Plot
A heat wave in Springfield leads Bart and Lisa to persuade Homer into getting a swimming pool; to avoid months of nagging, he gives in easily. Word soon spreads that the Simpsons have a pool and every child in the town comes to use the new facility. After being dared, Bart attempts an ambitious dive into the pool from the top of his treehouse, but gets distracted by Nelson, and falls and breaks his leg. This forces him to spend the rest of the summer wearing a cast and, unable to socialize with the other children, he retreats to his bedroom. His isolation slowly makes him more and more irritable and paranoid. Lisa loans Bart her telescope to entertain him. Soon, Bart hears a girlish scream next door, and witnesses Ned Flanders burying something in his backyard and screaming "I'm a murderer." He becomes convinced that Flanders has murdered his wife Maude, and vows to reveal the truth.
Meanwhile, Lisa basks in the glow of her new popularity. However, Martin Prince gets a larger pool, and everyone abandons Lisa, leaving her inside the empty pool with no idea of getting out. After apologizing to her brother for neglecting him, Bart asks her to go and look for evidence of the murder while Ned is out of the house. When Ned returns early, Lisa becomes trapped in the Flanders house, eventually being cornered in the attic; Bart painfully makes his way over there by himself, just in time to discover that Ned was actually putting away an axe, not threatening Lisa with it. Maude, as it turns out, is alive and well, and had just gone to Bible camp for the weekend, learning to be more judgmental. The victim of Ned's "murder" was merely her favorite ficus plant, and the girlish scream actually came from Ned himself. Meanwhile, the pool at Martin's breaks after being crammed with too many children, and everyone abandons him, although Nelson takes the time to steal his bathing suit first, leaving him standing naked in the wreckage of the pool.
Read more about this topic: Bart Of Darkness
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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