"We've no telephone and we've stopped opening our mail. You can't imagine how free we feel."
"Where some saw suffocation, Homer and Langley saw freedom."
— Fredrik Knudsen
The episode focuses on the Collyer Brothers, a pair of hoarder brothers who exemplified the Trash of the Titans trope within New York.
This episode provides examples of:
- Big Applesauce: The brothers were born and spent their entire lives in New York City, specifically Harlem which became the site of their notorious apartment.
- Booby Trap: Langley had set up some traps around the brownstone, with some designed to just alert the brothers while others were designed to kill and crush intruders under heaps of waste. Langley would later fall of victim to one of the lethal ones, where he would slowly suffocate while Homer was forced to listen.
- Collector of the Strange: While some of the things the Collyers hoarded were mundane items (like bowling balls, pianos and a bicycle), some of them were strange (like guns, baby carriages and a saw horse) and others were downright disturbing, like a full human skeleton, live cats, various human organs and the body of a two-headed infant (though it's worth noting that most of them likely came from their father, Herman).
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Both Collyer brothers suffer cruel and nasty deaths, Langley is suffocated by one of his own traps while Homer slowly starves to death, immobile and alone.
- Downer Ending: The first ever episode to end on one. It ends with Langley being killed in one of his own traps, and Homer starving to death. This is nothing to say of their image in pop culture being delusional psychotic hoarders.
- Eccentric Millionaire: The brothers were very well-off financially, enough to pay a seven-thousand dollar bill (equivalent to about one-hundred and forty thousand in modern currency) with spare cash and load their apartment with all sorts of bizarre items.
- Kissing Cousins: It's mentioned in passing, but the Collyers' parents (Herman and Susie) are noted to be first cousins.
- Loners Are Freaks: Homer and Langley are certainly seen this way due to their disinterest in any company but one another.
- Shrinking Violet: The brothers develop into extreme cases of this, doing just about anything to avoid crowds or attention, even walking six hours in the middle of the night just to get groceries.
- Shrouded in Myth: Part of what gained them such attention in their lifetime is that almost no one knew anything about them or their home and could only speculate about their behavior and why they engaged in it.
- Trash of the Titans: The Collyer Brothers are infamous for this trope, with their house being filled with mounds and mounds of various junk.
