Original air date: 12/9/1995
Terminal Stimpy: When Stimpy learns that he only has one life left, he goes through the five stages of accepting death.
Reverend Jack: Ren and Stimpy work for Reverend Jack Cheese preaching the joys of meat to the children of the world, but soon the Reverend goes insane and begins to think only about the meat. The Games artists' version of what happened when John K. was fired from the show.
"Terminal Stimpy" contains examples of:
- Bait-and-Switch:
- Stimpy's sixth death involved going outside "with wet hair during the Blizzard of '69". Rather than freezing to death as it implies, he just got hit by a bus.
- Stimpy breaks the gas pipes as he lights the furnace, which makes it look like he's going to lose his eighth life by getting burned up. He instead gets crushed by what appears to be a meteorite, which turns out to be a frozen chunk of horse manure dropped from an airplane.
- Brick Joke: Stimpy broke the gas pipes earlier in the episode. At the end, Ren and Stimpy light a candle in the gas-filled house and get blown up.
- Cats Have Nine Lives: And Stimpy's are almost used up.
- Cement Shoes: Stimpy lost his fourth life by wearing rainwear made of cement and sinking to the bottom of the sea, in order to "take care of Ren's gambling debts for him".
- Cutaway Gag: A series of them ensues as Stimpy recounts his previous deaths.
- Eleventy Zillion: Stimpy's answer to how many lives he has lost after getting hit by a bus (again)?Stimpy: Sixty-twelve! (holds up 3 fingers)
Ren: That's seven, you fathead. - Five Stages of Grief: Stimpy goes through this when he's down to only one life. One thing noticeable is that "Anger" is the first stage as opposed to "Denial" which here is instead the second.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: Stimpy, as part of the "Anger" grief stage, lashes at Ren for asking for toast, then politely asks his terrified friend what coffee he'd like.Stimpy: TOOOOOOAAAST?! HEEEERREE'S YOUR TOOASST!!! *smacks the toast in Ren's face*
- Interspecies Romance: Muddy Mudskipper shows Stimpy a picture of his "wife", a gorilla.
- Not Helping Your Case: When Stimpy freaks out at Ren eating a sandwich from the garbage.Ren: This sandwich is fresh. I just made it last week.
(cue Gross-Up Close-Up of the clearly-rotten sandwich) - O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Ren is clearly intimated when Stimpy lashes out at him for asking for toast, as part of the grief stage "Anger".
- Swallowed Whole: Stimpy's fifth death; he got eaten by a boa during their trip to the Amazon.
- Terrified of Germs: Stimpy becomes this when he's down to his last life.
- Visual Pun: For the third grief stage, "Bargaining", it shows Ren and Stimpy literally bargaining on furniture.
"Reverend Jack" contains examples of:
- Big "WHAT?!": Cow does this when Reverend Jack starts bad-mouthing his species (followed by his "Moo" Verbal Tic, of course).
- Bittersweet Ending: Ren and Stimpy perform puppet shows that children enjoy, but Reverend Jack heckles and throws stones at them as they perform. This is in fact a nod to the show, which continued without Kricfalusi, but gained him as their biggest critic.
- Bowdlerization: The original airing had a scene where the reverend performs a ceremony by putting sandwiches on Ren and Stimpy's heads while reciting faux-Catholic chants. On Nicktoons and the DVD, it's replaced by a shot of the meat truck and the dialogue was shortened.
- Call-Back: When the police officer pulls the meat truck over, he points out the circus midgets stuck to the grill.
- Captain Ersatz: Personality wise, Jack Cheese is a parody of John Kricfalusi, with his appearance being a bizarre caricature of The Riddler, right down to having him played by Frank Gorshin, who played the Riddler back in the 1960s.
- Famous for Being First: Stimpy says that the titular reverend was the first man to "put his meat on the Moon".
- It Makes Sense in Context: Meta example. The creators even admitted the episode is a giant in-joke that only really makes sense if you know about John Kricfalusi's involvement with the show.
- Karma Houdini Warranty: See Call-Back. It seems the circus midgets' escape in their previous episode didn't go so well.
- Knuckle Tattoos: The reverend has them grafted on his hands, with one saying "PITY" and the other "SELF PITY".
- Oh, the Humanity!: The Highway Meat Patrol Officer's reaction to what's going on in the back of the truck.
- Parody Religion: “We are gathered here today to pay homage to MEAT!”
- Re-Cut: The original airing had a scene where the reverend anoints Ren and Stimpy with meat during their "Eucharist", but was cut out in later airings/home video for being too blasphemous.
- Sanity Slippage: Reverend Jack Cheese completely loses it as the episode goes on, becoming a gibbering maniac by the end.
- Self-Deprecation:
- As part of the behind-the-scenes satire, Ren says that due to Jack's crazy behavior, they haven't put on a single puppet show in months, a nod to the show's constant delays of new episodes in the first two seasons.
- The puppet show Ren and Stimpy put on without Jack attracts the kids and is still enjoyable, but it's noticeably not as strange or entertaining.
- Special Guest: Frank Gorshin (famous for playing the Riddler in the 1960's Batman show) as Reverend Jack.
- Take That!: The entire episode was written as a giant pisstake at series creator John Kricfalusi, using Reverend Jack Cheese as a lawyer-friendly parody of him to satirize his personality and the awful treatment he gave the cast and crew behind the scenes. The fact that he's portrayed as a Riddler ersatz (a character who is known for being arrogant, obsessive and crazy) is a dig at him as well.
- Voice of the Legion: When the reverend calls the cow a "bloodthirsty, two-horned devil".
