (the left tail-light on her car is a little smaller than the right) and has no idea that the car is stolen. And when the pursuit gets underway, Wiggum adds his own soundtrack in the form of "Sunshine. Lollipops and Rainbows" by Lesley Gore, a callback to an earlier gag where Ruth used the same track as an accidental tone-setter for her evening with Marge. The callback is an inspired slice of absurdity, but it's also where the omnipresent affability slips over into something a notch more troubling. Amid those upbeat bubblegum vibes is a clear indifference, on Wiggum's part, toward what Ruth is actually up against. For Wiggum, the prospect of an old-fashioned car chase is one to be relished; for Ruth it's where her act of desperation is forced to come to a head.

When Marge and Ruth get as far as fleeing the police and attempting to disappear into the far horizon, the message seems to be that the horizon isn't there; the time of the outlaw came and went long ago, and there's nowhere left to disappear into, even in the sense that Thelma and Louise did. Unlike the movie it's spoofing, "Lam" does not end with the protagonists realising that they cannot go back, that their only option is to "keep going", even if that means going directly over a cliff edge. By the rules of the Simpsons universe, we know that Marge at least has to end up right back where she started; as for Ruth, she might introduce Marge to the thrills of 22:00 coffee and underground raves, but by her own admission, she envies the stability of Marge's home life. Ruth is savvy, streetwise and possesses a knowledge of the wider world that Marge does not, but she's shown to be rather desperate and directionless. The futility of her rebellion is underscored when Marge asks Ruth why she didn't simply report her ex-husband to the authorities, and her response is, "You're the level-headed friend I never had." (Actually, I think the answer to Marge's question is implicit enough in the adjacent display of incompetence from Wiggum happening just up the road; the odds are good that the police would have let Ruth down.)  What was meant to be a liberating evening of discovery for Marge is revealed to have all along been a cry for help from Ruth; presumably, she wasn't planning on the high-speed chase, but she has nevertheless tempted fate by driving the stolen car all over Springfield, and by taking Marge along, roped her unwittingly into becoming her accomplice. Ruth's motive for doing so is that she urgently needs someone to stand beside her in fighting back against her husband. Marge's first instinct is to offer a response that's reassuring but non-committal (by which she means her trademark murmur), but eventually realises that commitment is precisely what's required in a friendship and jumps back into Ruth's corner with both feet.

Still, for all the newfound resolve with which Marge assumes her position as Ruth's partner in crime, there is another irony, in that their devotion to the life of the outlaw is nowhere near as hardcore as their pursuers presuppose. When the chase reaches its climax and the women's only recourse is to literally go over the edge in the form of a nearby chasm, they actually have no idea of what lies ahead of them; this too is a silly misunderstanding, with Homer once again insisting on making this all about him. Not only is he wrong about the women's intentions, he offers a rather passive-aggressive supposition of their motives: "They're gonna drive right into to it just to teach us men a lesson!" That would be a gross misinterpretation of why Thelma and Louise made the decision they did at the end of their film, in which the infamous departure sequence seemed consciously reminiscent of that of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (1969) - in both cases, we leave with the understanding that the title characters died within the narrative action, but the technique of closing on a freeze frame allows us to see them as having attained a kind of symbolic immortality, so that they may live forever in their moment of all or nothing defiance. In the case of Thelma & Louise, the car has just begun its downward trajectory as we freeze and fade out, but still appears airborne; it is important that the characters' story ends not with death, but with flight. The spoof in Wayne's World 2, while funny on its own terms, doesn't really reflect that - there, it's played as an ending of overwhelming despair, not triumphant liberation. Homer's reading is even more egregious, since he perceives the apparent action as being performed out of spite, defined intrinsically in terms of how the men are going to react, as opposed to the women making a decision in terms of what they want for themselves. Male hand-wringing about a perceived female uprising forms part of a running gag throughout the third act, with Homer's misconstruing and Brockman's hysterical take on Marge and Ruth's rebellion as carrying apocalyptic implications ("It's in Revelations, people!") indicating that we are to interpret "Lam" as as much a parody of the furore Thelma & Louise generated on release as a pastiche of the film itself.

