Hi there everyone, and welcome back to another week of Lifetime of Simpsons. I’m back from my brief and accidental birthday break to begin our final year of Lifetime of Simpsons. We’re in the home stretch! And folks, we’re in for a very strange week. I’m not quite sure what was going on around this time, but this week’s episodes are buck-wild insane. So strap in, it’s gonna get weird.

The episode starts off with Mr. Smithers getting through several intense layers of security to access a supply closet in the Nuclear Plant. He takes the single paper clip he needed, and then leaves the closet, not realizing that he knocked over an inanimate carbon rod, which rolls and props the door open. Which means that access to all the wonderful office goods is now open to all the kleptomaniacs who work at the Plant.

Homer notices the door first, and puts out a call to arms, telling all of the other employees that it’s high-time to steal as much stuff as they can carry. This creates a feeding-frenzy, with every single employee bursting into the closet, and stealing everything that’s not nailed down. They then escalate to just stealing all sorts of stuff, stuffing their trunks and driving off in the middle of the day. Which is when disaster strikes.

Because Mr. Burns happens upon the convoy of thieving cars, and causes Homer to panic. He peels away and manages to escape from the Plant, causing a massive pile-up from all the other employees. They’re then all caught, and punished by Burns. The next day everyone is forced to go to an all-employee meeting where Burns yells at them, while thanking Homer for being the only employee who didn’t steal anything, as far as he knows.

The other employees are obviously pissed at Homer for this scam, but Homer doesn’t really seem to care, because he gets a day off. And he knows exactly how to spend that day. Going fishing with Bart. The two head out to a lake and Homer shows him the fishing techniques that Grandpa taught him when he was a boy, while Homer brags about screwing over his colleagues, and mocking the idea of karma.

Which obviously is a red flag, because the next morning Homer wakes up with a horrible surprise. He’s peed the bed. Yep, Homer has wet the bed, and quickly starts panicking. He grabs the sheets and tries to hide the evidence, trying to tell Marge that he’s going to do the laundry for the first time in his life. However, this is not going to be enough, because the next morning Homer wakes up and finds that he’s peed the bed again. He’s pretty baffled by this, until some daydream of Apu arrives, and explains the concept of karma to him.

Homer decides that the reason he’s peeing the bed is because he’s guilty of screwing over his co-workers, so he figures the only way to fix it is to hold a big party for them. He invites every single employee in the Plant, and they have a great time. Homer plies them with food and booze, and they all end up forgiving him. So, Homer has rebalanced the universe, solving his karmic issues, and is surely done with this weird bed-wetting, right?

Nope! He wakes up the next morning just as wet, and just as confused. So Homer flips through the yellow-pages, finds a store that sells embarrassing things, and goes to buy an adult bed alarm. He sets it up that night, hoping that it’ll be discreet. It’s not. It loudly sets off an alarm that night, drawing the attention of Marge and the kids. Homer’s secret is finally revealed, and the family are more than a little concerned. And worried.

Homer doesn’t really want to get any help about this though, so he just starts to accept his life of bed-wetting and starts wearing adult diapers. This does not fly with Marge though, so one night while Homer is parading around in his diaper she heads out to wander the streets and think. Which is when she runs into Professor Frink, who is aware of Homer’s problem. And, he has a way to fix it, because Frink has created a machine that lets you enter and affect people’s dreams. Yep, things are about to become Inception.

Marge and Frink then head back to the Simpson’s house, and get everyone on board. They stick Homer on the couch, and all enter his dream while Frink monitors things in reality. The family is then sent into Homer’s dreams, where he’s skiing down a mountain, being chased by the Grim Reaper on a snowmobile, dragging a coffin. So yeah, there’s some stuff going on in Homer’s mind. The family help Homer chase the Reaper, and they end up finding that the coffin has the word ‘Marriage’ written on it. Awkward!

However, while learning what’s written on the coffin the family ends up flying off a cliff, which is when Frink tells that if they die in this dream they’ll die in real life. So, with no other alternative, they decide to use the dream machine in the dream, and go one level deeper. Which sends them to a world where they still look and sound like they did back in the Tracy Ulman Days. They family is then forced to go to a family therapist, where they decide to crack open the coffin. And, obviously, fish come erupting out of the coffin to the point that they start being crushed to death by fish. Which can only mean one thing!

They need to go deeper! This time they Incept into Lisa’s dream, and end up at the Globe Theater, ready to perform some Shakespeare. Which bored everyone, causing them to immediately Incept one more level. And for some reason this takes them to the bottom of Homer’s subconscious, where his deepest and darkest desires and motivations are kept. Which come in the form of a massive city made of food, alcohol, and lust. Neat!

Marge and the kids then decide that they need to hunt down the truth to the weird fish marriage stuff. But things aren’t going to go that easily. Because Homer has decided he doesn’t want to return to reality, and wants to live in his magic world forever. Oh, and back in Earth, the police have arrived to arrest Frink for illegal experimentation, and the dream machine gets damaged, causing all of the dream levels to start falling apart.

Everything is about to be destroyed, with Homer’s magical realm collapsing in on itself, when they’re suddenly saved by the Grim Reaper, from earlier. The Reaper brings them to a safe rooftop, where we learn something shocking. It isn’t the Grim Reaper, it’s Homer’s mother Mona. She’s still alive in Homer’s mind, and she’s here to make everything make sense. So she brings them into one of the last remaining buildings, which turns out to be a movie theater.

The family sit down to see a repressed memory that Mona has found. It’s of Homer going fishing with Abe when he was a kid while Mona stayed at the shore. Little Homer ends up messing everything up, causing the family to not have anything for dinner, and a fight to break out. Mona left shortly thereafter, and Homer has apparently always thought that he was responsible for causing the fight that broke up their marriage. So when Homer went fishing with Bart this memory started to resurface, and he ends up reverting to a childlike state, wetting the bed. However, as Homer is realizing all of this, Mona continues playing the memory, and shows that after Homer went to sleep that night they didn’t fight. Mona and Abe actually had a heart-to-heart, and Mona saw what a good dad Abe could be, justifying to her that she could leave. So it wasn’t Homer’s fault. This then magically fixes his issues, and they leave their levels of dream, coming back to reality. And there was no bed wetting. Success!

This is a very weird, but mostly pretty fun episode. I certainly enjoyed myself while watching it, even though it feels very weird that it was just a normal episode. Like, this was just a normal, non-Treehouse of Horror episode where the Simpsons parodied Inception and went into Homer’s dreams. That’s kind of odd, right? Eh, whatever, despite the whole Inception parody being a little dated by this time, it’s still a fun premise for the Simpsons to play around in. Especially getting to see them go back to their Tracy Ullman days and goof off in there. It’s fun. I was a little terrified when I was pulling up the info for this episode and saw Mona, worried that we were getting yet another terrible episode ruin the legacy of “Mother Simpson,” but I actually didn’t mind Mona’s presence in this episode. All in all it’s just kind of a fun, but forgettable episode. I enjoyed myself; I just probably won’t remember much about it in a couple weeks.

Take Away: Confronting mental issues and repressed memories can be beneficial, and ignoring them probably isn’t the best course of action.

“How I Wet Your Mother” was written by Billy Kimball and Ian Maxtone-Graham and directed by Lance Kramer, 2012.