Recap / Helluva Boss S1E1 "Murder Family"

Blitzo: I don’t think you quite understand how we're operating down here. See, we take revenge out on the living, and it sounds like the core cast of your "sitcom of death" frankly are all probably down here in Hell with you. Boop.
Mrs. Mayberry: Not all of them. That whore survived...

When the I.M.P get hired to take out a heroic homicide survivor, things sure do happen - namely, Moxxie's hesitation at ruining a family through assassination, and the target turning out to be somewhat less than innocent...

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Tropes for this episode include:

• 30 Minutes, or It's Free!: After Moxxie accidentally causes an electric eel-related fire accident in front of their client Mayberry, Blitzo implements a last minute "24 hours or your first kill is free" policy to save face.
• Actor Allusion: Moxxie refers to the police as "your earthly authorities", which is very reminiscent of the way Zim — another Richard Steven Horvitz character — spoke about human institutions.
• Arrow Catch: After Moxxie accidentally sends a crossbow bolt ricocheting around the room, Blitzo catches it just before it hits their newest client in the face.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Downplayed with Mayberry's husband, as while he did cheat on his wife he probably didn't deserve to be the victim of a Murder-Suicide.
  • Moxxie and crew initially believe they're simply targeting the adulterous mother of an innocent family, which makes Moxxie worried that he'll destroy a good family by pulling off the mark. Then it turns out the entire family are psychotic cannibalistic Satanists, which makes Moxxie lose his hesitance in killing the woman.
    • Also, while Moxxie was horrified that the cops he called for arresting them defaulted to blowing up the house in an effort to kill off the remaining family, their aforementioned status makes it fully deserved.
• Bait-and-Switch Gunshot: Blitzo and Millie are tied up with Martha about to pull the trigger. A shot rings out, but it's Moxxie killing Martha.
• Brick Joke:
  • In the "Pilot", Blitzo wanted to buy a billboard to advertise the company, but was shot down due to expenses. After the fire scene in office, you can see the billboard behind Loona... except it includes several grammatical errors and instructions on how to put up the sign, showing that Blitzo forgot to turn off the speech to text.
  • Stolas launches into one of his usual censored raves towards Blitzo halfway through the episode, only for Blitzo to accidentally drop his phone when Martha hits him with her gun. Later, Moxxie runs past the discarded phone and we can hear Stolas still obliviously talking about all the filthy things he wants to do to Blitzo.
• Brief Accent Imitation: Moxxie is at first reluctant to kill a family, unless it's a Mafia family, at which point he briefly sounds like Vito Corleone.
• Bring My Brown Pants: Blitzo has a number of buttons under his desk connected to signal lights, one of which is labeled "Soiled myself".
• Burn the Witch!: Subverted. An attempt to send Blitzo and Millie back to Hell by burning them at the stake doesn't work because the imps are immune to fire. Blitzo even mocks the person who tried to set them on fire, saying that he can pretend to be in pain if it makes them feel better.
• Calling Me a Logarithm: When Stolas phones Blitzo in episode, he evokes his grimoire. Blitzo takes offense to it, forcing Stolas to clarify.
• Cerebus Retcon: Moxxie preventing Blitzo from killing Martha in front of her children, and then seemingly having difficulty breathing may possibly be a PTSD-induced panic attack, since we learn in Season 2 Episode 3 that Moxxie's mother was killed by his father.
• Cheater Gets Cheated On: The episode starts with a teacher catching her husband cheating and doing a murder-suicide. The person her husband was cheating with then survives, marries him, and is later seen in the montage of people calling her a hero having sex with someone else.
• Compromising Call: Blitzo's attempts to hide from Martha's wrath end up proving hopeless when Stolas ends up calling him and rambles long enough for Martha to catch him.
• Cultural Translation: In the French dub, the part where Mrs. Mayberry complains about being sent to hell with all the "'Hitlers' and 'Epsteins'" of the world is changed to replace Epstein with "Dutroux", in reference to the Belgian criminal Marc Dutroux, who is more known by French people than Epstein is.
• A Deadly Affair: The plot of the episode is kicked off by Mrs. Mayberry performing a Murder-Suicide on her husband when she found him sleeping with another woman.
• Deal with the Devil: Here it is revealed that Blitzo is on the receiving end of one, thanks to a deal he has with Stolas. In exchange for being granted unlimited use the Grimoire to access the mortal realm, Blitzo will return it to Stolas on the night of the full moon each month so he can perform his own job (and the two can also have sex). Blitzo is too busy avoiding getting shot at by Martha to say 'no' to the deal.
