After the company buys an online dating app, Reagan is convinced to give it a try. Meanwhile, Glenn becomes jealous of Brett's attractiveness and challenges him to switch lives to determine how much one's outer appearance matters.
Tropes:
- An Aesop:
- For the Brett/Glenn plot. While one's outward appearance is important at times, one's attitude and personality are what truly matters in a lasting relationship.
- It doesn't matter who or what your romantic partner is; treat them with respect. Reagan more or less treats Robot Bryan like a man-toy. She adjusts his programming when he makes her uncomfortable, and fails to put his needs before hers when he starts to gain sentience. Robot Bryan gives her a What the Hell, Hero? about that.
- Robot Reagan spells out to Reagan that she can't be afraid of dates going wrong with a Nice Guy. She has to take the leap herself, with no shortcuts or substitutes like Robot Bryan. That also means improving her social skills. Reagan admits that Robot Reagan is right.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Robot Bryan, after some personality fiddling from Reagan, decides to build his own version of Reagan with maxed-out traits. As the real Reagan warns beforehand, a hyper-confident Reagan can be pretty scary.
- Ambiguously Bi: If you look closely at the updated selection of matches ROBOTUS shows Reagan, you can see a few women. J.R. also says an appreciative "Nice" when he sees Glenn-as-Brett's dick-pic.
- The Bet: Several throughout the episode, with Gigi and Myc as bookies:
- Exploiting Reagan's social awkwardness, all of her colleagues (even Brett) wager various outcomes how her dating pursuit ends; all against her overall. Reagan herself doubles the wager by saying she can get a boyfriend by the end of the week. After some setbacks, she uses science to create the "perfect" boyfriend and wins on a technicality/pity.
- A betting pool is set up for employee ratings on RightSwipe.
- Brett and Glenn have one to switch bodies and see who would last longer in the other's life. Glenn would have won because Brett caved and begged to switch back first, but he got greedy with the positive attention and his behavior ultimately backfired on him.
- J.R. puts money down on Brett-in-Glenn's-body sexually satisfying Mrs. Dolphman (which he does), and at the end of the whole adventure, Myc takes a moment to ask if anyone put money on it ending on An Aesop.
- Blackmail: J. R. announces that Cognito Inc. has purchased a dating app called RightSwipe. With this, the company can invoke this trope and seize control of the "two remaining branches of government" with archived dick pics from their representatives.
- Bookends: Reagan calls for extraction when one of her first dates ends badly at the beginning of the episode. She does this again when her attempt to finally date Bryan is shot down in the end.
- Brain Transplant: When the Face/Off surgery fails, Andre resorts to brain-swapping to allow Glenn and Brett to experience each other's lives.
- Brick Joke: When Reagan accidentally reveals the existence of the shadow government to a boy she was going out with, she immediately called in an extraction team to make sure Cognito's secrets couldn't go public. She does it again once she has to come clean to Bryan.
- Broke the Rating Scale: The attractiveness-judging algorithm gives Glenn a score of zero... on a 1 to 10 scale.
- Casting Gag: William Jackson Harper once again plays a Nice Guy Endearingly Dorky Clueless Chick-Magnet that ends up in the middle of chaos thanks to a woman that has a crush on him. His robot self suffers existential crises repeatedly until Reagan wipes his memories and lowers his awareness, which is not that different from Chidi's many crises and eventual breakdown in The Good Place.
- Didn't Think This Through:
- Andre's initial plan of simply surgically removing Glenn and Brett's faces and swapping them has the expected result of them screaming at seeing their faces grotesquely slapped over the other's flayed flesh.
- When Robot Ryan gets tired of Reagan attitude and feeling jealous of her now trying to get in a relationship with the real Ryan he decided to create a robot replica of her but with all her personality settings set on high so that he can dump her for the replica, what he did not take into account was that by making Robot Reagan have zero self-doubt meant that now she is so confident to want to date the real deal rather than settle with a robot copy which ended up causing his death at her hands
- Double Standard Rape: Female on Male:
- Downplayed. Glenn's ex-wife throws herself on him (while Brett still possesses his body) after being attracted to his "new attitude and voice", in the middle of a therapy session. Brett clearly doesn't want it as he tries to say he's not actually Glenn. The therapist, meanwhile, just sits and watches, seeing this as "progress" to fix their relationship.
- Also downplayed. When Robo Reagan finally meets Bryan, she starts groping and flirting with him and then plants a kiss on his lips. He is visibly discomforted and runs off to the bathroom, but the real Reagan appears to be more jealous rather than horrified or embarrassed.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: The betting board for Reagan's dating life:
- Reagan dates her cousin, 3/1; first cousin, +20
- Reagan clones herself and has autofornication, 12/1
- Reagan marries a hologram, 5/1
- Relationship a VR simulation, 8/1
- Reagan dates a robot, 22/1
- Reagan builds weapon to destroy all relationships, 13/1
- Reagan and Neil deGrass Tyson have an affair, 15/1
- Reagan brings Carl Sagan back from the dead, 12/1; Sagan leaves Reagan for Marie Curie, +20
- Reagan fails, 2/1
- Gasp!: Reagan's reaction to Robot Reagan flirting with Bryan.Reagan: [gasps] That bitch!
