I'm Still Not Over... Dan's heart transplant on 'One Tree Hill'

Published on June 22, 2014 01:33PM EDT

One Tree Hill was a serious drama. It was about life and death and basketball and murder and high school and basketball and love and stalkers and brotherhood and basketball. (Plus, if the subject matter ever confused you and you found yourself doubting that the show was a drama, Chad Michael Murray looked like this 99 percent of the time.)

And like every good, very serious drama, One Tree Hill needed a villain. That villain materialized in the form of Dan Scott, the bad father-turned-murderer-turned-a-million-other-things, because this show seemed to never end and only got more ridiculous as time went on. But ironically enough, Dan Scott turned out to be one of the greatest television characters of all time—in an unintentionally comedic context.

For example, murder is serious. Heart transplants, also serious. But watching a murderer attempt to get a heart transplant only to get hit by a car and then have golden retriever eat his heart—in a hospital—was flat-out hilarious.

Step One of Dan’s heart-transplant journey was the day his pager went off. More specifically, it was the day he helped an old man with his cane and started to dish out advice on being careful only to be struck by a moving vehicle. And only then did his pager go off. Get it? He was talking about being careful when he was hit by a car! I believe the word you’re looking for is “genius.”

Step Two of Dan’s heart-transplant journey then involved Dan getting a glimpse at his heart after a paramedic tripped and spilled it out onto the floor. And don’t even bother asking, “Wasn’t the top of the cooler secure?” or any other logical question, because everyone knows that in North Carolina, hearts are carried around in Styrofoam containers with precisely 25 ice cubes to keep them cool. Oh, and golden retrievers are not only allowed into hospitals, but they’re big fans of eating human organs.

It could happen, right?

That was the beauty of One Tree Hill. Just when it thought it was creating its own bomb episode or leaving a mark on dramatic television, it unknowingly gave us what’s arguably one of the most ridiculous, and therefore funny, scenes in television history.

After all, if you can’t laugh when a dog runs off with a man’s only hope at life, you’re no better than Dan Scott. And that guy shot his own brother.