Tropes:
- Bait-and-Switch: It's initially implied the quiet man Mama Bosco got a saliva sample from for her baby-making machine is Agent Superball. It's eventually revealed to be former President John F. Kennedy.
- Brick Joke: In the previous episode, one of the items you could pick up was a typewriter ribbon. It was a completely useless item that did not have any impact on the story. In this episode it's revealed that the useless ribbon ended up at Jurgen's castle in the first place because Sam carelessly chucked it into the timestream after taking it out of the time card printer.
- Calculator Spelling: When Sam inspects the keypad for the door, Max tells him to "make it say BOOBIES". The code turns out to be 5318008, "BOOBIES" upside-down. Strange Minds Think Alike, apparently.
- Call-Back: If you look behind the counter in Bosco's, you can see the items Sam asked for in "Bright Side of the Moon" that would have made the first season easier to get through.
- Chekhov's Gag: The mariachis who show up every time someone mentioned a "birthday" in the last three episodes turn out to be plot-important characters.
- Cosmic Egg: When traveling back to the beginning of the universe, Sam and Max encounter Mr. Featherly. In order to answers Pedro's question of "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Sam rescues Featherly and replaces him with a chicken egg (revealed in the next episode to somehow be Featherly's) given to him by future self. At the end of the episode, we see the Mariachis' ship traveling back to the beginning of time and exploding, creating the universe. The egg is highly implied to be the source of all life in the universe.
- Crying Indian: Referenced when Sam removes the ink cartridge from the printer on T-H-E-M's spaceship and he accidentally drops it into a hole in space-time. Pedro scolds him for it, and Max follows up with "Somewhere, a time-traveling Native American is crying!"
- Did You Get a New Haircut?: Both Sam and Max do this upon seeing Bosco, who has been transformed into a freakish human-cow hybrid.
- From Bad to Worse: When you first encounter Bosco, he's been accidentally turned into a human-cow hybrid after freaking out and trashing his mother's store (spilling milk into the test tube baby maker he was born in). After Sam and Max visit Momma Bosco, she falls in love with Max and abandons her plan to use the baby maker. This results in a "catastrophic temporal anomaly" causing Bosco to be stuck fading in and out of existence. Don't worry too much, he gets better. At least, for a while.
- Fun with Acronyms: T-H-E-M turns out to be the Temporal Headquarters of Enlightened Mariachis.
- Girls Have Cooties: Kid Max (and by extension, Present Max) seem to have this attitude before Sam sabotages Bluster Blaster and convinces Kid Max to go to their school dance.
- Glass-Shattering Sound: Sam and Max revisit the events of "Situation: Comedy" just as Past Sam is hitting the high note that shatters Specs' glasses. Present Max expresses regret that he voted for Sam after that happened.
- Hollywood Heart Attack: Bosco dies of shock when he finally meets T-H-E-M in person.
- I Hate Past Me:
- Past Sam and Max annoy their present selves by hijacking their time-traveling elevator.
- The kid versions of Sam and Max from the eighties take several opportunities to mock and insult their older selves.
- Old Pedro is annoyed that Young Pedro and Middle-Aged Pedro leave him with the menial jobs involved in running their space ship.
- Informing the Fourth Wall: Parodied twice.
- Future Sam is senile, and just sits in his chair muttering things like "I can't use these things together!" or "I can't shoot Max!"
- Past Sam will wander around T-H-E-M's flying saucer saying things to himself like "That doesn't need to be made radioactive."
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: If you try to ask Near-Future Superball about time travel, he erases Sam and Max's memories. Part of the solution to a puzzle involves getting Past Sam and Max to lose their memories this way.
- Mistaken for Racist: Subverted. When Sam first talks to the Old Mariachi, he calls him Pedro (since he was identified as such the obituary in Future Sam and Max's office). Old Pedro acts offended that Sam would assume his name is something so stereotypical just because he's a Mariachi. After Sam gets flustered, Old Pedro laughs and reveals that he's just messing with Sam, and his name really is Pedro.
- My Future Self and Me: T-H-E-M turns out to be a time-traveling mariachi and two of his past selves. Sam and Max also interact with their past selves from around the events of "Situation: Comedy".
- Older Than They Look: Superball still looks around the same age in the 1960s as he does in the modern age, nearly forty years later. Superball chalks it up to "clean living".
- Riddle for the Ages: When Mama Bosco accused Sam of being jealous, why did the ship's A.I. detect a temperal anomaly?
- See You in Hell: As the two follow Bosco's soul through the portal, Max says to Sam "I'll see you in hell!" Which also doubles to foreshadow the next episode, "What's New Beelzebub?"
- Shout-Out: After Kid Max gets annoyed at Bluster Blaster and decides to drag Kid Sam to the school dance, Kid Sam whines about having wanted to go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters.
- The Slow Path: When Past Sam and Max steal the time elevator, Present Sam and Max are forced to relive the events of the last season and a half.Max: You... jerks!
Sam: You made us go through the last year and a half all over again! - Spit Take: Part of the solution to a puzzle involves trying to get a spit sample from Agent Superball, who proves to be very hard to surprise.
- Strange Minds Think Alike: When Sam discovers a key-pad lock to Bosco's security system, Max wants him to make it spell out the word "boobies". Sam eventually discovers the password to shut off the laser grid is 5318008... which, when put on a seven-segment display and turned upside down, resembles the word "boobies".
- Straw Feminist: Mama Bosco is always ranting about being looked down upon and oppressed by men.
- Suckiness Is Painful: The "soul-crushing" process involves subjecting souls to boring anecdotes from the Moai heads which are literally soul-crushingly dull.
- The Three Trials: You have to get rid of the three mariachis piloting the flying saucer in order to progress to the endgame.
- Unrequited Love Switcheroo: Mama Bosco becomes infatuated with Max because he's the one guy who hasn't expressed any interest in her. When you change history to make Max a Casanova Wannabe, she immediately loses interest.
- We Need a Distraction: Sam asks Max to distract Grandpa Stinky while he breaks into a display case. Max distracts Stinky by telling Stinky that someone's trying to break into his display case. Luckily, it somehow still works.
- Would Hurt a Child: Sam tries to get his younger self to give up on his programming hobby and be a detective. Kid Sam asks if he'd have to be as fat as him too, prompting present Sam to pull out his gun. He only refrains from shooting his former self when the time-traveling elevator points out he's about to cause a paradox.
