After Brian humiliates Stewie for his size, Stewie invents a Shrink Ray to get back at him. Soon, however, Stewie has to shrink himself to save Brian from a hungry rat. Things get a turn for the worse when the duo is vacuumed up and thrown in the garbage by an unaware Lois. Things get a further turn for the worse when Stewie and Brian manage to get back to the Shrink Ray, but press the wrong button and shrink themselves to microscopic size...
Tropes:
- Artistic License – Biology: Being that they actually live and thrive (best) in water, you can't drown tardigrades ("water bears").
- Church of Happyology: Lampshaded by Stewie:Stewie: And we won't get in trouble because we didn't use the actual name!
- Eldritch Abomination: The dust mites play with this. To anyone else, they wouldn't be this but, to the other micro animals, they are seen as this with the way they behave (killing almost anything in their paths for no reason) and their designs seem to invoke this (see here
). - Even Evil Has Standards: Peter wants to press the button the Exterminator shows him to activate the fumigation but changes his mind when the man again wants to go out to dinner with him, annoyed by someone he just met and has no acquaintance with immediately wanting to hang out with him.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: The Exterminator called in to fumigate the Griffins' house is so lonely that he imagines Peter and Lois taking him out to dinner.
- Imagine Spot: The lonely Exterminator imagines Peter and Lois taking him out to dinner and Peter taking him to his house while placing his jacket on him when he feels cold.
- Inventional Wisdom: Stewie is not very good at labeling. When your machine has both a tiny button and a big button labelled "tiny", with opposite functions, mix-ups are hard to avoid (see Poor Communication Kills below). Justified up to a point, since Stewie didn't expect anyone to use his machine when he built it, and presumably knows what his buttons do.
- Mister Exposition: Stewie tells Brian all he (and the audience) needs to know about microscopic animals.
- Mouse World: There is a whole ecosystem of microscopic animals in the shag carpet of Stewie's room.
- Poor Communication Kills: Or shrinks, in this case. The shrink ray has a tiny button and a large button labelled "tiny", as mentioned under Inventional Wisdom. Stewie ask Brian to push "the tiny button" to return them to normal size. Hilarity Ensues.Stewie: I didn't say 'hit the big button that says "tiny"'! I said 'hit the tiny button'! The one you pressed is going to shrink us down to microscopic size!Brian: Why did you make the "tiny" button big?!Stewie: I had to make it big enough to write "tiny" on it!
- Peter and Lois didn't bother to tell the Exterminator that their kids and Brian were still inside the house just as he got it fumigated.
- Seinfeldian Conversation: Stewie and Brian get back into the house by climbing the lattice on the wall. Stewie points out that "every Eighties movie has one, so the fat man thought we should have one too". Then, for the whole duration of the climb, the duo discuss which Eighties movies did actually contain a lattice.
- Shout-Out:
- The vacuuming scene is reminiscent of the lawnmower scene in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Brian and Stewie being thrown in the garbage and having to cross the lawn back is also likely a homage to the movie.
- The tardigrade society in the second half of the episode may owe something to Ant-Man and the Wasp popularizing tardigrades earlier in 2018.
- Shrink Ray: Much of the hilarity comes from this, as Stewie uses one to get back at Brian for some pranks. Things go wrong, however, when he accidentally shrinks them both down to microscopic size.
- Your Size May Vary: It's a plot point that Brian and Stewie shrink to a slightly smaller size than a rat, yet a later scene (before they get a second dose of Shrink Ray) shows them to be smaller than a housefly.
