Airdate: September 30, 2012
Written by: Christy Karacas, Stephen Warbrick, Janine DiTullio
Story editor: Janine DiTullio
An indeterminate amount of time has passed since the season 2 cliffhanger, and Superjail has now become "Ultrajail". Not only has the Mistress taken over the jail, but she's demoted the Warden, Jared, and the Doctor to inmates, and hooked up with Lord Stingray to become the "Stingstress" pair.
As the new rulers of the jail wind up proving to have a reign as unstable as their relationship, Jared, Charise, and Alice try to find a way to bring the Warden back to power and get the jail back to the way it was.
"Stingstress" contains examples of:
- A Day in the Limelight: The Warden kind of takes a backseat to Lord Stingray and the Mistress' relationship drama for a while there. And in the end, it's Alice who also shines.
- Censor Box: A GIANT one nearly covering the whole bed and screen when Lord Stingray and his poker buddies walk in on The Mistress and Alice having sex. Nothing was actually drawn under it, though.
- Call-Back: The episode picks up an indeterminate amount of months after the "Vacation" cliffhanger. Thankfully, Nicky's flashback is there to pick the viewers up to speed on how Superjail fell to the Mistress and Lord Stingray.
- Continuity Nod: Fang has remained with Lord Stingray as a pet.
- The Mistress exiles Lord Stingray to "The Tip" (Jared's favorite building from "Ladies' Night") after their breakup. It now sports a bedroom inside it.
- While the "UJ" badges on the Mistress troopers' hats may have seemed like an animation error at first, it comes full-circle in this episode when it's revealed that the Mistress rebranded Superjail as "Ultrajail" in the takeover.
- Some of Lord Stingray's soldiers are briefly shown to have returned, as they're utilized as guards for some of the cells. Of course, like the Mistress troopers, these ones could possibly be robots.
- Creator Cameo: The bartender in the speedo
that gets his head blown to bits by Lady Jacknife is a thinly-veiled cameo of Peedee Shindell (producer for seasons 2 and on). - Distaff Counterpart: Aside from the Ultraprison staff, there's now a female counterpart for Jacknife who's just as criminal and unlucky.
- Driven to Madness: The Warden, after being demoted to an inmate and stuck in a cell for so long. He manages to recover, or well, as much as he can considering his usual grasp on reality.
- Expository Hairstyle Change: As with her first appearance, the Mistress' hair instantly lengthens when she attempts to have a romantic moment in the bedroom with Lord Stingray. It goes back to short after she's exiled him to "The Tip". After she has sex with Alice towards the end, her hair stays long as she decides to become a hippie.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: There's a rat with Gary's hairstyle and glasses amongst Warden's menagerie of insects and vermin. It's foreshadowing of something to come.
- Combined with "Off Model": Some of the Ultraprison inmates are shown wearing Superjail institutional coveralls in a very brief bit, when part of a building falls and crushes a bunch of inmates. It appears the episode might have gone through some modifications in production, or that it was a layout that couldn't be fixed in time.
- When Bruce slams his billy club into Alice's crotch, there's a quick frame gag where the lenses of her glasses bulge out as if they were eyes.
- While the Mistress and Stingray look over at the surveillance cameras, Jailbot can be seen finally arriving back at the jail. Unfortunately for him, he's a little too late to be helpful as we see later.
- In Jared and Charise's fantasy of a perfect Ultrajail, there's a sign reading "Pee Dee, Live in Concert!", an injoke about the producer Peedee Shindell (who will later be referenced in another way in Uh-Oh, It's Magic).
- Funny Background Event: As the Superjail inmates are being captured by the Mistress' ships, watch for Jean and Paul trying to grab on to each other and stay together. They fail, and Jean is none too pleased.
- A few of these can be seen in the pan across the prison cells: Ash is attempting to entertain a bored Nicky who's busy taking a dump, the Doctor is messily dissecting an inmate on a toilet, and Fatty is being tormented by Gary and Bird.
- Gag Censor: The Mistress' breasts suddenly gain flowers obscuring her nipples, after she throws off her robe.
