Desperate to replace their worn out sofa, Louise sabotages it, sending the family on a hunt for a replacement.
Sacred Tropes:
- Berserk Button: Linda is a little pissed when the suggestion of replacing the couch comes up.
- Brutal Honesty: The Sofa Queen drills it into Linda's head that their old couch, as nostalgic as it is, is disgusting and beyond repair anyway.
- Comically Missing the Point: The Couch Burners keep closing their eyes to look more dramatic, but Bob wants to take a picture of them with their eyes open. Even worse, they keep saying it "Feels" like their eyes are open like they're genuinely too dumb to realize when their eyes are closed.
- Companion Cube: Linda is really attached to the couch, noting all the firsts the kids had on it, and refusing to give it up no matter what damage it suffers. Bob and Louise later realize she's right.
- Despair Event Horizon: Linda, when she finds out the couch was sabotaged, is inconsolable, crying harder than she ever had in the series before.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Linda eulogizes the broken couch as if it was a relative that just died.
- Exiled to the Couch: Discussed; when Linda runs off crying, the Sofa Jester jokes that he'll add some pillows and blankets to the couch because Bob is about to be sleeping on it.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: During the Family TV Night at the beginning, Bob and Louise are sitting together on the floor instead of joining the others on the couch, hinting at which two Belchers are most focused on replacing the couch.
- Inelegant Blubbering: Linda ends up crying and running through the store when she realizes Louise tricked her into getting a new couch.
- Kitschy Local Commercial: The plot is kicked off by Bob and Louise watching an ad for the Sofa Queen and thinking that the couch needs to be replaced.
- Never My Fault: Louise does admit to sabotaging the couch, but she frames it as if Bob was a willing accomplice rather than an Unwitting Instigator of Doom. Though to be fair, Bob doesn't put up the best defense.
- Noodle Incident: Bob once tried windsurfing, but refuses to get into any details.
- Pyromaniac: The members of the Couch Burners insist on living up to their name.
- Rhetorical Request Blunder: Bob ponders out loud about getting a new couch if something finally happens to the old one. He really shouldn't have said that where Louise could hear him, as she takes it as a sign to deliberately sabotage the couch.
- Serious Business: The Belcher family couch. Linda reacts to the discovery that Bob was (inadvertently) involved in "sabotaging" it as if he's confessing to adultery. Granted, it has a lot of sentimental memories to her and to the family, but even so.
- Small Name, Big Ego: The Couch Burners think they're way more popular than they are.
- Snap Back: The damage Louise does to the couch (coupled with the water damage it suffers from sitting outside) is completely reversed by the next time it appears.
- Status Quo Is God: The Belchers realize they have too many fond memories of their old couch to part with it. They get it back from the Couch Burners by trading them their new couch to burn instead. This is despite the fact that the old couch is already broken and they already spent a ton of money on the new couch.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Bob's comment on how Linda might replace the couch if something happened to it was only meant as a statement of fact, but this drives Louise to actively sabotage the couch so that the Belchers have a reason get a new one.
- Victory Through Intimidation: The vote for replacing the couch was actually about to pass 4-1 (with Linda being the only dissenting vote), but Linda intimidated Gene and Tina into siding with her, making the vote fail 2-3.
