With Fran and the kids out of the house, and Ethyl not being too happy at her old age, Fran asks Earl to check on her every so often until she gets back. Ethyl soon goes unconscious, and when Earl walks past her to get food and she doesn't harm or insult him, Earl determines that she's dead. Ethyl goes to the afterlife, a wondrous place, only to learn that her time has not come yet and is just having a coma. When Fran comes home, she finds that Earl had buried her, but then Ethyl comes out from being buried. Ethyl tells the children all about the afterlife and how great it was, and she soon appears on a show called Mysteries That Haven't Been Solved Yet to talk about the experience. This leads to her getting her own show, The Afterlife Show, where viewers are told to send money to the show while she talks about the afterlife. During her first show, Ethyl falls unconscious again, returning to the afterlife. Her late husband, Louie, tells Ethyl that, once again, she's only there temporarily, but he has an important message for her, to not push the afterlife. He convinces her that she should enjoy her life while she can, and also to stop profiting from the afterlife, as those who make money off the afterlife end up going to a much worse place. She sees that place, a room full of Earl Sinclair's. When she comes back to life, she decides that she'll stop talking about the afterlife and will live her life to the fullest from now on.
This episode includes examples of:
- Accidental Misnaming: Roy gets upset when the actor portraying him in the episode of Mysteries That Haven't Been Solved Yet featuring Ethyl is named "Ray".
- Determinator: Earl had buried Ethyl considerably more than six feet underground, and when she awoke from her coma, she not only had to dig up a long distance, but also had to drag her wheelchair by her teeth.
- Failed a Spot Check: When Ethyl goes unconscious, Earl instantly thinks she died and buries her, without having a doctor check to see if she was indeed dead first. And when she goes unconscious again, Earl once again jumps the gun and digs a hole, but at least this time his more level-headed family is around to wait and see.
- A Good, Old-Fashioned Paint Watching: At the beginning of this episode, Ethyl watches a TV channel about grass growing. Doubly strange, given that the family is noted to be carnivores. If they were herbivores, it would be analogous to all the cooking/food channels seen on cable.
- Ironic Hell / Big "NO!": The "Place That's Not So Nice" is a room full of Earls. Ethyl screams in horror at the reveal.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Earl realizes that Ethyl is dead when she doesn't hit or insult him when he walked by.
- Take That!: This episode delivers a few to Unsolved Mysteries, the show that shared the same time slot, in the form of Mysteries That Haven't Been Solved Yet:
- First, when the Robert Stack dinosaur comes to the Sinclair house to look for Ethyl, Ethyl asks him how they come up with so many mysteries week after week, the Robert Stack dinosaur admits that they only have four mysteries, which they tell over and over. Luckily, no one seems to notice.
- Then, when the Sinclair family watches the episode of Mysteries that Haven't Been Solved Yet featuring Ethyl, Earl asks Fran why they're watching that show when they could be watching the puppet show on the other channel. When Fran tells Earl that the puppet show is just for kids and it'll only last a year, Earl tells her that the puppet show does some very sophisticated juxtapositions of reality.
- Finally, the Mysteries That Haven't Been Solved Yet episode featuring Ethyl ends with this line from the Robert Stack dinosaur:
"Next week's baffling mystery; Our viewers. Who are they? Why do they keep watching our show when there's a wildly better show on the other channel in this time slot?" - Tranquil Fury: You can just feel the rage in Fran's voice as she responds to Earl's halfassed apology for the previous day:Fran: You buried my mother alive, Earl.
