During (forced) spring cleaning, Kevin, Hamster and Gretel are made aware of a bank robbery by a supervillain named the Nightmarionette: a former neuroscientist with self-esteem issues, who uses a staff that can read minds with electromagnetic waves in order to project hyper-realistic holograms of anyone's greatest fears. Gretel falls victim to this, and so Kevin and Fred decide to help Gretel overcome her greatest fear (a scorpion with a toaster for a head) by using immersion therapy.
Tropes:
- Absurd Phobia: While others are shown common fears by the Nightmarionette, like snakes and clowns, Gretel's fear is a toaster-scorpion hybrid that she dreams about sometimes. After she's beaten that fear through immersion therapy, the Nightmarionette goes deeper into her subconscious and summons... a blender-lobster.
- Anti-Climax: Hamster's fear is at first shown to be a mysterious tube. It turns out to be the vacuum cleaner from back when he was a regular hamster in the pet store, used by the clerk when she's cleaning up the place, as Hamster went back to said pet store to tell her about it. All it took was an apology from the clerk for Hamster to get over his fear.
- Chekhov's Gun: During spring cleaning, Gretel finds Mr. Grumpypuss, a sock puppet Kevin used to do a dumb act with to make Gretel laugh whenever she is scared ("dumb stuff beats scary stuff"). This is also how Kevin break Gretel out of her fear for a second time.
- Face Your Fears: Both Hamster and Gretel have to conquer their fears to defeat the Nightmarionette. Kevin helps Gretel to do so with immersion therapy, but Hamster decides to face his fear by himself.
- Lampshade Hanging:
- Hamster outright gives away his Secret Identity both by talking to the clerk at the pet store and transforming in front of her with little concern.
- Deconstructed regarding the ending; Kevin questions Hamster's clothing rather than why he's describing the moral of the day's events. Hamster calls him out on this.
- Oh, Crap!: One of the transitions featured a terrified Gretel and Hamster. See here.
◊ - Running Gag: Because of his name, the Nightmarionette mistakenly gets called a puppet by Gretel, Kevin and even the news, much to his annoyance (not helping when he considers himself a puppeteer of his chaos). This somehow leads to the episode ending on references to Pinocchio.
- Shout-Out: As previously stated, Pinocchio is referenced by the ending, with Hamster dressed up like Jiminy Cricket.
- Shown Their Work: Scorpions are correctly drawn with eight legs, rather than six legs as in most cartoons (the pincers are actually mouthparts, rather than arms).
- Video Call Fail: Kevin gets a call after having he and Gretel found Mr. Grumpypuss, so when he takes the call, he still does his shtick as Mr. Grumpypuss, still in the moment. He then realizes that the caller is his crush Hiromi, who wanted to invite him to the comic shop with an anime mime troupe.
