Collection Completed
Every man needs a hobby.
Crypt Keeper: (sitting on the head of a fallen statue) Before I get to tonight's terror tale, I'd like to introduce you to my pet: Peeves. (cut to a shot of a taxidermied dog) He has a terror tail of his own. (cackles) Tonight's skin-pimpling story, is about a couple with their own pet peeves. I call this chunk of chilling charnel chatter: Collection Completed.
After faithfully working at the Suntime tool company for 47 years, Jonas (M. Emmet Walsh) is forced into retirement, and isn't happy with it one bit. He is too wound up to enjoy his new leisure time, and his wife Anita (Audra Lindley) irritates him even further with her constant doting on her menagerie of pets and adopted strays. While pruning the backyard hedges, Jonas learns from his neighbor Roy (Martin Garner) that Anita's animal obsession runs deeper than he first thought. Anita herself even starts treating him like a pet, such as giving him a tuna sandwich made with cat-food and hiding his medicine inside a brownie, prompting him to declare that he's not an animal, but a human being. To add insult to injury, Anita also adopts a bulldog and names it after Jonas, saying that it reminds her of him. While Anita didn't mean any offense, Jonas' feelings are still hurt. When one of Anita's cats knocks over a pitcher of lemonade, Jonas tries to attack it with his pruning shears, but trips and falls into a pool filled with slime and decaying leaves. He tries to clean himself up in the bathtub, only to find it full of fish, declaring this to be the last straw.
The next morning, Jonas cheerfully tells Anita that he's found a new hobby and starts spending long periods in the basement, ordering her to keep out. She finds Jonas the bulldog standing motionless in the backyard and discovers, to her horror, that Jonas' new hobby is taxidermy. Arriving in the basement, Anita shrieks in agony after discovering that Jonas has killed and stuffed every animal in the house, except for Mew Mew the cat. As he prepares to start pouncing on the poor cat, Anita grabs the gold-plated hammer given to Jonas as a retirement gift and bashes his head in. Sometime later, Anita and Jonas are sitting in the living room with the TV on. As Anita gets up to start making lunch, Roy stops by to see how the two are doing, and promptly goes slack-jawed to find the corpse of Jonas, sitting in his favorite chair, haphazardly stuffed and stitched back together.
Tropes:
- Ascended Extra: Roy. In the comic, he was a nameless neighbor who only appears in the final panel to check on Anita and Jonah (whom Anita had stuffed and mounted). In the show, his role is vastly expanded.
- Adaptational Nice Guy: Jonas is a lot nicer than his comic counterpart, Jonah. Jonah despised animals for no apparent reason, and gleefully rubbed his new hobby in his wife's face. Jonas doesn't start outright hating animals until his wife starts treating him like one of them, and he keeps his hobby well hidden until the climax.
- Awful Wedded Life: Jonas has been away from home so much because of his relentless dedication to his work, and Anita has spent the last 47 years turning their house into a zoo to cope with his absence and lack of affection toward her. When the former is forced into mandatory retirement, the pair slowly and awkwardly discover that they can't stand living under the same roof anymore.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: Downplayed with Jonas. He's a grump, but he does have a valid right to be one with how his wife dotes more on animals than him, especially when she starts treating him like a pet. He only goes on the warpath and taxidermizes them all when he's pushed one time too many.
- Bait-and-Switch:
- At the start of the episode, Anita talks to what seem to be guests for the retirement party she's planned for Jonas. When Jonas isn't interested in celebrating and Anita goes to give them the bad news, we learn that the "guests" are actually her pets (in party hats, no less).
- After Jonas resolves to try talking things out with Anita, the scene cuts to Anita conceding that she was too wrapped up in her own problems to recognize someone else was in need, apologizing and admitting that it's time for a fresh start. We then see that she's talking to Mew Mew.
- Berserk Button: When Jonas attempts to kill and stuff Mew Mew, her last living pet, Anita loses it and kills him with his new hammer.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Anita is unfalteringly friendly to animals of all kinds, but when her husband kills and stuffs all but one of her pets, she completely snaps and kills him.
