Broodwich

S2 E10: Broodwich

Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Warner Bros. Discovery, 2000.

Shake’s problems in “Broodwich” begin the way many of his problems do: with the promise of treasure and the complete absence of suspicion.

Frylock, attempting to get azaleas planted without an argument, hands Shake a hand-drawn treasure map marked with several X’s in the front yard. Shake grabs a shovel and commits fully to the idea that pirates have buried bullion directly beneath the property line. Frylock gives him one instruction: don’t dig deeper than about a foot.

Shake immediately ignores it.

Within minutes, the water line is gone, the gas line is gone, and the yard collapses into a sinkhole large enough to swallow both Shake and the landscaping plan. At the bottom, he finds a cavern filled with bones. A voice echoes through the darkness and invites him to “taste the future.”

The future is a sandwich.

Shake takes a bite without hesitation and disappears in a burst of flames.

The Broodwich Dimension is a quiet, unsettling landscape of striped purple hills where Shake appears rendered in a sillier, hand-drawn version of himself. There he meets Jerry, a polite but committed figure who begins pursuing him with a large axe. Before the situation can fully develop, Shake snaps back to his living room, shaken but already thinking about the next bite.

At this point Frylock intervenes and delivers the only responsible exposition in the episode. He has, he explains, read a very disturbing article about this sandwich in the Bible. The Broodwich is immortal. Each bite sends the eater back to the nightmare dimension, and if the entire sandwich is consumed, the eater will remain there permanently.

Shake takes another bite while Frylock is talking.

What follows is less a horror story than a study in appetite management. Shake tries to keep the sandwich out of reach by taping it to the ceiling. He then climbs up and eats it anyway. He attempts to offload the risk by forcing it into Meatwad’s mouth; Meatwad returns from the axe dimension relatively calm and somewhat complimentary about the experience, which does nothing to discourage further consumption.

The sandwich itself, according to The Voice, is forged from wheat harvested in hell’s half-acre, baked by Beelzebub, spread with mayonnaise beaten from the eggs of dark chicken forces, layered with cheese from a fanged cow, and filled with 666 meats from animals whose blood contains maggots. There is Dijon mustard. There is no bacon, because there are no swine evil enough.

Despite the sourcing, Shake repeatedly describes it as excellent.

Eventually, through persistence rather than strategy, Shake finishes the entire Broodwich… and remains standing in his living room. The Voice is confused. The rules are clear. Completion should mean permanent relocation to the axe situation.

Then the truth comes out.

Shake picked off the sun-dried tomatoes because they were, in his words, “disgusting.”

This turns out not to be a loophole but a test. By refusing part of the sandwich, Shake has unknowingly passed the Broodwich’s secret trial of character. As a reward, The Voice offers him a skeletal bride. Shake declines immediately, which counts as passing a second test. The actual prize, The Voice explains, is free brain surgery.

Shake accepts with enthusiasm.

After the procedure, which appears to be a full lobotomy, Shake calmly eats the sun-dried tomatoes he previously rejected. This time, with the sandwich truly complete, he returns to the Broodwich Dimension for good, where Jerry, who has demonstrated admirable patience throughout the episode, finally cuts him in half.

What makes the Broodwich memorable isn’t the hell wheat or the maggot-blood meats. It’s that the sandwich works exactly the way powerful food often does on television: every warning is clear, every consequence immediate, and the experience is still compelling enough to justify going back for another bite.

The only real mistake, as it turns out, was trying to customize the order.