I’m going to offer a conservative estimate – I’m one of a dozen people who hasn’t seen Inception (It’s on my list of things to do, I swear).  But after watching this week’s South Park, I’m a little less intrigued by the idea of following “a taco within a taco.”  That quote makes as much sense as the plot of the movie, I presume.

As Eric Cartman says, “When a chick says, ‘we need to talk,’ you might as well start punching yourself in the balls, dude.” So, when Wendy confronted Stan about his messy locker, he got his balls-busted, big time.

“It’s a real disease. It’s called, ‘hoarding.’ People who can’t throw anything away, and they just keep living in deeper and deeper filth until the people around them just can’t take it anymore,” Wendy said, demanding that Stan clean out his locker.

Typical fans of South Park might expect this: the townsfolk blowing a minor, messy locker into a giant emergency.  In fact, there is a crisis – Stan is a hoarder (class three, for the record).  His psychosis manifests itself in a messy locker, packed with maggot-infested sandwiches, broken toothbrushes, and wadded up papers – Hey! I had that sort of locker in high school.

Locker hoarding is serious because “it can lead to room hoarding, then house hoarding. In some cases, people even hoard animals.”

It becomes clear that Stan is not alone – Mr. Mackey is identified as a class five hoarder (Hurray, X-Men: The Last Stand references!).  This is apparent when Stan tries to throw away Mr. Mackey’s month-old milk carton. Mr. Mackey responds quite reasonably, “If you throw that away, I will you in the mouth … okay!”

The town enlists the help of Dr. Chinstrap, an expert on hoarding. He also identifies a sheep-herder (pronounced, Hoar-der) as a patient with the psychosis. He happens to herd (pronounced, hu-rt) sheep by hoarding them … so he too is pulled into Dr. Chinstrap’s therapy sessions, in which he uses regression therapy, diving deep into the memories of Stan, Mackey, and the sheep herder to determine the cause of their actions.

Hypnosis leads into a dream sequence of Mackey’s childhood, but there’s one problem.  “Mr. Mackey’s childhood regression dream was so vivid it actually sucked the other two patients into it.” Enter the Inception references, but in the words of my favorite character, Randy Marsh, “Come on. That’s stupid. How is that even possible?”

So, it’s a trip into the origins of Mr. Mackey – how exciting! No surprises here. He was a geeky, bullied kid with a passion for Light Brite (Great theme): “Light Brite, making things with Li-i-ght. What a site! Making things with Light Brite.” Although Stan does his best to awake Mackey, the Light Brite and the hit television series, Zoom, easily distracts Mackey.

Enter Randy Marsh to the rescues, but he goes “completely off chart” and enters the dream as a butterfly, looking for “butterfly poon” … FYI. He gets some. Booyah.

Dr. Chinstrap calls in an elite team of experts, who go into Mackey’s dream to put them into a dream within a dream … so that they could put them into another dream or take them or something … did I mention this was a spoof on Inception? I think it’s like “a taco inside a taco within a Taco Bell that’s inside a KFC within a bowl that’s inside your dream.” But dammed if I knew!

Enter Mrs. Marsh, who I generally I despise as a character, but in this case, I make an exception: “Just because an idea is overly convoluted and complex doesn’t make it cool. Going into multiple dream levels sounds like a really stupid idea.” According to the “experts,” she’s just not smart enough to understand.

These experts, of course, get lost, and lose themselves inside the dream: “Is this the dream or the dream within the dream?” They aren’t sure, and accept the most logical explanation: “I think it’s the dream inside the matrix inside the dream” (Hurray, The Matrix references!). So naturally, the fire department and the pizza delivery guy follows them into the taco within a taco, and forces Dr. Chinstrap to seek the help of “the most powerful dream infiltrator in the world,” Freddy Krueger (and just in time for Halloween).

But of course, he’s retired from the business of dream hoping, bitter at the US government for forcing him to kill those teenagers to stop the Russians.

In the meantime, Mackey discovered the root of his hoarding psychosis – he was molested by Woodsy, the lovable, anti-littering mascot of the forest. The mascot becomes a monster, attacks Mackey, Stan, Randy, the experts, the firemen, and the pizza-delivery guy, and kills the sheep-herder – he’s stopped at the last second by Freddy.  Last week, it was Osama Bin Laden playing the hero. So, yes, that is a logical progression.

Mackey stops hoarding because he confronts that fact that, “when he tried to throw things away, his subconscious would remember Woodsy’s voice saying, ‘Give a hoot. Don’t pollute,’ and touching his penis with his wing.”

Stan, of course, gives up hoarding to avoid any more therapy – Thank goodness because I couldn’t handle anymore either.