• Double Entendre:
  Blitzo: There he is. Have a good wank-off session, Moxxie?
  Moxxie: Excuse me?
  Blitzo: I don’t care where you come in the living world. Just come to your job on time, alright?
• Double-Meaning Title: The title of the episode, "Murder Family", refers to not only what happens in the episode, in which I.M.P essentially murder a family, but also to the fact that the family in question is a family of murderers.
• Downer Ending: Played for Laughs at Moxxie's expense. Rather than killing Martha's husband and children, Moxxie calls the police on them so they'll have a chance to change for the better. Unfortunately, they simply decide to blow up the house with the family still inside, and Moxxie spends the episode's closing moments staring off into space in traumatized silence.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Mrs. Mayberry was damned for murdering her husband in a blind rage after discovering he was cheating on her, yet given the reveal that Martha is a murderous cannibal it's entirely possible Martha would've killed Jarold Mayberry herself. Which meant had Mrs. Mayberry not lost her temper like her student advised her to, her adulterous husband would've already been taken care of.
  • A genuinely good woman got sent to Hell for a crime of passion- killing her husband and attempting to kill the woman he had an affair with before turning the gun on herself. Said adulterous woman is praised by the media as a hero just for surviving when she's secretly also a psychotic cannibal and has done far worse than her attempted killer ever did.
• Dunce Cap: The one boy who didn’t do his homework in Mrs. Mayberry’s class is sent to the corner wearing this kind of hat.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Stolas retains his Cluster F-Bomb Aggressive Submissive tendencies from the pilot, which were dropped after this episode.
• Easy Road to Hell: Assuming Mayberry had done no wrong, as she claims, while still alive on Earth, her entire straight-and-narrow life amounted to nothing because of her Murder-Suicide, instantly resulting in her damnation.
  Mayberry: You do everything right in life, play by all the rules, and still get sent down here with all the 'Hitlers' and 'Epsteins' of the world. After one measly massacre propelled by blind rage.
• Empathy Doll Shot: Seconds after a police helicopter blows up Martha's house with her family in it, a scorched teddy bear flies out of the carnage and hits Moxxie in the face.
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending: The episode ends with everyone laughing except for Moxxie, who has a traumatized expression.
• 15 Minutes of Fame: Martha becomes a news-worthy "hero" for having survived Mayberry's attack, and receives a hefty donation and lots of admiration for her and her family. This pisses off the latter greatly and she hires I.M.P to hunt Martha down.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: The "murder family" have a couple bone-framed pictures, a spine and patchwork lamp, a mounted child's head, and several guns and axes hanging their walls, all of which gives a heavy hint about what they're really like shortly before they reveal their true nature. Earlier during the montage where Martha gets called a hero, pause during the sex scenes and you notice that the "butterflies" on the wallpaper are actually human pelvises.
  • When Moxxie fouling Blitzo's shot alerts the family to their presence, the father says they're rabbits who are going to be tomorrow's dinner...despite the fact that a game animal wouldn't be firing a gun at them.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Inside the episode:
    • To justify doing their job as assassins, especially when dealing with targets in a family, Loona and Millie remind Moxxie that not all families are completely innocent and guess what terrible things they could be committing in secret. While Martha's family doesn't exactly do any of that, their cannibalistic nature more than justify the girls' claim and allows Moxxie to kill the target.
    • While the arrow Moxxie accidentally fires is bouncing around the room, it goes right through the middle of the family photo Loona is holding up. This subtly foreshadows how Moxxie will be directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of everyone in Martha's family.
  • At the scale of the show, Moxxie expressing his disagreement of killing off the father of a family, except if they are Abusive Parent or from a mafia family. Those exceptions are already understandable without knowing Moxxie's backstory. But it takes a whole new meaning when Season 2 Episode 3 reveals he is a former abused child whose father is a mafia boss.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Mayberry starts getting hostile with Blitzo, who presses a button that causes a light labeled "Deranged Client" to light up before quickly cutting away; a quick pause button will see that the other lights are labeled "More Coffee," "Soiled my Pants," "Horny Client," "Client Giving Birth," "Ghost," and "Stolas."
  • After Blitzo sends Mrs. Mayberry off in a taxi, an I.M.P billboard can be seen in the background, and since it was apparently made with speech-to-text, and Blitzo didn't proofread it, it's got some... interesting mistakes.
