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Dark Harvest is a particularly dark episode of Invader Zim, originally produced as episode 2B and aired as episode 4B on April 20, 2001.

[edit] Plot

[edit] Warning! Plot and/or ending details below!

Out on the playground, Zim is hit with a ball and cries "My squeedly-spootch!" (Apparently, an Irken organ.) Dib quickly points out that it's not a human organ. Gaz then says she has a squeedly-spootch.

Later in class, a pigeon flies into the classroom and lands on Zim's head. As Ms. Bitters tries to teach the children about the bubonic plague (by explaining the 'Ring around the Rosy' tale), yet she's distracted by the cooing of the pigeon. She angrily tells Zim to go see the school nurse because he has head pigeons. She gives him a hall pass, which is a collar that will apparently explode if he leaves school grounds. On his way out, Dib tries to scare Zim by telling him that his organs will probably be inspected, and he's sure to be discovered. So Zim gets an idea.

Dib quickly realizes Zim is up to something so he asks to see the nurse as well, telling Ms. Bitters that a pencil is lodged in his brain. (He appears to have broken a pencil and stuck it up his nose.) After he convinces her that the pencil is in far enough to be a danger, she allows him to go. She also gives him a hall pass—a 62 lb. radiator. He soon discovers Zim's intentions: stealing the organs of the other children by teleporting them out and replacing them with various items (a carton of milk, a Game Slave, a kitten, etc.). Dib desperately tries to protect the last child (with all organs intact), Torque Smackey, from Zim's organ transplanting, and follows him around. As Dib is walking with Torque down the hall, he tells him about Zim, and how aliens are "kind of a hobby of (his), no, more of a way of life". He also tells him he has vague memories of being abducted by aliens. He thinks that they were experimenting on him, "trying to create some sort of super baby, perhaps?". Dib keep's walking, but Torque dissapears. Dib hears strange noises from another room, and sees flashing from the room. It is apparently the school storage room, and Dib sees a weight roll his way, and runs out of the room screaming, although it is unclear exactly what happened to Torque. Zim travels through the air vent, chasing Dib, and Dib eventually descends to the boiler room, and soon, Zim corners him.

In the final scene, Zim and Dib are being examined by the nurse. She shoos the pigeon away and tells Zim that he's "the healthiest little boy (she's) ever seen, and such plentiful organs!" Dib, however, moos like a cow from the novelty item Zim zapped into him. The nurse cries out in a panic and calls Dib inhuman and a newspaper spins onto the screen with the headline, "Hideous mooing cyborg boy found!"

[edit] Trivia

• Just before Dib decsends into the boiler room, you can see an arrow pointing down, with the letters "JV". This is a possible reference to the creator's initials, Jhonen Vasquez.

• At the beginning of the episode, there is a teacher inside of one of the classrooms. The teacher is carrying a vial containing what appears to be "Filler Bunny", another one of Jhonen Vasquez's characters. A ball then flies through the window, shattering the window and the vial.

• The hall pass collar, which explodes if he leaves the school grounds, is a reference to the collars used in Battle Royale, which explode if the students enter certain areas.

• When Dib runs through the hallway trying to escape Zim, one of the classrooms has a sign that reads "Taxidermy", a reference to Roman Dirge.