Recap / The Amazing World Of Gumball S 5 E 16 The Matchmaker

Thinking Teri is Darwin's new crush, Gumball decides to play matchmaker, with Carrie tagging along to play saboteur.

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Tropes:

• All Love Is Unrequited: Carrie thought this was the case with Darwin, hence she used her tears as the ingredient for the love potion. Thankfully for her, it wasn't, as Darwin seeing her cry caused him to break out of the love potion's effects and get together with her.
• Atmosphere Abuse: Exaggerated when Darwin overdoes it with spraying himself with deodorant for his date with Teri, which ends up "punching a hole in the ozone layer" just above the Watterson house, resulting in a beam of light causing the house to lightly burn.
• Cargo Ship: Teri is still affected by the spell after Darwin breaks out, so Gumball uses the love potion to make her fall in love with her own disinfecting spray bottle so she won't intervene with Darwin and Carrie finally asking each other out.
• Chekhov's Gun: Carrie uses her tears to make the love potion. Her crying ends up breaking Darwin out of the spell when he sees it.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Gumball summons Carrie by saying her name repeatedly like in the "The Mirror", though it works even though he says it three times instead of five.
  • "The Photo" and "The Compilation" showed Carrie's image not reflected in mirrors or photos before.
• Cover Innocent Eyes and Ears:
  • Upon seeing Darwin and Teri making out offscreen, a horrified Carrie and Gumball cover each other's eyes. Unfortunately for Gumball, Carrie's hands are transparent....
    Gumball [horrified]: I can still see....
  • When Darwin and Carrie kiss each other, Love Potion-free, Carrie covers Gumball's eyes again. This time, however, he doesn't mind.
• A Day in the Limelight: For Carrie.
• Emo Teen:
  • Darwin is showing signs of becoming this in the episode, listening to an emo song so angsty his boombox flood his bedroom with a flood of tears from its speakers, writing an angst-ridden love-letter to Carrie, and, in one scene, visually morphing into into a hyper-exaggerated emo stereotype. His emo look is so over-the-top, even Carrie, an actual emo teen, is embarrassed by it.
    Carrie: I, uh...guess it's not for everyone.
  • Darwin's emo teen transformation is lampshaded first by Gumball, who can't help but notice how emo his brother is becoming, only to be rebuked by Carrie, then by Carrie herself as mentioned above.
• Foreshadowing: Darwin's Emo Teen behavior in the beginning hints at his attraction to the similarly emo Carrie.
• Fully Automatic Clip Show: When Teri is told she has cooties, she wonders how and asks Darwin who he's kissed. Cue of a rapid-fire montage that Teri comments over.
  Teri: Rachel. Carrie. Gumball. Gumball. Gumball. OK, what's up with you guys? Penny... Sussie? Alan's balloon knot. Chris Morris!?^* Actually a wad of Principal Brown's hair. All right, enough!
• G-Rated Sex: Teri and Darwin making out is treated as something that can't be onscreen and Gumball and Carrie cover their eyes to avoid seeing. It also leads to a scene where kissing and cooties are treated like sex and a STD.
• Gross-Up Close-Up: Of Darwin's cootie riddled mouth when Teri confronts him over her diagnosis of cooties.
• Head Desk: Gumball slams his heads against a desk in defeat when he sees that Teri (under the influence of the love potion) readily accepts a recently-fattened Darwin. Carrie does the same thing as Gumball, but she ends up phasing through the desk and free-falls down due to her ghostly nature.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • Gumball tries to give Darwin some advice about girls:
    Gumball: You know what all girls like?
    Darwin: Being treated like they're all the same and having generalizations made about them?
    Gumball: What? No, they all hate that.
  • After Gumball fails to convince Teri some soda he spilled is poison, she calls him a hypochondriac, then walks off spraying disinfectant on every spot of the floor before she steps on it.
• Idiot Ball: While Gumball's oblivious behavior this episode is to be expected, Carrie has no such excuse. She's present for most of Darwin's emo behavior, which should have clued her in, at the very least, that Gumball misinterpreted Darwin's image of Teri.
• Internal Reveal: While the episode shows the audience increasingly-obvious hints that Darwin is crushing on Carrie, neither Gumball nor Carrie catch on until Darwin tells Gumball (who then tells Carrie) the photo he saw of Teri was actually of Carrie. Carrie doesn't show up in any kind of photograph due to her ghostly nature.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy:
  • What Carrie eventually resigns herself to when she thinks Darwin is irrevocably in love with Teri.
  • Happens a second time, but for different reasons - every attempt to dispel the Love Potion Carrie and Gumball exposed Darwin and Teri to fails, so Carrie gives up and starts crying in remorse. This frees Darwin from the potion.
• Left the Background Music On: When Carrie starts mixing the ingredients for her love potion, some very suggestive R&B music starts playing. Gumball notices and gets very concerned.
  Gumball: Uh, where's that music coming from?
  Carrie: It's-it's supposed to happen when you're making a love potion.
• Love Potion: Carrie eventually makes one for Gumball, which not only causes R&B music to start playing out of nowhere, it causes whomever is exposed to it to fall madly in love with whomever — or whatever — they see.
• My God, What Have I Done?: One of the ways Carrie messes with Gumball's matchmaking attempts is by tricking him into giving Darwin bad relationship advice, leading to Darwin humiliating himself in front of Teri. This works like a charm, but seeing Teri laugh at him just makes Carrie more depressed, and in the next scene she realizes she's been sabotaging Darwin's happiness (at least, as far she knows) and decides to help him for real.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Gumball for mistaking Darwin's photo of Carrie for Teri and Carrie being the one to make the love potion in the first place when she should have realized that Darwin was crushing on her. Had it not been for the act of the true love, Carrie wouldn't have get together with Darwin.
• Ocular Gushers: The emo song Darwin listens to in the beginning is so angsty, it causes a flood of tears from his boombox to fill his room.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Carrie and Gumball regret using a Love Potion on Darwin and Teri, but only because Darwin wasn't already in love with her. They completely disregard Teri's feelings even before this revelation, and humor is derived from Gumball using the potion again to make her fall for an inanimate object (with no indication of it ever wearing off).
• Relationship Sabotage:
  • Gumball has the bizarre idea to bring Darwin's (not-actually) previous crush, Carrie, along to help him play matchmaker. Carrie decides to come along in order to sabotage every attempt Gumball makes to get the two to fall in love.
  • Once Gumball and Carrie realize that Darwin actually liked Carrie and not Teri before being afflicted by the Love Potion, the two try to break Darwin and Teri up.
• Recycled Soundtrack: The Failure Montage of Carrie and Gumball trying to break up Teri and Darwin is set to an instrumental version of "I'm On My Way", Darwin's song from "The Origins".
• Take Out Word For It: When Darwin and Teri finally love each other, the camera only shows Gumball and Carrie. Their first kiss is never explicitly shown but judging by Gumball and Carrie's reaction it wasn't pretty.

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