Ed returns home to find his parents inside, waiting for him. Ed asks whether their flight was cancelled; Dad tells Ed to follow him into the living room. There, a semi-circle of wooden chairs have been set up. Ed barely recognizes the first guy, George, who offers Ed coffee or a menthol cigarette. Ed declines both. He spots Phil there and asks what's going on. Phil looks severely depressed. George tells Ed that life is like a footpath through a dark African jungle. As long as you stick to the path, you're okay. But when you start veering off, that's when you get into trouble. When George was Ed's age, he was into everything...booze, whores, gambling, smank...(Ed looks dumbfounded and mouths the word "Smank?" in a true comedic moment). But Ed doesn't need to worry anymore. He's among friends. Phil pipes up, "We love you, Ed" and tells Ed it's an intervention. Ed's not impressed.

On top of the bowling alley, Kenny and Shirley stand guard over the "T." Kenny's relieving any of Shirley's doubts by telling her that even though he's a big man, he's quick. He once caught a live chicken with his bare hands like Rocky Balboa. Shirley is oblivious to Kenny's ramblings as she spills out her latest deep thoughts: she wants to know if you put a hamburger in a blender and blended it until it made a hamburger sauce and then poured it over a hamburger, would it double the hamburger flavor? Kenny thinks about it and decides that it'd be more like eating two hamburgers rather than doubling the flavor. "But it's not," Shirley protests. Kenny thinks about it and suggests that she should send that to Readers Digest.

At Ed's intervention, everyone's taking turns talking loudly into Ed's face. His dad yells, "You're having a nervous breakdown!" Phil, relying on early '80s dance music lyrics, tells Ed, "If you're going to ride, don't ride the white horse!" Ed's had enough and tells them as much. He then asks to speak to his dad alone. Dad admits that he just didn't want to stand back and watch Ed make a huge mistake with this whole "Return to Stuckeyville." Dad then tells the story of when Ed was five and Dad was offered a promotion in Dallas. Dad turned the promotion down. It was the best opportunity of his career and he let it go...because he was scared. Dad tells Ed that he's been thrown off the horse and is too scared to get up. And if he doesn't hurry up and get up, he'll never know what he could have achieved.