B Plot: Hank and Wanda make fuel out of cabbage but catch the suspicions of Karen and Davis, who think their experiment is a little less corny and little more Breaking Bad.
Tropes referenced:
- Amusingly Short List: In The Tag, Brent and Lacey are waiting for the bus to go purchase food for The Ruby and decide to go through the list:Lacey: Okay, do you have the list of things I need?
Brent: Yep, I have it right here. [reading from a piece of paper] Hot dogs...
Beat. He re-folds the paper.Lacey: There are other things on that list besides hot dogs.
Brent: When I get the hot dogs I'll look at the rest of the list. - Comical Overreacting: Brent lampshades Oscar's tendency to do this:Oscar: What the hell's going on?!
Brent: Oh hey, Dad. The tanks ran dry. I hope you'll do me the honor of overreacting to this.
Oscar: The tanks?! The underground tanks?!
Brent: No, the Sherman tanks I brought home from World War II.
Oscar: What kind of an idiot jackass lets his gas station run out of gas? You're just a station now. Change the sign from "Corner Gas" to "Corner Nothing". - Conviction by Contradiction: Lacey is trying to convince the town to try more of her exotic foods since they liked the last one. She turns to Brent for help. However, Brent then asks point blank how she can keep creating new dishes if she's supposedly "out of food". This forces Lacey to admit she was never out of food and was only pretending so the town would have no choice but to eat what she put in front of them.
- Deadpan Snarker: When Oscar complains that a gasless town is going to turn into a post-apocalyptic wasteland like that one movie, Brent asks if he meant Frozen
- Escalating War: Brent forgets to order more gas for Corner Gas, so Oscar decides to teach him a lesson by stealing everything at Corner Gas and stuffing it in the trunk of his car. This leads to Brent taking a joyride in Oscar's car to run out the gas, and when Oscar's first idea of electrifying Brent's telephone when he calls in a gas shipment is shot down by Emma, he settles for cancelling the shipment and making the whole town go gasless for another week.
- Freudian Slip:Lacey: This could be my chance to force everyone... I mean provide everyone, opportunity to try something different.
- Hillbilly Moonshiner: Hank convinces Wanda (mainly by doubting her ability to do so) to create ethanol out of cabbage stolen from Emma's garden, which he plans to sell while the town needs gas, though the operation is a tad more scientific than hillbilly.
- Hypocritical Humor:
- Oscar complains to Emma while she's gardening about how lazy Brent is and where he got that behavior from. Emma then asks him to pass a shovel, and Oscar just states she's closer.
- Won points out Brent's blatant hypocrisy after Brent criticizes him for being out of food at the Foo Mart:Brent: How could you let his happen? This is very unprofessional, Won.
Won: You know, I was going to drive into the city to get some supplies, but I can't get any gas for some reason.
Brent: [backpedaling] Yeah, well... that, that's a whole different, complicated... - After learning about Lacey's osso bucco, Oscar wants her to make some non-foreign food at The Ruby, like pasta (which is Italian) or tacos (Mexican).
- Hank chuckles about how he can get Wanda to do anything just by saying "as if you could", but Lacey then gets Hank to try her osso bucco by using the same tactic.
- Imagine Spot: In addition to Oscar envisioning the town's impending gasless crisis as as scene from Mad Max, after Oscar decides to get revenge for his son's foolishness by stealing everything at Corner Gas, Brent imagines all the food having gone to Food Heaven...which is adjacent to Celebrity Impersonator Heaven, where "William Shakespeare", "David Bowie", and "Elvis Presley" are chowing down.
- Irrational Hatred: As per usual, the townspeople are upset at Lacey for changing her menu yet again, adding such things as quinoa soup and osso bucco. Even when they admit the food smells and tastes good when forced to eat it during the gas shortage, they refuse to eat it any longer than necessary.
- Noodle Incident: When Davis proposes that he and Karen patrol on foot while the town is out of gas, Karen states it's his worst idea since he tried to kiss a badger. After a quick flashback to Davis putting on lip balm and kissing a badger, even present-day Davis has no idea why he did that.
- Popcultural Osmosis Failure: Wanda tries to use Jean Valjean as an example of someone good who broke the law. Karen then asks "Kickboxing Time Cop?", obviously thinking of Jean-Claude Van Damme. Later, Karen combines the names when trying to convince Davis to investigate Hank and Wanda, asking him to emulate "Jean Claude Valjean".
- Shout-Out:
- A rapid succession of shouts occur in the Cold Open when Hank asks for examples of "good" aliens in TV shows and movies.
- There's an entire Imagine Spot to Mad Max when Oscar pictures the town in a panic over being gasless.
- Also, as mentioned in the B Plot blurb, Breaking Bad is shouted out by name, with Karen referring to Wanda as "Wanda White".
- Stuff Blowing Up: When Karen and Davis try to bust Wanda and Hank's cabbage-ethanol operation, they convince the cops to let them off by giving them the ethanol for free to refuel the police cruiser. Soon after, the explosion from downtown Dog River is seen all the way at Corner Gas...though it's a partial Bait-and-Switch as Karen convinced Davis to test it on his lawnmower first.