  • When Millie is drawing the portal to Earth on the wall, you can see that the building the IMP offices are in is apparently supposed to be condemned.
  • Before the target's family are shown to be Satanic cannibals you can see a Human Head on the Wall and a lamp made from a human spinal column. Even earlier, the shots of Martha and Ralphie's bedroom shows they have wallpaper decorated with images of pelvis bones.
  • Blitzo makes a jerkoff motion with his tail when telling Martha that burning him and Millie won't work, but he can fake it "if it'll make your dick hard."
• Freudian Threat: An incredibly rare non-castration example. After Moxxie finishes the job and apologizes heavily for nearly ruining things, Blitzo quickly states he "forgives" him, before giving a Whispered Threat that if Moxxie ever screws up another job, he is going to fuck both him and his wife, strongly implying that he's fully willing to rape them if he gets angry enough.
• Funny Background Event: Near the beginning, a horribly misspelt billboard for I.M.P with the arrow to their building pointing in the wrong direction can be seen behind Blitzo and Loona after the fire.
• Gasoline Dousing: The parents try to set the demons on fire by dousing them with gasoline from a jerrycan and lighting the post with a torch. Hilariously, this has no effect on them since demons are immune to fire.
• Groin Attack: Played with. When Moxxie attempts "target practice" on the photo of a suburban family, the aim of his crossbow hovers around the father's crotch...
• Harmful to Minors: Mrs. Mayberry gruesomely attacks her husband and Martha, killing the former, realizing too late that the webcam was on the entire time and her students could see the whole thing. Understandably, they end up badly traumatized.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Mayberry was a well-meaning teacher who loved her students. When she snapped and committed a Murder-Suicide, the kids and everyone else saw her as nothing more than a "sick woman" and "crazy bitch".
• Hollywood Satanism: I.M.P gets captured by a family of Satanists, whose kids have a playroom full of stuffed corpses, and who guess (somewhat correctly) that the imps are there to drag them down to Hell, and then attempt to send them back by burning at the stake while saying praises to Satan.
• Human Head on the Wall: One early indicator that Martha's family isn't as wholesome and innocent as it seems is the fact that somebody's severed head can briefly be seen mounted on a wall near their kitchen like a hunting trophy.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Lampshaded by Moxxie before he calls the police.
• Hypocrite: After witnessing her husband's affair on camera, Mayberry proceeds out of school to deal with it. On her way out, one of the children tell her a lesson she taught them: "Think before you act". Unfortunately, the teacher has become too angry to practice what she preached and it all goes downhill from there.
• Insane Troll Logic: Everyone kept calling Martha a hero after engaging in an adulterous affair that resulted in Mayberry nearly killing her, killing her husband, and then killing herself. Somehow, even Mayberry's students buy into it.
• Instant Oracle: Just Add Water!: Stolas uses the bubbles from his bath to scry on Blitzo as he's running for his life, and chooses then to call him about using his grimoire.
• Kinda Busy Here: Stolas calls Blitzo at the worst possible time, giving away his position while on the run. Giving Blitzo no time to negotiate the demon prince's Sex for Services proposal.
• Moe Greene Special: Inverted, you could say. Moxxie shoots Martha in the back of the head, with the bullet going right through and popping her eye out.
• Murder-Suicide: After discovering her husband cheating on her, Mayberry kills him and (seemingly) Martha in blind rage. After realizing the camera is still on, allowing her students to see the carnage, she turns the gun on herself in guilt. Martha managed to survive the entire ordeal.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: An Anti-Villain example. Moxxie's hesitation with killing the target and ruining her family bites his group in the ass big time. Luckily, he managed to help finish the assignment and kill Martha.
• Noodle Implements: Stolas looks forward to "passionate fornication" with Blitzo the next time they meet. Much of his on-the-phone raving is censored, so it's unknown about the specifics the demon has in mind.
  Stolas: ...I'll use while you and I and *bleep* and jelly sandwiches all night...!
• Noodle Incident: I.M.P seems to have dealt with situations related to the buttons shown during the Freeze-Frame Bonus. The bottom button has one specifically for Stolas.
• No-Sell: Turns out earthly fire doesn't even phase imps, shooting them might work though.
• Not Helping Your Case: Having realized she had killed her cheating husband and another woman while her students were watching from their school's computer, she expresses severe guilt and kills herself. Unfortunately, she never considered shutting off the camera at any point, resulting in her suicide further traumatizing them.
• Overly Literal Transcription: A billboard advertising I.M.P uses this as the punchline, implied to have been Blitzo sending a mangled text to the signmakers due to a text-to-speech mishap.
