When a new family moves in next to the Wilkersons, a feud erupts between the two families which resorts to increasingly worse tactics. Except for Hal who is best friends with the father. Meanwhile, Commandant Spangler prepares the cadets for a visit from Oliver North.
The neighbours in question:
- Tina (Robin Riker) — the mother.
- Mike (Gregory Jbara) — the father.
- Josh (Michael Welsh) — the son.
- Emily (Dakota Fanning) — the daughter.
- Hector (Christopher DerGregorian) — the gardener.
This work contains examples of:
- Bad Boss: At the beginning of the show, Tina is shown ostensively mistreating Hector when he was handling some duties (such as digging holes and cleaning the litter) on the front porch. This exchange, where Lois tells Tina to be Nice to the Waiter, is what starts the feud between them:Tina: Damn it! Damn it, Hector, not over there! Are you deaf, or stupid or both? Could you please try to be a little less useless? Where is the sun, do you see the sun? I told you to dig the holes over there! God, you people drive me nuts with your laziness!
Lois: What is the matter with you?
Tina: Excuse me?
Lois: You can't talk to him like that! He's a human being, you talk to him like he's some kind of animal!
Tina: I will deal with the help the way I want to!
Lois: He is not The Help! He's not a servant or a slave, he's a professional! (Hector is blowing a can across the yard with a leaf blower.) He's a person with a skill, a skill you do not have, which is why you hired him! (Looks at Hector.) Oh, for God's sake, just pick it up!- As we see later, this was Tina's childish way of hiding her affair with Hector.
- Bizarro World: Tina's family would be Lois's family, if Lois didn't really love Hal and had no parental skills whatsoever, and Reese, Malcolm and Dewey were pathologically evil (and the latter were a girl). The only one that would remain essentially the same would be Hal, while Reese and Malcolm would be one person as Josh.
- Blatant Lies: When caught with her pants down by Malcolm and Reese and her yelling only calls the neighbourhood's attention to what is going on in her back yard, Tina says that Hector was teaching her how to swim. Yeah right, with both naked on the bubbling jacuzzi when there was a perfectly nice pool right by.
- Consummate Liar: A lot of Josh's lies were Blatant Lies to the audience but he was so good at telling them that the other characters believed him.
- Cheating with the Milkman: Tina was cheating with Hector, whom she was abusing earlier in the episode.
- Creepy Child: Emily, who bites Reese so hard Lois has to stop her by grabbing her nose, and who causes nightmares on him.
- Evil vs. Evil: The feud. Lois even acknowledges it:Lois: They may be awful but they're better than your two brats.
- Forbidden Friendship: Lois forbids members of her family from hanging out with Tina's family, and vice-versa. Most of Lois's family obliges, since (almost) all of them are evil. There's one exception, though: Hal and Mike, who continue their friendship in secret. The rest of the family only discovers they continued to be friends all along at the very end of the episode, but nothing happens to Hal - none of the others had a beef with Mike, anyway, and he was all alone after his humiliated family had to leave town and abandoned him.
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: Hal and Mike start to bond after discovering all their common traits, quickly stating that both are straight. When Mike moves away, Hal is too heartbroken to meet the new neighbor.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Francis lies to Spangler and says he and North had a great time together, and took pictures of him being drunk.
- Laser-Guided Karma: The family is embarrassed out of the neighborhood and Mike (the only nice family member) divorces Tina.
- Latin Lover: Tina is having an affair with Hector because she has a Race Fetish for Latinos, as she tells him:Tina: (Rubbing one of her hands in Hector's muscular torso when naked with him in the jacuzzi.) My god, you people are handsome.
- Modesty Bedsheet: When Hector and Tina are in the jacuzzi, we only see him upfront with his torso - she's standing right in front of him but showing her back to the camera. When they're caught with their pants down, first she tries to reach for a towel (in the process accidentally hiting his head with the chair where it was put), then she hides behind him.
- Oh, Crap!: Lois' expression as Hal disturbingly gives an accurate idea of the psychology behind being a peeping tom indicates she's figuring out something about her husband.
- Only Friend: Hal seems to be this to Mike.
- The Peeping Tom:
- One of Josh's lies was about Malcolm being a peeping tom, to the point the police arrives to the house to question him. To Malcolm's chagrin, he finds out through Dewey that the neighborhood kids already made a nursery song about him peeping on their windows.
- Tina confuses both Malcolm and Reese with peeping toms when they jump over the fence to plant stolen goods in Josh's window and catch her in the act with Hector.
- Rewatch Bonus: The plot actually left a clue that Tina was cheating on Mike before the scene where we catch her in the act with Hector: that's when she asked Lois whether the latter's doctor would write her a prescription for "neck pain, or back pain, or whatever will get ‘em to write the prescription".
- Sanity Slippage: Reese really starts to lose it as a result of Emily's constant attempts to bite him. Near the end of the episode, Reese goes off on his tangent about wanting to get Tina and Mike arrested, which will lead Emily to be put into foster care until she bites her foster parents so much they'll abandon her and she'll be found by hillbillies.
- Shout-Out: The cadets do a rendition of "The Candy Man".
- The Silent Bob: Hector never says anything in the scenes he appears on; he just reacts: fed up/annoyed when Tina yells at him for not picking up the can right; very happy when she complements his dashing Latin looks. Sometimes not even that, as when Tina yells at him for not digging the holes in the right spot (he just keeps up with his work). The one time he almost talks is when Tina and him are inside the jacuzzi and he warns her that Malcolm and Reese are there by flashing his eyes standing at the spot they're at.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: When Malcolm tries to convince everyone that he isn't a peeping tom because there's nothing interesting about the neighbors, Hal suddenly explains in big detail that being a peeping tom is more about the thrills than the interest. This makes everyone turn their attentions to him instead.
- Token Good Teammate: Mike is the only one of the new neighbours that is not evil, in deep contrast with his family - who, by the way, abandoned him when they left town humiliated by Tina's cheating.
- We Are Not Going Through That Again: When a new family takes over Tina's family's old house and meets Lois's family, Hal says they're not ready to meet them (this after Tina and her children were proven to be evil, and Hal had to suffer a friendship breakup with Mike after Tina was found to be cheating on him with Hector).
- Womanchild: Tina has zero parenting skills, handles Lois' yelling at her for damaging her property by turning on the sprinklers, herself yells at everyone and everything that annoys her, and hides her affair like a child would by mistreating Hector.
- Zany Scheme: Reese's plan is to plant stolen goods outside Josh's window and call the cops on them. Lampshaded by Malcolm:Malcolm: I know it's stupid but I'm too desperate to care.
