Plot
Homer decides to take Marge and the kids down to Bloodbath Gulch, a ghost town turned tourist destination. On their way there, Homer's car breaks down, right in front of the Springfield Retirement Castle, leaving Grampa to assume that they have come to visit him on his birthday. Homer tries his hardest to start the car up again, but is eventually forced to take Grampa with them after he is able to reach them. While in the town bar, Grampa drinks too much sarsaparilla and just as the family is leaving, says he needs to go to the bathroom. Homer refuses to stop, saying that he needs to get home in time to watch an episode of Inside the Actors Studio featuring F. Murray Abraham. Grampa is forced to hold it in for hours and as a result, his kidneys explode. Dr. Hibbert informs the family that Grampa does not have much time to live, and that the only way he can be saved is if Homer donates one of his kidneys. Homer happily agrees, and is admired and pampered for it by his wife and kids. However, he becomes frightened after finding out about the risks involved in the operation and, while he makes it to the hospital, jumps out a window at the last minute.
Guilt-ridden and ashamed, Homer deems himself unworthy of living amongst civilized people and decides to start a new life at sea, climbing aboard the Captain McAllister's ship, described as "the ship of lost souls" (though the back of the ship reads, "Honeybunch", because Captain McAllister never painted over the name). While there, he meets several strange people including a man who looks and sounds like Peter Lorre, who have their own tales of misery. After Homer tells them how he promised his father one of his kidneys, but ran away and left him to die, they are angered and disgusted (including the French concertina player who stole his instrument from a blind monkey) and throw him into the ocean. Homer eventually drifts back to shore, where he witnesses a father and son build a sand castle and laments how he never had such a relationship with his own father or his kids. Homer decides determinedly to rectify his mistake and takes off for the hospital, trampling the sand castle in the process.
Homer arrives in time, reconciling with Grampa and apologizing for his behavior, but ultimately he panics and flees again when Dr. Hibbert says "...this may sting a little". Homer's mad dash from the hospital is stopped by an oncoming truck. While the driver (Hans Moleman) manages to hit the brakes just in time, one of the cars it was carrying slides off and lands on Homer. Homer later wakes up in traction in a hospital bed, and is greeted by Dr. Hibbert, Marge and the kids. Believing Grampa is dead, Homer sadly vows to visit his grave after he gets better. However Grampa, who is alive and well, appears in the doorway and declares that he has never felt better. From the sheepish look of the others in the room, Homer looks down and discovers that, while he was unconscious, they took out one of his kidneys. Angry at first, Homer vows to get it back, but settles down after his family tells him that he did the right thing for Grampa. They engage in a group hug, and Homer proceeds to consider Bart as a potential donor for himself.
Read more about this topic: Homer Simpson In: "Kidney Trouble"
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“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 was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“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)