In the end, the chasm doesn't even offer symbolic liberation, as it did in Scott's picture. Marge and Ruth realise where they're headed and slam on the brakes in the nick of time, only for Wiggum to fail to take the same action and to send himself and Homer flying over instead. Theirs is definitely not a conscious bid for freedom, in which the characters wholeheartedly embrace the mythos of the American outlaw, but an act of random incompetence, as is the Springfieldian way. Likewise, their salvation arises through the mindless desecration of that mythical American horizon - the fade-in reveals that their fall was broken by a vast heap of rubbish dumped into the once-magnificent chasm. There is no flight for Homer and Wiggum, merely a dragging back down to Earth, head-first into the grotesque overspilling of society's messiness, which now permeates every inch of the natural habitat that formerly served the outlaw so well.

With the Thelma & Louise trajectory complete, "Lam" has something of an unsettling epilogue, in the way characteristically favoured by Season 5. It's a parody of the detective series Dragnet, which might be a bit confusing if you're unfamiliar with that series, but provides an efficient and succinct means of wrapping up the episode's various loose ends swiftly, so that even Hutz's random involvement gets a satisfying payoff. We learn that, in spite of her misgivings that the odds were stacked against her, due process actually served Ruth pretty well in the end - the auto theft charges were ultimately dropped and her ex-husband was ordered to pay the full sum he owed her in child support. Lest we be tempted to see this as a vindication of the legal system, the outcome is heavily implied to have hinged upon Mr Powers' poor choice of legal representative (maybe Hutz - Miguel Sanchez? - should stick to babysitting; at least the house didn't completely disintegrate with him in charge). What happens to Marge and Homer is altogether more perturbing. Marge, unlike Ruth, is forced to pay dearly for the embracing of her latent rebel, but it's for the dumbest transgression possible - her destruction of those antique cans (shouldn't Ruth have been charged with that too? She shot more than her fair share of cans), for which she is made to cough up fifty cents for the cost of the cans, and two thousand dollars in punitive damages and mental anguish. Ouch. Still, that's less ridiculous and infuriating than what she went through in "Marge In Chains" (a custodial sentence for stealing a bottle of Kentucky bourbon? Are you kidding me?). As for Homer, we learn that he was "remanded to the custody of the United States Army Neurochemical Research Centre at Fort Meade, Maryland for extensive testing" - a development that doesn't seem quite so baffling once you've connected it to a gag from the first act, when we learn that Homer once volunteered for an army experiment to get out of an evening with Patty and Selma, a move that might have entailed two or three lingering side-effects. As another ludicrous action that reaps disturbing last-minute consequences, it makes sense (enough). But still, what a note to take us out on.

For the episode's cynicism as to what the wider world has left to offer for the outlaw, it proves invaluable as the one place in which Marge and Ruth were able to enjoy an emotional connection. That is the tragedy of "Marge on the Lam". A return to normalcy unfortunately means that their bond cannot endure; the series' regular cast just wasn't willing to accommodate Ruth in the long-term. "Lam" would be her last speaking appearance for some years and, far from going out in a blaze of gravity-defying glory, she wound up slipping away quietly into background cameo limbo. Too bad, because all those wacky shenanigans involving bears in cars, weather station vandalism and Lesley Gore couldn't overshadow the fact that "Lam" is, at its core, a rare Simpsons episode that actively celebrates female friendship. In that sense, the road leading away from Springfield still represents freedom, another alternate universe in which Marge's excursion with Ruth could have been the start of something much bigger for her, and not just a temporary reprieve from the monotony. Alas, there isn't much room for Marge to spread her wings under this sun, except in these stolen outliers.