- Hyperspace Wardrobe: Used in a gag with Lord Stingray. Right after his entire uniform (save for his helmet) has been stripped off and he winds up in a bathrobe, he instantly regains his whole supervillain uniform after lying down in bed, throwing the robe off to reveal it underneath.
- Imagine Spot: Charise's vision of an "Ultrajail" utopia where the Ultraprison and Superjail staff can cohabitate in peace and romance.
- Improbable Infant Survival: Subverted with the heavily-pregnant Ultraprison inmate, although her death seems to have been tweaked so that no fetus would be shown amongst her womb and guts (considering Adult Swim's rule about "no dead babies or children").
- Lamarck Was Right: The Doctor's two children that he had with an Ultraprison inmate seem to have been born with not only his huge nose, but his glasses as well.
- Negated Moment of Awesome: Jailbot finally makes it back to Superjail, and explodes through a toilet in time in hopes of saving Alice and fighting the Ultraprison staff- only for Nova to pull out her weapons and threaten to kick his ass. He doesn't do anything more.
- No Name Given: "Lady Jacknife" has no official name alluded to, leaving fans to use various placeholders for her such as "Jacqueknife".
- Pixellation: During the sex montage, Alice is shown pounding away at a clam with her crotch. The pixellation obscures an actual jackhammer in the scene, which the censors still ordered blurred due to the suggestion of phallic imagery.
- Reset Button Ending: The first episode to actually have continuity directly carried over from the last (as opposed to an automatic reset with Negative Continuity), as well as given an in-story reset by the end. Jared and Charise aren't exactly pleased at being split apart again.
- Series Continuity Error: Overlapping with possible Retcon. At the end of "Vacation", the Doctor was shown alongside the rest of the Superjail staff when they were confronted by the Mistress, and he was wearing his usual green work clothes. The flashback in this same episode has the Doctor instead depicted among all the starving and tired inmates, along with having a much longer beard (compared to the one he had at the end of the previous episode), lighter skin, and wearing the sailor coveralls that the inmates had. Oddly enough, the final shot of "Vacation" (with the Doctor among the staff) was recycled as the first establishing shot in the the flashback.
- Sex Is Liberation: What seems to be the case when the Mistress finally finds someone that she is pleasured by, giving her the idea to give up Superjail and return home.
- Shipper on Deck: Charise plays this for the Warden and the Mistress and Jared then plays along, but the two only really want to be closer to each other and have Superjail back to normal (or at least improved) without the Mistress' power-hungry hold on it.
- Ship Sinking: To the "Stingstress" pair, as well as subverting the idea that the Warden and the Mistress could ever be a healthy, loving couple (as Charise had fantasized about).
- Sigil Spam: Mistress' smaller spaceships are all shaped like her hat, her bulldozer is pink and modeled after her, and she demolished the Warden's tower to replace it with a pink-and-yellow version modeled after her own face. There are also those pink "Ultrajail" troopers that oddly seem reminiscent of the Warden ones from "Time-Police".
- The tower in the fantasy version of "Ultrajail" is a merger of the original Warden one and the Mistress' version, with it wearing a pink top hat with a flower on top.
- Stock Footage: The very first shot of Nicky's flashback is reused from the final shot of "Vacation" (which brings up the above odd continuity error concerning the Doctor).
- Some Ultraprison inmates' character models are recycled and even recolored in the bathroom sequence. In particular, a smoking blonde inmate is given a much paler, black-haired "clone" in the scene of the women glaring at Fatty.
- They Killed Kenny Again: Fatty winds up shoved through a glory hole to the point where his entire skin sheds off and he's left as a stumbling mass of organs and muscle, and likely immolated with the rest of the inmates in the bathroom.
- Time Skip: Of several months at the least. Not that it sticks in the end, as the status quo comes back (except for the Mistress becoming a hippie).
- Wraparound Background: Used within part of the bathroom brawl sequence. The same stalls and fighting inmates seem to be duplicated over and over for a portion of the panning, until Alice pops off the running inmate's head.
