When Linda and Tina go to the shoe store, Gene is accidentally left home alone; Bob, Louise, and Teddy go to buy restaurant equipment from a creepy guy whom Bob found on the internet.
Mr. Lonely Tropes:
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Left alone in the house, Gene decides to do all the things he's not allowed to do: eat from Linda's secret stash of crackers, play with Louise's toys, read Tina's diary, and... hold all the spoons in the house at once.
- Call-Back:
- One of the things in Gene's song about what he likes to think about is Vietnamese Banh mi, which he also wanted the family to order in "The Bleakening".
- When trying out better shoes, Linda happily exclaims that she feels like a businesswoman in New York, which Gene had deliriously thought was going to happen to her if she became a successful businesswoman entrepreneur in "Mommy Boy."
- Cell Phones Are Useless: Gene actually tries to call his parents after being left home alone, but circumstances arise that keep him from reaching them. Namely, Linda loses her phone and decides that she can part from it for a few hours, so when Gene tries to call her, he finds the phone under the couch cushions. Later, Gene can't remember Bob's phone number, so he looks for it on the fridge door, but the last three digits are smeared with ketchup, leaving them unreadable.
- Chekhov's Gun: The old grill hood is left near the basement, which causes Gene some problems when it falls in front of the door and blocks it, locking Gene inside.
- Comically Missing the Point: Gene notes that Linda's secret cracker stash was in a box labeled "Spiders", and wonders where Linda keeps the spiders.
- Continuity Nod: When Gene holds a rave with Louise's toys, both Kuchi Kopi and Melted Kuchi Kopi can be seen.
- A Day in the Limelight: For Gene's Imaginary Friend Ken! Normally confined to one-line gags where Gene relates his latest (age-inappropriate) business venture, this time Gene gets to exposit by talking to him, and much of Gene's plotline revolves around him.
- Dirty Coward: While discussing whether or not the guy selling the grill hood's a serial killer, Teddy makes it clear he'd abandon Bob and Louise to save his own skin. He wouldn't even bother calling the police, assuming they wouldn't get there in time, though he reconsiders when seeing how upset (read: utterly confused) Bob is.
- Everyone Has Standards: Louise hates shoe shopping so much she immediately decides to go with Bob when she learns that's what Linda and Tina are doing, even though she's not exactly enthused about getting a new grill hood.
- Hates Being Alone: Gene, to the point that he still gets changed in Bob & Linda's bedroom every morning (even if they're not awake). Naturally, this makes the episode's A-plot a living nightmare for him, although via Character Development he overcomes this.
- Happily Married: Adam mentions having a wife who was concerned for his safety when he decided to start selling stuff online.
- Hopeless with Tech: It doesn't occur to Gene to look up Bob's number in Linda's cell's contacts mostly because he's not that tech-savvy.
- Imaginary Friend: The first thing Gene does when he realizes he's home alone and can't call his parents is to pretend to be getting a call from Ken* , using a pair of salad tongs as an earpiece. Eventually the fantasy gets too real when Ken decides to hang up, leaving Gene alone with his thoughts.
- Insistent Terminology: Every time Bob says the new hood is "refurbished", Teddy says it's "old" and claims that "refurbished" is only a fancy term for it.
- Karmic Jackpot: Linda and Tina venture out of the Sale section and into normal-priced shoes section. They go a little wild trying on different shoes, leaving boxes around. When the disapproving, overworked sales woman tries getting them to leave, Linda and Tina feel bad and start picking up and putting shoes away themselves. Linda also apologizes to the worker and commiserates over how depressing the Sales section is. In the end, the sales woman offers to sell them a pair of new, non-sale sneakers for 20% off.
- Locked in a Freezer: Gene walks down to the basement to use the meat grinder when the old grill hood falls on the door and pins it down, trapping him.
- Mistaken for Murderer:
- Louise is convinced that Adam, the guy selling Bob the grill hood, is a serial killer luring people online to his home so he can kill them because of the jokes he made about a loud vacuum cleaner being able to cover up screaming and one of the tortilla presses he has doubling as a hand press if you're not careful with it. Bob thinks she's just being paranoid, but when Adam takes too long to get the receipt, he slowly starts to think she's right. In the end, however, Adam just turns out to be a nice, albeit socially-awkward man, who took so long with the receipt because he also had to go to the bathroom, couldn't hear them yelling because he had a fan on and who keeps most of the lights off in his house, which makes it look creepy.
- After all the above, Adam himself thinks they are murderers and was warned that people on the internet could turn out to be serial killers if he sold his stuff online.
- Never Split the Party: Bob tries to go inside to check on Adam himself, but Louise refuses to let him go alone. Teddy volunteers to go with Bob, and Bob asks if maybe Teddy could go in alone. He refuses, so all three of them go inside together.
- Noodle Incident: A toe was found in the sales rack. Or something that resembled a toe. Either way, the police confiscated it.
- No Social Skills: Adam is a genuinely Nice Guy, but he's so awkward that eventually even Bob thinks he's up to something.
- Papa Wolf: Despite insisting Adam isn't a murderer, when Bob, Louise, and Teddy go to check on him Bob insists that Louise stay behind him.
- Running Gag: Gene's Imaginary Friend Ken makes a reappearance. He's apparently now a filmmaker.
- Sanity Slippage: Gene slowly loses it once he's left alone that his bottom is using a pair of salad tongs to talk to his imaginary friend Ken. He gets better when he starts going insane once Ken (apparently) hangs up on him.
- Shout-Out:
- The Store Next Door is "Lionel Stitchy Plastic Surgery".
- The Exterminator Van is "Song of the Flea".
- When Gene can't decide whether to go with Bob or Linda, Tina says that it's "a real Kramer vs. Kramer. I think that was a Seinfeld episode."
- The Burger of the Day is the The Green a Little Bean of Me Burger
. - Louise wants to call the new hood Robin, and gets annoyed when Bob doesn't understand the reference.
- Linda and Tina visit Shoe’s the Boss Shoe Warehouse.
- While Gene is alone, he dances on the counter in Bob's Burgers. While talking to Ken, he says, "I do feel like the bartenders in Coyote Ugly!"
- When he gets trapped in the basement, Gene yells, "Call Richard Belzer! Call Ice-T! Call Mariska Hargitay!"Explanation
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Linda doesn't want to leave Gene home alone. “And not because I don’t want you to find Mommy’s special crackers that I don’t really have, forget I said anything.”
- Tough Love: Gene interprets Ken hanging up as Ken making him learn from experience that being alone isn't so bad. Of course, Ken is imaginary, so it's moreso Gene doing this to himself.
- Wrong Assumption: Because of Gene's indecisiveness, both Bob and Linda assumed he was going with the other, and so accidentally leave Gene home alone. It's only when they return and discover that Gene is with neither of them that they realize what happened.
