When Michelle Kwan comes in second place at the 1998 Olympics, Jessica tries to keep it from Emery and Evan. Louis changes Eddie's bedtime, hoping to spend more quality time together watching The Late Show with David Letterman.
- Batman Gambit: When Eddie's fatherless friend says he thinks a store mannequin is hot and plans to break in and steal it after closing, and Louis arrives soon after in an attempt to reinforce his authority and convince Eddie to spend the night with family, Eddie decides the best course of action is to swear at his father. This shocks Louis enough to immediately ground Eddie, and when the friend leaves, Eddie interrupts Louis' lecture with a hug; Eddie then explains he wanted Louis to ground him so he could get out of the mannequin theft without losing his friend's respect.
- Conspiracy Theorist: Once Evan and Emery learn about Michelle Kwan via Honey Saying Too Much, Jessica tries to explain her failure by making up a conspiracy about how she was replaced. Evan and Emery end up strengthening this theory by researching her travel schedule and finding inconsistencies, but it's ultimately debunked by Nancy Kerrigan, who Honey knows because she did her makeup for an ice dancing show.
- Hard Work Hardly Works: The entire plotline with Jessica, Evan, and Emery is built around Jessica having encouraged her boys to work as hard as Michelle Kwan in order to succeed in life, and her disbelief that Kwan still lost despite it.
- Motivational Lie: After Jessica, Honey, Evan, and Emery go all the way to a book signing event featuring Nancy Kerrigan to unravel the "conspiracy" of how she lost, and are told by Kerrigan that sometimes you can do your best and still fail, Jessica notices that her autograph has an addendum encouraging her to keep looking for answers. When she leaves, Emery points out that the addendum was written with one of Evan's pens instead of Kerrigan's, and Evan states that Jessica clearly needs to believe in the moral that hard work always leads to success more than either of them do.
- Parental Substitute: Louis ends up having to act like a father to one of Eddie's fatherless friends, whose lack of proper guidance nearly leads him to committing a crime.
- Rhetorical Question Blunder: When Kwan loses and Jessica destroys the tape she was going to show to Emery and Evan when they came back from school, Grandma asks Jessica if she's planning to lie to her children for the rest of their lives. Jessica genuinely considers it and decides that she can, though she ends up failing the next day.
- Rite of Passage: The episode begins with Louis seeing Eddie shave (he thinks for the first time, but actually Eddie has been borrowing Grandma's razor for months), and declares that he's truly a man now.
- Saying Too Much: Jessica initially tries her best to hide the truth from her children by destroying the tape that had recorded the event while they were at school, and stealing every newspaper in the area, but she's foiled by Honey arriving to celebrate Tara Lipinski's victory over Kwan.
- Significant Anagram: Attempted by Evan and Emery when they make a conspiracy theory over why Kwan lost, rearranging the letters in "Tara Lipinski" to get "rink alias"...ignoring the fact that the T, P, and an I are left over.
- Stand Your Ground: To teach Louis the importance of knowing when to wield his authority as a father, Marvin shows him old film footage of him in his military days supervising a railroad construction and getting elephants to avoid charging at them by refusing to back down. Louis then tries to apply this lesson to Eddie, but realizes that the real issue is Eddie's friend; he then confronts the kid outside of the store he planned to break into, and uses his fatherly authority to convince him to stand down.
- Toxic Friend Influence: After Louis decides that Eddie's a man now and can have an extended bedtime so they can watch Letterman together, one of Eddie's fatherless friends convinces him to instead spend their time together on the streets eating donuts and fantasizing about a female store mannequin.
- When You Coming Home, Dad?: Louis wants to have a friendly relationship with Eddie because his own father was strict and distant, and is disheartened when Eddie would rather use his extra pre-bedtime to hang with his friends over family time. Eddie eventually comforts him by saying that he may have a lot of friends, but nobody could replace Louis as his dad.