- Handsome Lech: Glenn becomes this in Brett's body. Even though he gathers a lot of female attention initially, with two women wanting to have sex with him at first sight, his personality and political views quickly put them off.
- Heel Realization: By the end of the episode, Glenn confronts Brett and demands to know why people still hate him despite now being handsome. Brett tells Glenn that his ugly appearance isn't what drives people away (well, to his ex-wife, at least); it's his Jerkass attitude and excessive patriotism. Glenn tries to improve his relationship with her when they switch back brains but feels cheated after learning she had sex with Brett earlier.
- Her Own Worst Enemy: Reagan doesn't get the memo that maybe sitting back and listening to her dates, treating them like people, would allow her to go on repeats and maybe get a boyfriend. She explicitly says that growing as a person doesn't interest her. Also, her evil robot double.
- Hotter and Sexier: Robot Reagan wears a dress more revealing than anything Reagan normally wears.
- Hypocritical Humor: Andre says that he needs to stop basing his surgeries on movies when his Face/Off-inspired swap goes horribly wrong, only to then immediately decide on a Freaky Friday-esque brain swap instead.
- Literal Metaphor: When Gigi asks Reagan if Robot Bryan is "Boyfriend Material" for her, she shows off a box with robot parts labeled as such and responds:Reagan: Gigi, I made him out of literal "Boyfriend Material".
- Loophole Abuse: Reagan tries and fails to get a boyfriend from RightSwipe to win The Bet. When ROBOTUS helps her find a good match in the form of Bryan, she makes a robot clone to practice dating on, but by coincidence happens to take him to the same restaurant where the real Bryan is on a date with someone else. Just as she gives up, Robot Bryan offers to form a relationship with her. Because there was no rule against making a boyfriend, Reagan wins on a technicality, though Gigi and Myc are creeped out and mostly fork over the cash out of pity.
- Mistaken for Pedophile: When Glenn has his face scanned for an attractiveness score on RightSwipe, it labels him as a possible sex offender and gives him a 0/10. Not that he blames the result. He reveals that his dolphin-like appearance makes him a victim of this trope frequently. When Brett becomes Glenn, he ends up scaring a child and is later kicked out of his apartment because it is 100 yards from a nearby school.
- Morality Dial: Reagan's robots can have their personality traits adjusted through various labeled bars. The first thing Robot Reagan does is destroy any device that would allow the real Reagan to do this to her.
- Never Found the Body: Reagan left the handling of her robot clone to a cleanup crew after finally beating her, and notes that they failed to find her body where Reagan left it, leaving Robot Reagan's fate up in the air.
- Nice Guy: What makes Brett eventually win despite having Glenn's face is his kindness, which allows him to fix Glenn's marriage problems without even trying.
- "Ray of Hope" Ending: Reagan's Zany Scheme kills any chances of her dating the real Bryan, and she has to call an extraction team to wipe his memories of her. She confides in Robotus that he was right that she was overcomplicating things. Robotus, however, reveals that because Reagan gained genuine healthy confidence in herself and in taking risks in her love life, he adjusted her algorithm and more matches on which she can try again.
- Sexiness Score: RightSwipe's algorithm judges users' attractiveness on a one-to-ten scale. Brett scores a ten, while Glenn scores a zero.
- Shout-Out:
- After scaring a kid in a coffee shop, Brett (in Glenn's body) misquotes The Elephant Man by saying the famous line, "I am not an Animorph, I am a human being! ...Sort of."
- Andre compares the surgery he does on Brett and Glenn to Face/Off and Freaky Friday.
- The two Reagan's name drop The Bechdel Test when they realize they are fighting over a boy and briefly talk about the weather to pass the test.note
- The video game that Robot Bryan is playing in Reagan's living room appears to be Doom. The sprites from the game even resemble a Pinkie Demon and the shotgun viewmodel.
- Sure, Let's Go with That:
- When Robot Reagan encourages Reagan to take a chance with Bryan, Reagan wonders if Robot Reagan was secretly trying to push her in that direction. Robot Reagan goes along with it before shutting down.
- When Reagan reveals Robot Reagan's existence to Bryan, he asks her if Robot Reagan was the one at the restaurant performing the racist Italian stand-up routine while covered in Marinara sauce, she briefly pauses, looking off the side before saying, "Yes, that was her."
- Take That!: At some point Robot Brian becomes a crypto-bro, spending his free time explaining bitcoin to people online. While Reagan thinks it's just digital money and thus doesn't really need explaining, Robot Brian calls it a "lifestyle choice."
- Voices Are Mental: After Andre switches Brett and Glenn's brains, they still speak in their own voices despite being in each other's bodies.
- Wasted Beauty: The handsome Brett and hideous Glenn switch bodies for a week so that they can see which of them has a better dating life. While Glenn is initially more successful at attracting women using Brett's body, his advantage soon evaporates because those same women are repulsed by his condescending, sexist attitudes.
- You Know What You Did: Inverted; Glenn has to go to mandated couples counseling with his ex-wife. Brett goes instead per the bet conditions. He doesn't know what Glenn did, but he hears out the complaints and sincerely apologizes.
