The Past
Ned, lonely at Boarding School, can't sleep. He tries to console himself by playing with a clay village he's built, but it doesn't work; and he ends up sitting by the window and staring up at the full moon, missing his old life... and Chuck. In Coeur d'Coeurs, Chuck is looking at the same moon, and missing Ned.The Present
Puppy breeder Harold Hundin's death seems tricky at first - a stabbing with no witnesses and no fingerprints on the weapon - until he's revived by Ned and reveals that he was actually poisoned, and stabbed himself accidentally as he panicked and slipped around near an unfortunately pointy dog brush. As Harold's minute ends, he gives them the crucial testimony - "my wife did it."Of course, the next morning, Emerson Cod discovers that Hundin had four wives, each of whom had a motive for murder. Back to square one for the Pie Hole detectives...
The four of them split up to interrogate the wives. They discover that Hundin had just bred the ultimate dog, Bubblegum, but that Bubblegum had also just been killed — and then they're outmaneuvered when the wives (who are on good terms) — compare notes and figure out what's going on. Ambushing the detectives at the Pie Hole, they suggest interrogating fellow dog breeder Ramsfield Snuppy, to whom Harold had sold Bubblegum just before his death.
Tropes
- Artistic License – Law: Polygamy is illegal in America; while obviously that doesn't stop certain people from doing it, and there's nothing preventing one man from being in an unofficial relationship with multiple different women, it's unlikely a high profile guy like Hundin would be able to get away with officially marrying all four.
- Asshole Victim: Harold Hundin; he subjected his first wife Hilary to a polygamous marriage she clearly didn't sign up for and wasn't happy in, and wanted to clone her beloved Bubblegum against her wishes, further emotionally abusing her.
- Beautiful Dreamer
- Bilingual Bonus: Hundin means female dog (or bitch)in German.
- Bitter Almonds
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: There's a lot of dog terminology applied to people in this episode.
- Erotic Dream: Ned has one involving Olive disguised as Chuck, which makes him nervous around both girls. The facts that he can never be intimate with Chuck and that the current case concerns a polygamist (Emerson: "One to have...one to hold") make him nervous the entire episode.
- Evil Brit: Simone. Subverted—she's not the killer, and while much more pragmatic and callous than the other wives, she is definitely not evil.
- Marriage of Convenience: Simone eventually reveals that her marriage to Harold was purely a business relationship and that they were never intimately involved.
- Odd Name Out: Harold is married to Hilary, Heather, Hallie and Simone.
- Narrator: So Hilary made her own decision. Refusing to subject her baby to the same tortuous, shared existence she had been cursed to live... Hilary poisoned Harold and framed Hallie to take any fall, knowing good Hallie served, but did not drink, caffeine herself.
- Polyamory: The heroes are pissed about Hundin having four wives — not for any moral reason, but because it makes "My wife killed me" a whole lot more complicated than it needs to be. It also turns out to be one of the causes of Hundin's death, since first wife Hilary grew more frustrated and resentful with each new wife Hundin added to the marriage; his plan to clone Bubblegum was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
- Rasputinian Death: Downplayed. Hundin drank poisoned coffee, slipped on the spilled coffee, and in doing so, accidentally stabbed himself with a particularly pointy designer hairbrush multiple times.
- We Named the Monkey "Jack": Both variations at the same time. Ned and Digby swap names when they perform their interrogation.
