Plot
The Simpsons go out to dinner at a new steakhouse whose existence Lisa is protesting, where Homer enters a challenge with a truck driver named Red Barclay. Homer and Red compete to see who can eat the 16-pound steak, "Sir Loin-a-Lot" first. Red wins the challenge, but dies from beef poisoning according to Dr. Hibbert. Homer decides to finish Red's last delivery and brings Bart along with him, leaving the rest of the family behind. In his absence, Marge feels that Homer always gets to go on better adventures while she is left at home; she decides to be adventurous herself and goes to buy a musical doorbell which plays the song "(They Long to Be) Close to You". After installing despite Marge's insistence that they should let visitors do the ringing first, Lisa rings the doorbell. However, the doorbell starts to malfunction and repeatedly plays the song.
Meanwhile, Homer falls asleep and wakes up abruptly at the wheel of the truck due to taking both pep pills — which are of such power that the Congress is "falling all over themselves in Washington to outlaw these things" — and sleeping pills that he bought at a general store. He awakes to discover that the truck drove by itself with its Navitron Autodrive system. He informs other truck drivers, who inform him that he cannot let anyone know about the Autodrive system because it would make all truck drivers lose their jobs. However, Homer tells a passing bus about the system. Back in Springfield, Marge's attempt to cut the wires to the doorbell fails since Homer traded their tools for confectionery. She pulls out a wire, which instead causes the doorbell to play faster and louder, disturbing the neighborhood.
Meanwhile, an angry mob of truckers get in a showdown with Homer, and he survives without the autodrive system. Homer and Bart arrive in Atlanta to finish the shipment on time, and then commandeer a train to Springfield. Back at the Simpson house, the doorbell store's mascot, Señor Ding-Dong, appears and uses his whip to silence the doorbell and stops Wiggum from shooting the doorbell.
Read more about this topic: Maximum Homerdrive
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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“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)