A worm creature named Warren the Eagle tries to educate the trio about friendship when Duck and Red Guy upset Yellow Guy on computer day. Things become worse when Yellow Guy becomes depressed and retreats to his happy place inside his head. Warren enters his brain to try and get him back.
Tropes:
- Aerith and Bob: Compared to Warren, none of the Brain Friends have necessarily normal names (or appearances), but Yumpherdinker is definitely a standout in both regards.
- …And That Little Girl Was Me: Warren tries to pull this off after telling his (back)story, but it falls flat on his face when the trio (including Yellow Guy) is able to figure it out before he can announce the reveal.
- Art Shift: Yellow Guy's Mental World is shown in stop motion-styled CGI.
- Audience? What Audience?: Red Guy and Duck are confused when Warren addresses the camrea, because from their point of view he appears to be just talking to the wall about something seemingly random with his back turned to them.Red Guy: Huh? Who is that?
Duck: I dunno. I think it's an insane person. - Author Avatar: Warren tells a story about a "guy that [he] knew", very obviously himself.Red Guy: I mean, you did some of it in first-person.
- Bait-and-Switch: To get away from Warren, Shy Imaginary Older Brother breaks the window like he's going to climb out of it... and then he takes a shard of glass from the broken window and slits his own throat.
- Battle in the Center of the Mind: Warren invades Yellow Guy's head and ruins his happy place, but when Yellow Guy tries to run away, Warren assumes a much more threatening form to ensure he stays. Duck manages to stab him in the eye before he can hurt Yellow Guy, though.
- Blatant Lies:
- Warren's insistence that he's an eagle whose wings haven't grown in yet, complete with his business card saying "Warren the Worm" with "worm" crossed out and "eagle" written underneath.
- The trio (and Colin) interrupt Warren's rhetorical statement about why even someone like him would have trouble making friends, saying how ugly he is. Warren begins quietly sobbing, but insists that he's laughing and that they didn't hurt his feelings.
- The Bus Came Back: Colin from "Computers" returns, and is far more friendly now, as it's implied that the puppets invite him over for computer day.
- Captain Obvious: When Duck and Red Guy are asking an internet doctor what's wrong with Yellow Guy, the doctor asks if Yellow has a worm in his brain. When confirming that Yellow Guy does in fact have a worm in his brain, the doctor comes to the scientific conclusion that Yellow Guy has a worm in his brain, to the sincere shock of Duck and Red Guy.
- Chainsaw Good: As the trio's fight continues to get increasingly heated during the credits, Red Guy somehow pulls out a chainsaw.
- Continuity Nod:
- Duck utters his "Pesky bee!" line from "Love" after fishing Warren out of Yellow Guy's brain.
- When the guys log into the Internet, a colorful version of the word "NOTHING" flies by, a reference to the "Computer" episode of the original web series ("Oh, look, nothing!"). Plenty of other things related to the episode appear as well, particularly in regards to Colin’s virtual world.
- Dark Reprise: Warren sings an utterly fucked up version of the "Brain Friends "leitmotif", when stalking Yellow Guy in the darkest recesses of his mind.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Duck Guy's several comments of wanting to see a picture of a skeleton can remind you of searching porn on the internet.
- Foreshadowing: A very easy one to miss, but if one watches carefully when the story goes inside Yellow Guy's brain, they can notice electrical wiring mixed into his flesh. Two episodes later, we learn that he is at least partially mechanical in nature.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus:
- When Warren rewinds the moment where Red Guy and Duck swear at Yellow Guy, you can see the puppets getting set up by the crew members of the show, complete with the (heavily tattooed) actor physically portraying Red Guy getting into his costume, which includes a hood..
- Pausing the episode on the guys' daily chore list reveals that one of Duck Guy's responsibilities is watching over a grease fire that apparently hasn't been put out yet.
- Friendship Moment: Red Guy and Duck saving Yellow Guy from Warren and comforting him when he thought that they weren't friends anymore. This is then accompanied by them singing a sweet song together... Then Yellow Guy breaks their new computer, causing Duck to scream and berate him -- followed by the trio beating each other up with glass bottles to actual weaponry.
- Gonk: Warren the "Eagle" is a blemish-covered earthworm with thick lips, crooked yellow teeth, and bugging eyes. The trio (and Colin) at one point start insulting his appearance, comparing him to a piece of a larger animal that fell off or a tumor. Inside Yellow Guy's Imagine Spot, Warren looks progressively worse.
- Grievous Bottley Harm: In the final moments of the episode, the main trio get into an argument which gets so heated that Yellow Guy straight up shatters a glass bottle on Duck's face. Then it's immediately followed by Red Guy (who was defending him a few seconds earlier) shattering another bottle on Yellow Guy's face while yelling that he's "dealing with it".
- Happy Place: After taking an onslaught of verbal abuse from Red Guy and Duck, Yellow Guy retreats into his imagination, where he knows his memories will be kind to him.
- Heroic BSoD: Thanks to a combination of not receiving any mail from his online friends, and Warren's terrible advice, Yellow Guy's brain becomes upset and he completely blanks out.