- Bludgeoned to Death: Anita kills Jonas by hitting him in the head with the gold-plated ball peen hammer he was given as a retirement gift from Suntime.
- Chekhov's Gun: The gold-plated hammer Jonas gets as a retirement present.
- Crazy Cat Lady: With her affectionate nature towards all animals, Anita is a definite case, as far as Jonas is concerned. Eventually, she even starts treating Jonas as if he were an animal himself. After Jonas goes nuts and demonstrates his new "hobby" on her pets, she bashes his head in when he goes to do the same to Mew Mew. The ending hints that the experience drove her crazy for real, since she's revealed to have crudely taxidermied Jonas himself and has been talking to him like he was still alive.
- Deadpan Snarker: While talking to Roy, Jonas uses a pair of pruning shears on a hedge and gets increasingly aggressive with his work. By the end of the scene, he's reduced the hedge to a pole, prompting this gem from Roy:Roy: I'd say you about done.
- Death by Irony: In response to Jonas threatening Mew Mew, Anita kills him with the gold-plated hammer he was given for his retirement. His corpse is then crudely stitched and stuffed, just as he had subjected all of Anita's pets to.
- Elvis Lives: A passing news report on the couple's TV set states that Elvis' spirit may be alive in an Iowa woman's Doberman Pinscher.
- Establishing Character Moment:
- Anita tends to a stray cat that comes to her doorstep, unknowingly shutting the door in Jonas' face.
- Jonas grouses about being a Reluctant Retiree, then trips and spots Mew Mew, loudly questioning how the cat got inside.
- Foil: Jonas' neighbor Roy is one to Jonas himself, being a happy-go-lucky man who's adjusted just fine to retired life. He does acknowledge how Anita's behavior is unusual, but he takes it in stride, gets along with her many pets, and advocates simple solutions for Jonas to try and solve his problems.
- Freudian Excuse: Anita is implied to dote on animals so much as a means of coping with severe neglect, as Jonas' workaholic nature meant he never had any time for her.
- Friend to All Living Things: Anita, given the sheer number of pets and strays she's adopted. She has birdhouses and feeders set up for the crows and songbirds, several aquariums and a koi pond, and Roy even notes that she's been seen having squirrels rest on her head.
- Gory Discretion Shot: We don't see the hammer hit Jonas in the face, but the final scene suggests it was very messy and required a lot of work to fix up.
- Grumpy Old Man: Jonas, who moans, whines, and gropes about being forced into retirement. He gets even grumpier when Anita begins treating him like a pet, while at the same time treating the actual pets with more dignity.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: The gold-plated hammer that Jonas receives as a retirement present ends up being the end of him, when Anita uses it to kill him.
- Hope Spot: Roy almost talks Jonas into calming down and simply talking things out with Anita. Then Jonas sees her having a heart-to-heart with Mew Mew and gets weirded out again.
- I Ate WHAT?!: Jonas, when Anita gives him a tuna sandwich made with cat food.
- Insistent Terminology: Anita insists the animals she's taken in are her friends and children.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Jonas certainly went too far by killing Anita's pets, but he did have valid reasons to be aghast at Anita's behavior throughout the episode (including adopting every stray that comes by and feeding them very expensive food), as well as how she treated him more like an animal than a husband.
- Jumping Off the Slippery Slope:
- Jonas makes a lot of fair points about the situation, but then we get to his gleeful reveal of his new hobby.
- Anita was jumping off the slope from her very first appearance with the huge array of pets she's gathered into the house. The climax has her becoming truly crazy when she discovers what Jonas does to the pets, and subjects him to the same fate.
- Karma Houdini: Anita presumably faces no consequences for killing her husband.
- Lampshade Hanging: When talking about Anita's animal obsession, Roy says that it's been going on for some time and expresses surprise that Jonas (who lives with her) completely missed it.
