Plot
After a series of distractions from Marge, Homer suddenly smells out the annual chili cook-off. Marge admits that she was trying to keep Homer from attending because of his drunken antics at the previous year's event (he jumped into a cotton candy machine, claiming he was a "puffy pink cloud"). She allows Homer to go, on the condition that he not drink any beer. At the cook-off, Homer demonstrates an extraordinary ability to withstand hot foods, until he falls victim to Chief Wiggum's chili which is spiked with "The Merciless Peppers of Quetzlzacatenango! Grown deep in the jungle primeval by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum". Homer tries one pepper but it burns the tip of his tongue. He runs to a beer vendor and attempts to drink several at once, just as Marge walks up and catches him. He instead drinks several cups of water, fuming about his humiliation.
After nearly drinking melted candle wax, Homer decides to coat his mouth with melted wax, enabling him to eat several of the peppers, leaving Wiggum and the crowd astonished. The peppers bring on a hallucination in which Homer is trapped in a bizarre fantasy world. He encounters a large snake, a gigantic butterfly and a tortoise, and he accidentally destroys the sun. He finally arrives at a large Mayan pyramid and meets his spirit guide or nahual—a coyote. The coyote advises Homer to find his soulmate, and questions Homer's assumption that he has already found her in Marge. Meanwhile, Marge hears of Homer's strange behavior and, believing he has broken his promise, drives home.
The next day, Homer regains his senses while lying in a golf course sand trap. He rationalizes his dream, comparing the desert he wandered in to the sand trap, and the talking coyote with a passing talking dog. (The dog says "Hi, Homer. Find your soulmate!", prompting Homer to observe that "there's no such thing as a talking dog", after which the dog barks, to which Homer replies, "Damn straight!") After returning home, he finds Marge angry with him for his embarrassing behavior at the cook-off. This leads to Homer making note of their fundamental personality differences, causing him to question if Marge is truly his soulmate, and he leaves. Filled with doubt, he searches elsewhere for a soulmate, yet fails in each instance.
Eventually he becomes convinced that a lighthouse keeper might be his soulmate, since they would both be theoretically lonely individuals; instead he finds the lighthouse is operated by a machine, EARL (Electronic Automatic Robotic Lighthouse). Seeing an approaching ship, Homer destroys the lighthouse's light in hopes that it will cause the boat to come closer and the people inside will befriend him. Marge arrives, having known exactly where Homer would go, and the pair realize that they really are soulmates. Marge quickly fixes the lighthouse so that the ship will not run into them, but it runs aground nearby, spilling its precious cargo of hot pants. The citizens of Springfield happily retrieve the pants while Marge and Homer embrace.
Read more about this topic: Insanity Pepper
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“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)