Springfield has one less resident.
The Simpsons, the iconic long-running sitcom on FOX, officially killed off a recurring character on its Nov. 16 episode.
The beginning of the episode, “Sashes to Sashes,” saw the death of recurring character Alice Glick, the organist at the First Church of Springfield.
It happened in the episode’s opening scene when the organ unexpectedly blasts during a sermon by Reverend Lovejoy is unexpectedly interrupted during his sermon.
“Oh, come on now, Alice, that’s a bit much,” Lovejoy says before realizing something is wrong. “Alice?”
A shot then cuts to Alice keeled over on the organ keys with her tongue hanging out. Simpsons co-executive producer Tim Long told Entertainment Weekly that the character’s death is permanent.
“In a sense, Alice the organist will live forever, through the beautiful music she made,” he said in a statement. “But in another, more important sense, yep, she’s dead as a doornail.”
Alice first appeared in the season 2 episode “Three Men and a Comic Book” in 1991, in which Cloris Leachman provided her voice. She was subsequently voiced by Tress MacNeille.
She’s been in background of dozens of episodes, often with a toothless laugh, but its unclear how many episodes she was actually in.
Alice, one of more than 700 named characters in the show, previously died in the season 23 episode “Replaceable You” in 2011, in which a Robotic pet killed her at the Springfield Retirement Castle.
Since its debut in 1989, 797 episodes of the show have been broadcast. It is the longest-running American animated series, longest-running American sitcom, and the longest-running American scripted primetime television series, both in seasons and individual episodes.
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