Plot
Homer takes his family to a company picnic given by his boss, Mr. Burns, and hopes they will not embarrass him. After Bart, Lisa and Marge all misbehave, Homer sees that Burns is drawn to a "normal" family that treats one another with respect, and he wonders why he is cursed with his troubled family.
Determined to improve his family's behavior, Homer takes them on a tour of the neighbourhood, peeking through living room windows to observe how happy families spend time together. Depressed by the outing, Homer stops by Moe's Tavern, where he sees a commercial for Dr. Marvin Monroe's Family Therapy Center. Dr. Monroe guarantees "family bliss or double your money back."
Homer makes an appointment at the clinic and pays for it by pawning their television. Dr. Monroe encourages the family to express their unhappiness and release their hostility toward one another through several exercises. When these methods prove ineffective the doctor takes them all to a generator, allowing them to deliver electric shocks to each other. The family shocks one another to the point of causing a power drain on the city and driving the doctor's other patients away. Unable to help them, Dr. Monroe gives the Simpsons double their money back. With a fresh sense of family unity, they use the money to buy a new television set.
Read more about this topic: There's No Disgrace Like Home
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)