This ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Easter Egg Suggests That Dennis Really Did Kill Mauree– Uh, Bastet

The official story from the Philadelphia Police Department about the gruesome demise of the cat formerly known as the human woman Maureen Ponderosa is that Bastet was “prancing around on the rooftops like an asshole” before she fell to her death. But Dennis Reynolds’ subconscious may have its own version of events.

In the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 12 episode “Making Dennis Reynolds a Murderer,” the show satirized the true-crime documentary craze of the late 2010s with a breakdown of the final days of Dennis’ ex-wife, as well as Dennis’ own involvement in her devolution into a dead cat-woman. While Mac and Charlie’s “documentary” failed to get the “gotcha” moment of a real true-crime project like HBO’s The Jinx, conspiratorially minded It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fans have spent the last seven years searching for clues that Dennis actually did orchestrate the end of Bastet’s nine lives like they’re looking for Pepe Silvia.

The Paddy’s Pub Gang has since moved on from Maureen’s suspicious fall — just as Dennis no doubt intended — and the canon has cleared Dennis of all possible criminal culpability for Bastet’s permanent catnap. However, did the most recent episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the Season 16 finale “Dennis Takes a Mental Health Day,” suggest that Dennis may actually have killed Maureen after all? Is the cat out of the bag??

In “Dennis Takes A Mental Health Day,” the Golden God goes in for a routine physical examination when his doctor informs him that he has high blood pressure. Instead of accepting medication for the ordinary condition, Dennis tells his doctor that he will simply command his body to lower his blood pressure. After a call from the Gang aggravates his condition, Dennis decides to take a mental health day of relaxation. 

However, the illogical inconveniences of today’s tech-obsessed society only continue to enrage Dennis, who eventually snaps when he finds himself locked out of his rented luxury electric vehicle from the fictional carmaker Tsuma due to its ridiculous dependence on a phone app. After suffering a series of increasingly frustrating setbacks, Dennis resolves to track down the CEO of Tsuma and dramatically rip his heart out of his chest before crushing it into a diamond and eating it. Suddenly, Dennis is back in the doctor’s office, and the viewer learns that the entire episode was a self-induced daydream that Dennis used to manually lower his blood pressure by 20 points.

“Dennis Takes A Mental Health Day” is based on Glenn Howerton's own enraging experience of getting locked out of his Tesla and fantasizing about murdering Elon Musk with his bare hands, but the dream contains a hidden confession — the name of the car company whose CEO Dennis murders comes from the Japanese word Tsuma, which translates to “wife.” 

Did Dennis secretly use a laser pointer to bait Bastet into jumping off the roof? Did he have Mac, Cricket or some other minion disguise themselves as Bastet to stage the security footage? 

The logistics of the possible murder are unclear, but Dennis' subconscious is not. At the very least, he had an overwhelming urge to murder his ex-wife, and he may have even pulled it off. Someone at the Philadelphia Coroner’s Office needs to do an autopsy on the late cat-woman as soon as possible — her heart may be missing or possibly crystalized.