There are five members of the titular suburban clan in The Simpsons, but fans often forget about the youngest child, Maggie, because she’s a baby, and not the talking kind like Family Guy’s Stewie Griffin. It’s not easy to craft a compelling story around a character who’s constantly sucking on a pacifier. But from shooting Mr. Burns to outsmarting Lisa, Maggie has been the focus of some really great episodes of the show.
While the majority of classic Simpsons episodes revolve around the family members who can talk, there are plenty of hilarious Maggie-centric storylines for fans of Homer and Marge’s youngest kid.
Lisa has to go undercover as a young nun when Maggie is accidentally left on a convent's doorstep in the season 20 episode “Gone Maggie Gone.”
Meanwhile, Marge has lost her vision and until it returns, Homer and Bart run elaborate schemes to convince her that Maggie is still in the house.
Simon Cowell guest-starred as a Simon Cowell-esque talent judge in “Smart & Smarter,” except instead of judging aspiring singers’ talent, he judges the intelligence of all the applicants at a prestigious kindergarten.
Lisa begins to feel inferior when Cowell determines Maggie to be a genius who will eventually grow up to outsmart her older sister.
After Homer’s wealthy long-lost brother Herb was ruined by Homer’s inane automobile design, he returned in the season 3 episode “Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?” to try to win back his fortune with a device that translates baby talk.
While he’s designing the prototype, he uses Maggie’s baby talk to program it. Danny DeVito’s second guest appearance on The Simpsons was just as hilarious as his first.
Homer becomes a local celebrity in season 11’s “Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder” after bowling a perfect 300 game. However, when his fame begins to fade, he seeks meaning elsewhere.
This is when it becomes a Maggie episode, as Homer sees Ron Howard taking his kids to the zoo and tries to bond with his infant daughter for the first time.
The main storyline of season 4’s “A Streetcar Named Marge” revolves around Marge starring in a musical adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. But when she’s at rehearsals, she drops Maggie off at the Ayn Rand School for Tots, setting up a hilarious B-plot for the Simpson baby.
The strict owner of the daycare confiscates the kids’ pacifiers, and in a spoof of The Great Escape (complete with its iconic theme tune), Maggie liberates them. When Homer picks up Maggie, he’s freaked out by a roomful of eerily silent babies sucking on pacifiers, à la the final scene of Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Homer’s reckless driving causes Maggie to soar out of her baby seat and through the sunroof at the same time Moe is about to jump off a bridge in season 14’s “Moe Baby Blues.” When Moe catches Maggie, he inadvertently saves the baby’s life.
After this, Moe and Maggie become the best of friends. Homer and Marge are concerned about the amount of time the bartender is spending with their baby but warm to him when he saves her from a mafia shootout.
Homer and Marge are deemed unfit parents in “Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily” when Grampa is found asleep during a babysitting gig and Bart and Lisa are sent home from school with headlice.
The Simpson kids are adopted by Ned and Maude Flanders. Bart and Lisa are old enough to remember that they’re Simpsons, but Maggie starts to morph into a Flanders.
The season 6 finale and season 7 premiere make up the first and, so far, only two-part episode of The Simpsons. “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” is an obvious lampoon of the “Who shot J.R.?” debate that rocked the Dallas fanbase following the third-season finale “A House Divided.”
At the end of the first part, Mr. Burns riles the whole town, then gets shot by an unseen assailant. The second part focuses on the ensuing investigation, which finds Maggie to be the guilty party.
In a parody of Citizen Kane, Mr. Burns remembers his childhood teddy bear Bobo and sets about tracking it down. It shows up in a bag of ice cubes at the Kwik-E-Mart and Maggie quickly takes a shine to it. Maggie refuses to give away the bear, so Burns pulls out all the stops to try to get it back.
The episode has plenty of great moments, like Homer eating 64 slices of American cheese and one-term U.S. presidents getting turned away from Mr. Burns’ birthday party.
When looking through the family photos in season 6’s “And Maggie Makes Three,” Bart and Lisa notice that there are no pictures of Maggie in any of the albums. So, Homer and Marge tell the story of Maggie’s unexpected arrival.
The episode closes with one of The Simpsons’ sweetest, most tear-jerking moments as Maggie’s pictures are revealed to be at Homer’s workstation, encouraging him to keep working for Mr. Burns for the baby’s sake.
