Cotton's Plot

Cotton's Plot
Air date	October 3, 1999
Written by	Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger
Directed by	Anthony Lioi
Episode guide
Previous	"Peggy Hill: The Decline and Fall"
Next	"Bills are Made to be Broken"

"Cotton's Plot" is the sixty-second episode of King of the Hill. It was first aired on October 3, 1999. The episode was written by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, and directed by Anthony Lioi.

Summary

When Peggy struggles with her physical therapy, Cotton takes charge of the situation and helps Peggy regain her mobility. Grateful for the help and progress, Peggy helps Cotton try to obtain a grave in the cemetery reserved for war veterans until Hank points out some discrepancies in Cotton's war stories.

Plot

Peggy is finally removed from her full-body cast after six weeks of recovery, but her muscles have atrophied and she can barely move, requiring physical therapy. When Peggy realizes that conventional therapy moves far too slow for her liking, she becomes despondent. When Cotton sees Peggy is too weak to even wheel herself into the kitchen from the patio, he groans in disbelief. When Peggy drops a frozen toaster waffle on the floor, Cotton starts taunting her, telling her she would never survive the trials he had faced in life. When Peggy tries to escape to the living room, her wheelchair cannot clear the door sill, prompting Cotton to park her right next to him. After another uneventful session of physical therapy, Peggy feels weaker than ever, and the next day, she falls out of her wheelchair in the kitchen. After trying and failing to crawl back into the chair, Cotton returns and resumes taunting Peggy over her invalidity, refusing to help her back up into the wheelchair. As he continues berating her, Peggy becomes increasingly agitated, before finally climbing into her wheelchair all by herself. Realizing that her drive to spite Cotton gave her the motivation she needs, she asks him to take over her physical therapy regiment.

Cotton's method of getting Peggy to regain the use of her limbs is essentially to act as a drill sergeant. Whenever she complains, he regales her with a war story to motivate her to work through the pain. When Hank learns that Peggy has quit rehab and that Cotton has completely taken over as her personal trainer, he is horrified. He tells her that he is worried that Cotton is just capitalizing on her condition to torture her for his own amusement, but Peggy quickly demonstrates that the "therapy" is showing rapid progress. Peggy tells Hank she is repaying Cotton for his help by helping him fill out an application to be buried in the Texas State Cemetery, as Cotton had mentioned earlier he found it ridiculous he needed to "prove" he was a war hero just to receive an appropriate burial. However, when Peggy lists off some of the war stories Cotton told her, Hank notices that his father claimed to have been present at Munich and Okinawa in a span of just two days. When Peggy confirms it would have been impossible to get from Germany to Japan in such a short amount of time, she tries to confront Cotton, but he refuses to listen. Peggy is furious at herself for believing Cotton's "lies", and when the time comes for Cotton to present his application to the cemetery administration, Peggy stays behind and returns to physical therapy. When Cotton goes before the commission, he realizes that Peggy never showed up with his application, and he desperately tries to stop the meeting from adjourning.

Back at physical therapy, Peggy continues moping about how Cotton lied to her, and calls him a fraud. Hank, in a rare moment, stands up for his father, and reminds Peggy that, "fraud" or not, he still returned home from the war without his shins. He tells Peggy that after he came back to the US, a doctor told Cotton that he would never walk again—and 18 months later, Cotton walked up to that same doctor and punched him in the kidneys... allegedly. Realizing that Cotton is still worthy of some recognition, Peggy goes to the Veterans Committee and helps Cotton get his grave. When she presents a highlight of Cotton's tour of duty, he complains that she left out his time in Munich; this time, when Peggy tells him he was never in Germany, he appears genuinely confused and accepts it as the truth. The episode ends with the family visiting the plot, and Cotton encouraging Peggy to climb a hill to see it, offering her the chance to literally dance on his grave if she makes it. Peggy pushes herself and climbs the hill, even managing to briefly stand up for the first time since the accident, before she and Cotton start dancing together on the plot.

Meanwhile, Peggy's discarded body cast is appropriated by Bill and taken to his house, where he props up a photo of her in it and plays one-handed Boggle with it. When Dale witnesses the act, he takes the cast away from Bill—only to stuff it in the passenger seat of his van so he can use the carpool lane. When Boomhauer catches Dale in the act, he says Dale is no better than Bill, and takes the cast for himself, presumably to finally throw it away. Instead, Boomhauer uses the cast to fake a full body injury, in order to con nurses at the local hospital into giving him sponge baths.

Characters

• Hank Hill
• Peggy Hill
• Bobby Hill
• Luanne Platter
• Dale Gribble
• Jeff Boomhauer
• Bill Dauterive
• Cotton Hill
• Didi Hill
• Ramsey (debut)
• G.H. Hill (non-speaking)

Stinger Quote

• Cotton: "I can't heeaar yoouuu~♪"

Trivia

• There is a grave marked Stephen F. Austin at the Texas State Cemetery. Bobby asks if it is the wrestler or the bionic guy. These are likely references to Stone Cold Steve Austin (a popular WWF/WWE wrestler at the time) and Colonel Steve Austin (The Six Million Dollar Man, portrayed by Lee Majors). Hank looks with disapproval that his son does not recognize Stephen F. Austin as "the Father of Texas."
• Hank makes a wheelchair path for Peggy in the backyard (near the alley). This path is not seen in the rest of the series. Hank most likely removed the concrete and reinstalled the grass once Peggy no longer needed the wheelchair.

Gallery