Grim Reaper Pizza
S6 E4: Nergal’s Pizza
The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, 2001.
It begins, as all good tragedies do, with a dinner invitation from a well-meaning underworld horror.
Nergal shows up at Billy’s house carrying a steaming pizza and the misplaced confidence of a man who’s never heard of restraint. He claims it’s the finest pizza ever created. He says this not as a boast, but as prophecy. Billy’s father eats a slice and has a full-body religious experience. Mandy, high priestess of contempt, nods in approval. Even Grim—skeletal harbinger of death, part-time houseguest—says it’s good. Just good. Not “the best,” not “life-changing,” not “transcendent.” And with that, Nergal’s fragile ego cracks like a cheap crust under too many toppings.
Within minutes, pizzerias rise. Grim opens one to prove a point. Nergal opens one to win. Flyers flood Endsville. Billboards appear. Commercials run on repeat until children dream in jingle form. Grim’s ads accuse Nergal of stuffing his crust with dirty socks. Nergal fires back that Grim’s sauce contains bugs. A rat—speaking directly to camera—confirms that he pooped on a Nergal’s slice and would happily do it again. Dracula orders a pie and is told to wait. Dracula does not like waiting. Pizza face mascots are introduced. Chaos reigns.
Grim, scrambling for an edge, digs deep into family lore and emerges with Granny Grim’s hot sauce. It is not so much a condiment as a weapon. It hums with ancestral rage. It obliterates palates. It very nearly obliterates Nergal Jr., who, in a desperate attempt at sabotage, disguises himself as Mandy, tastes the sauce, and is promptly flattened, emotionally and physically. Plan B: replace the sauce with something untested and ghastly. Nergal administers an unlabeled elixir—because when you’re losing a culinary arms race, mystery chemicals are always the answer.
This, naturally, ends in facial transfiguration, mild possession, and the subtle spread of a parasitic Nergal spore across the population of Endsville. Faces morph into crust. Eyes melt into pepperoni. It is unclear whether this is intended, a side effect, or simply a feature of Nergal’s flavor profile. The entire town begins moaning for pizza in a single unified voice.
And then—because there is always an and then—we learn that none of this is real. Or, more disturbingly, all of it is. A sentient slice of pizza sits in a softly lit room, telling the story of Endsville’s downfall to his two pizza-children, who hang on every word like mozzarella on a pulled-apart slice. This bedtime story contains no moral, only a whisper of doom and a lingering scent of oregano.
In the end, it’s not about which pizza was better. It’s about what the pizza awakened.
And also: don’t mess with Granny Grim’s hot sauce unless you’re ready to meet your maker—and he’s made of cheese.