"Feel the doom impending 'cause stupidity is hashtag trending"
Gumball and Darwin realize that the adult residents of Elmore are dangerously naive when it comes to being safe online, and in fact are in serious need of the boys' help with even the simplest of tasks.
Tropes:
- Acronym Confusion: Part of Nicole's confusion about the Internet comes from her not understanding initialisms and slang terms: she thinks "TL;DR" means "toilet doctor", OMG is "offend my grandmother", "ROFL" means "Receive Our Feelings and Love", and "baes" means "babies".
- Actually a Good Idea: Gumball snarks at what kind of ridiculous, outdated ideas must be in Nicole's parenting magazine. When she says it's about protecting children from the dangers of the Internet, he replies, "Okay, fair enough. I've got nothing sarcastic to say about that."
- Bottle Episode: Much of the episode takes place in Nicole's office floor.
- Brick Joke: Nicole claims to "read movies" online. A few minutes later, it turns out she means printing out every individual frame of a video to go through like a flipbook.
- Call-Back: Like Richard, Nicole thinks that "LOL" means "Lots of Love", which she uses inappropriately.
- Compressed Vice: Nicole's technological ineptitude comes entirely out of nowhere, and is at odds with numerous previous scenes where she could use a computer just fine (one episode even had a gag, where she was able to look up Darwin's search history and the other members of the family run out to destroy their devices, upon realizing she knew how to do that).
- Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Gumball and Darwin realize that the same generation they look up to to lead them are the same people who are utterly incapable of running modern technology.
- Facepalm: The boys' reaction to Nicole's ineptitude with basic computer literacy and security. Nicole gets one herself when they inform her she just lost money and ruined a computer because she thought paying online meant putting money in the disk drive.
- Freak Out: The IT man of the Rainbow Factory had a nervous breakdown and ran out on his job. Nicole is the main cause of it, as he scrawled her name over every surface in his office.
- Hopeless with Tech: Nicole, and by extension everyone else who works in the office, to the amusement (and then horror) of Gumball and Darwin.
- Idiot Ball: Nicole is usually shown to at least be able to untangle computer cords. But in this episode, she puts actual money in the CD slot.
- Innocently Insensitive: Nicole uses the abbreviation "ROFL" on a serious post, making it look like she's being insensitive when she actually misunderstood what it meant.Darwin: Jackie Wilson: "Tough morning today. Anniversary of the day my grandad went missing at sea." And you answered with a photo of a sad kitten saying "ROFL?"
Nicole: Yeah! Receive Our Feelings and Love! - Leet Lingo: Nicole's password is 7ER3$@, a leetspeak version of her voice actor's first name, Teresa.
- Literal-Minded: Most of the humor in the episode is about Nicole and the other workers at the Rainbow Factory taking computer terminology literally. Averted in one scene where Nicole is told to put her online order in the basket and Darwin preemptively dives towards the wastepaper basket thinking that Nicole would dump the whole computer in there.
- Mercy Kill: When Gumball sees a pop-up window on Nicole's computer that's over twenty years old, upon clicking it off, it turns to dust, with the elderly dog on it saying "Thank you".
- No Ending: The episode abruptly ends with Gumball and Darwin deciding that the employees are too incapable of using regular technology and replacing it with baby toys.
- Technologically Blind Elders: Not only Nicole, but the entire office staff of the Rainbow Factory have no idea how to work their computers. Darwin and Gumball conclude that all old people, no matter how powerful, suffer from the same issues.
- Take That!: Nicole sharing image macros of a Despicable Me Minions Captain Ersatz (A "Munion") is shown to actively drain intelligence.
- There Are Two Kinds of People in the World: Gumball says that "There are two kinds of people in this world: those who need everything spelled out for them, and..." Darwin can't figure out the second kind he's implying.