- Imaginary Friend: Yellow Guy has a whole gang of them living in his brain, with one of them potentially being Real After All.
- Immediate Self-Contradiction: After Warren tells the audience that friendship is about what everyone wants to do, not just doing your own thing, he tries to play his podcast on the Brain Friends' radio when that's not what they want.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Duck is able to extract Warren from Yellow Guy's brain by piercing him with a needle that goes right through his eye.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Warren is introduced pausing the trio's fight (as if it were a VHS video) to explain to the viewer how they're not being good friends and what they should be saying in their situation. The trio remain aware during this, with Red Guy commenting "is that supposed to be me?" at Warren superimposing his own mouth over his.
- Mundane Made Awesome:
- The guys do an adorably synchronized headbang when they access the internet. Red Guy gleefully says that he wants to check their internet speed, Yellow Guy wants to do some online gambling, and Duck just wants to go on the dark web to look at some skeletons. The gang instead checks their emails, all done with a retrowave tunnel and banging music in the background. A far cry from the disturbing transition to the digital world in "Computers".
- When Yellow Guy goes into his mental world, the first thing he does is jumping across a lump on the floor that his Brain Friends celebrate him for and Saturdavid giving him an edible trophy before starting a dance party.
- Noodle Incident: Duck mentions that the documents he's been forging have led to many deaths (but maybe that's just the worm in his brain talking).
- Nothing Is Funnier: The rest of the trio's fight in the ending is audio only as the credits roll, and just from the sounds alone, we can tell that it's progressively getting more violent.
- The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Zigzagged. Yellow Guy is tasked with coming up with the password for the guys' Internet Day, and selects his maiden name. Ordinarily that would be a very common password choice...if the maiden name in question wasn't "Rat Eyes."
- Rhetorical Question Blunder: Warren the Eagle breaks the fourth wall to talk about his difficulty in keeping friends and asks the audience "How could a confident, handsome worm- EAGLE have trouble keeping friends?" The main trio then immediately provide several reasons why that may be the case; each reason colourfully insulting his appearance in a different way.
- Samus Is a Girl: Yumpherdinker has the deepest and most masculine voice of all the brain friends, and also has a generally masculine/mannish face. She is also explicitly stated within the episode to be female, being the only Brain Friend with a confirmed gender.
- Sheep in Sheep's Clothing: Given that the show is a Subverted Kids' Show, one would expect something to go wrong in Yellow Guy's happy place. But, as it turns out, they're all genuinely what they show themselves as, and it's Warren making everything about himself that ruins it. The worst his happy place has to offer is the Shy Imaginary Older Brother cutting his own throat open to escape Warren.
- Shout-Out: Though it might be just a coincidence, the general aesthetic and layout of going into Yellow Guy's mind through his ear into his own fantasy world full of CGI characters presents itself as a very accurate homage to the intro of the point and click PC/Mac game Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong-Nou.
- Speaking Up for Another: The song the main trio sings together at the end of the episode is interrupted when Yellow Guy trips and breaks Colin's computer gift, to which Duck responds by calling Yellow Guy an idiot. Red Guy immediately comes to Yellow Guy's defense by telling Duck that he shouldn't talk to him in the insulting way he did (especially since he had promised to stop doing so beforehand). However, he quickly turns against Yellow Guy when the latter hits Duck with a bottle, triggering a fight between the three that carries only in sound and dialogue over the episode's ending credits.Duck: You idiot!Yellow Guy: What? Don't say that to me, I didn't mean to!Duck: Oh, shut up!Red Guy: Don't talk to him like that! You said you weren't gonna talk to him like that anymore!Duck: What, turn on me?! He ruined it! I'm never gonna see that skeleton!Red Guy: What? Oh boo-hoo, here we go, now we're gonna start—Yellow Guy: I hate you! (hits Duck with a bottle, sending Duck falling with a scream) Ah!Red Guy: I'M DEALING WITH IT! (throws another bottle at Yellow Guy, with the camera getting knocked over alongside Yellow Guy)
- Sugar Bowl: The place inside Yellow Guy's mind. If the world he inhabits is already very similar to a kid's show, the place his Brain Friends reside in is straight out of a pre-school show.
- Take That!: Colin apparently thinks that freelancers "deserve to die".
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Warren gets a particularly scathing one courtesy of the puppets and Colin taking turns roasting him, to the point where he's broken to tears attempting to mask it as laughing.
- The Un-Reveal: Early on in the episode, Yellow Guy and Duck attempt to use their real names for the password. Throughout it all, they never actually say those names out loud, and the names on the screen are censored for password protection. For further confusion, Yellow Guy's name is apparently extremely long and includes a hyphen, while Duck's name consists of a single character which, according to the key on the keyboard, is some kind of indecipherable symbol.
- You Wouldn't Shoot Me: When Yellow Guy (apparently toting a gun) shouts "I'll Kill You!" during the fight over the end credits, Red Guy responds with the revving of a chainsaw and a defiant "Oh, really?"