  Billboard: Goat an asshole in the living worlds!? Come to I am Pee!!!??! Make sure you put this sign on the rite side. Don't fuck this up. Also payment may take a couple weeks because it cums in the mail. -SPEECH TO TEXT- -Blitzo
• Police Brutality: Moxxie calls the police on Martha's family, and a police helicopter blows up their house with a missile.
• Psycho Electric Eel: Blitzo keeps a tank of them in the office. After Moxxie misfires an arrow and knocks the tank over, their electricity ends up setting the place on fire.
• Questionable Consent: Blitzo is not in a position to actually think through Stolas' offer of Sex for Services since he's being shot at at the time, and only agrees hastily to get Stolas to end the conversation. It's not impossible that a better discussion happened later offscreen though - since Stolas didn't just kill Blitzo for taking the book back in the first place, Blitzo might feel more safe to negotiate than an imp typically would be with a Goetia.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Blitzo gives Moxxie a short but scathing one for making him miss a sniper shot, angrily questioning why the smaller imp keeps trying to rationalize the innocence of a human.
  Blitzo: From the moment of birth, you're already a parasite leeching off your momma's tits! Get the FUCK over yourself, you baby dick prune!
• Rewatch Bonus: After learning the truth about the "Murder Family", viewers might become more wary of the fact that every scene involving their home long before the reveal has various decorations made up of human body parts, hinting at the truth before it gets spelled out later.
• Riddle for the Ages: Whose remains were in the urn Martha's family had at the dinner table with them?
• Shout-Out:
  • Our villains of the episodes is a tightly-knit The Family That Slays Together, who are fond of Human Resources, much like the Sawyers from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).
  • In the French dub, the episode's title is changed to "Petit Meurtre en Famille" (Little Murder in Family), which, aside from a removed plural, is the same title as the French series Petits Meurtres en famille.
• Small Role, Big Impact: The unnamed Dunce Cap wearing kid in Mrs. Mayberry's class is a very minor character. However, it's thanks to him mentioning that it was Mr. Mayberry's birthday that lead to the series of events that happened in the first episode, from Mrs. Mayberry's Murder-Suicide to her hiring I.M.P to kill Martha who had survived her wrath.
• Spoof Aesop:
  • The end of the episode has Blitzo and Millie give some mock aesops summarizing it up. That "Moxxie finally learnt not to fuck up" and "killing people isn't that big a deal if they try to kill you back".
  • Ironically, Martha's family are the ones defending themselves, and Millie concludes this relieves them of any guilt. Mayberry notices how messed up that sounds. She quickly gets over it because she was the one who hired them to kill the woman in the first place.
• Start of Darkness: The first two minutes show how Mrs. Mayberry went from a sweet human to a bitter demon.
• Technicolor Fire: The candles surrounding Stolas' bath have bright blue flames, burning with a low intensity that implies they're nowhere near hot enough to be regular fire.
• Toothy Bird: Although Stolas as an established character is not an example, there is one single instance of this trope in this episode — most likely unintentional, due to animation error (or Early-Installment Weirdness). Namely, when Stolas says "once a month" during his conversation with Blitzo, he is briefly seen with teeth.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The Dunce Cap kid mentions during all the singing that it's Jarold Mayberry's birthday. This prompts Mrs. Mayberry to realize and declare to her class that she had forgotten that it was her husband's birthday and that she hadn't gotten him anything special. To solve this, another one of Mrs. Mayberry's students suggests calling him up via video chat so that they could do a Happy Birthday surprise. Unfortunately, this leads to the whole class catching him in the act of cheating which in turn causes Mrs. Mayberry to go on a vengeful rampage against her husband and Martha, the woman he was sleeping with, that ends in a Murder-Suicide.
• Villain Has a Point: Millie and Loona points out that no human is completely innocent, and that they all have some dark secrets to hide. Millie reminds Moxxie that, as assassins, it's not their place to delve into other people's personal lives, nor determining if a target's assassination is truly justified. In in other words:
  Millie: Guilty and innocent aren’t our business, Mox. Killing who we’re paid to is... Our... Business.
• Villain of the Week: Martha and her cannibalistic cult family.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Martha, not even counting the reveal that she's an insane cannibal, is applauded by the masses as a hero for surviving Mrs. Mayberry's onslaught when it's freely acknowledged she was sleeping with a married man and cheating on her own husband.

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Episode can be viewed on YouTube here.

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