- Mummies at the Dinner Table: The episode ends with Anita having a conversation with the taxidermied corpse of her husband, which she has seated in his armchair so he can watch television.
- Oh, Crap!: Roy, in the final scene, and for good reason.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Jonas says he prefers using chloroform on his "projects" because it keeps their muscles from tensing and makes the work easier.
- Pre-Mortem One-Liner: "You're not going to kill that cat!"
- Punny Name: The Crypt Keeper opens the episode with one: "I'd like to introduce you to my pet: Peeves."
- Rage Breaking Point: Jonas' sanity goes down the toilet when he falls into Anita's muck-filled koi pond and tries to take a shower to clean himself off, only to find the bathtub full of the fish from said pond, prompting him to scream.
- Reluctant Retiree: Jonas moans about being put out to pasture just because of his age, feeling that all his hard work for almost half a century went completely unappreciated.
- Sanity Slippage:
- Jonas gets increasingly unhinged throughout the episode, ultimately snapping and taking up taxidermy.
- While much is made of Anita's obsession with animals, seeing what Jonas does to her pets drives her off the deep end in such a way that she'll do anything to protect Mew Mew.
- Sarcasm-Blind: Roy, during the first time he and Jonas talk in the basement.
- Shear Menace: When Jonas starts losing his mind, one of his first acts is to chase Mew Mew around the garden with an enormous pair of hedge clippers.
- Shout-Out:
- Jonas' rant to Anita provides one to The Elephant Man: "I am not an animal! I am a human being!"
- Lassie is also glimpsed on the couple's TV twice.
- Spared by the Adaptation: Mew Mew doesn't make it in the original comic. It's possible she gets to live here because in the comic, he was Anita's only pet and the rest of the animals were strays that Jonas trapped.
- Stating the Simple Solution: After Jonas vents about Anita hiding his aspirin in a brownie, Roy suggests that he simply talk to her about it instead of grouse in the basement. This appears to work, but it's revealed that Anita is having her heart-to-heart with Mew Mew.
- Taxidermy Is Creepy: Jonas's new "hobby" when he snaps, killing and stuffing Anita's pets. At the end of the episode, he's on the receiving end of this trope, courtesy of the now-insane Anita.
- Trauma Button: Anita makes an innocent comment about the pets providing her with company, which Jonas takes as an insult for his workaholic nature. He proceeds to go on an angry tirade before she mollifies him.
- Ungrateful Bastard: In Jonas' eyes, Suntime Hand Tools, the company he used to work for, put him out to pasture at 65 even though he's been their regional sales leader 17 years in a row.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Roy telling Jonas about Anita's habits and suggesting that he adopt a hobby to calm his nerves sets off the climax.
- We Named the Monkey "Jack": Jonas is utterly nonplussed when he discovers that Anita has named a stray bulldog after him. The canine Jonas becomes the first animal that the human Jonas kills and stuffs.
- Wham Shot: How we learn what's become of Jonas.
- Workaholic: Jonas is THE workaholic, having worked 6 days a week all year round for his entire tenure of 47 years. He can't stand his mandatory retirement (even though the first day of said retirement is the first free weekday he's had since he was 17), denounces sleeping in and taking up hobbies as complete wastes of time, and has been out of the house so much that he's unable to stand living in the same place as his wife, even missing how Anita's behavior is nothing new. Roy even remarks that the idea of Jonas being retired is tantamount to Didn't See That Coming.
- Would Hit a Girl: While Anita pleads with him to hand over Mew Mew, Jonas shoves her into his table.
- Your Television Hates You: Jonas tries to watch TV to get his mind off of Anita's animal obsession. He ends up tuning into a news report about a possessed dog, a different news report about cougar sightings, and an episode of Lassie before grumpily deciding to shut the set off.
Crypt Keeper: (peering around a corner) I guess Jonas learned that a hobby can be very self-fulfilling... as long as you're not too stuffy about it. (cackles) So, until next time, I want all of you to sit, stay, play dead. (cackles) Good boy!
