"I AM A GOOD FATHER!"
Imaginary Darwin: You abandoned your children in a public play center. What kind of father would do that?
Richard: A tired one doing his best?
Imaginary Darwin: No! A lazy one doing his worst!
Richard: A tired one doing his best?
Imaginary Darwin: No! A lazy one doing his worst!
Richard wakes up and finds that he lost Gumball, Darwin, and Anais some time the previous night, forcing him to retrace his steps and take them to their first day back to school from summer vacation before Nicole notices.
Tropes:
- All Part of the Show: When Richard drives the truck through a movie screen, everyone thought it was part of the 3-D effect.
- Bad Impressionists: Richard starts his call to Principal Brown pretending to be Nicole, but exposes himself immediately by introducing himself as "my wife".
- Can't You Read the Sign?: As Richard tries to flag down Hank, Hank looks up a handbook pictorial matching Richard's exact image and puts in a call for a "10-17".
- Comic-Book Time: It's the start of a new school year, but there's no mention of the students advancing to a new grade and Gumball's class still has the same teacher.
- Crazy Memory: The kids in Richard's flashbacks at first look completely misdrawn, then he tries again and they've got a bunch of features and body parts mixed up between each other, and both times their voices are wrong. When he imagines demons that accuse him of being a bad father, one of them points out he can't even remember what his own kids look and sound like.
- Cutting the Knot: Richard finds the kids inside a shipping containers, but can't break them out. He decides he'll just drag the entire container to school.Richard: When mom asked me to get you to school, she didn't specify whether it had to be inside or outside of a shipping container!
- A Day in the Limelight: Most of the episode is centered on Richard. Gumball, Darwin, and Anais barely make an appearance and Darwin and Anais don't have many lines.
- Epic Fail: Richard is so lazy that he becomes tired after thirty minutes of school supply shopping, so much so that when he gets home, he goes immediately to bed even though it's only after 5:00.
- From Bad to Worse: Richard has a nightmare where he finds out that he and the kids overslept until 7:30 AM, so they'll probably end up late to school. He wakes up, only to find out it's actually 8:30 AM and the kids are missing.
- Fun with Homophones: Richard yells at Hank to "Pull over!", but Hank thinks he's harassing him because of his pullover.
- Hassle-Free Hotwire: Richard is able to hotwire several cars by taking his own key and forcing into the slot, apparently breaking through to the wiring.
- Imagine Spotting: John is able to see Richard's flashbacks to the previous day.
- Infernal Background: After Richard fails to remember what he did with the kids, his imaginary versions of them turn into demons that tell him he's a bad father while the background changes to a fiery cave with piles of skulls lying around.
- Just in Time: Richard drops the kids off at school just in time for them to fall out the front door and slide next to the car Nicole took to pick them up.
- The Man in the Mirror Talks Back: Richard gets off a call with Nicole while standing in front of a mirror.Richard: Don't know what she's worried about, I'm a good father.
Richard's reflection: (Waving his hand in a 'more or less' manner) Eh...
Richard: What do you know?
(Richard flips the mirror to face the wall) - Must Make Amends: Richard's gross negligence endangers his kids, and he spends the whole episode frantically trying to save them and get them to school on time.I am a good father!
- Needle in a Stack of Needles: By the time Richard catches up to the shipping container the kids were stuck in, they've been put in a yard of other shipping containers. He uses a crane to shake them around, identifying the correct one by sound, even though he can't tell what are obviously containers full of pianos and livestock.
- Rewind Gag: Richard declares to himself that the first thing to do when finding a lost belonging is to retrace your steps. He does this by doing in reverse exactly what he did during a panic attack, including the background music and the damage he caused.
- Running Gag: Richard ends up breaking car windows throughout the episode by punching them, often unnecessarily. He even rolls up an open window just so he can break it.
- Running Gagged: Richard prefaces any vehicle-activation with "Prepare to jump into hyperspace!" throughout the episode until he gets interrupted, then quits halfway through saying it again.
- Soft Glass: Richard keeps breaking car windows with his fist as a Running Gag. Once he finds a car with an open window, so he rolls it up just to break it.
- Stunned Silence: At the episode's end, Anais, Darwin, and Gumball are all too shocked to tell Nicole how their day was—Darwin also had a plastic ball in his mouth.
- Suspiciously Apropos Music: While engaging in a car chase, Richard turns his radio to "Soundtrack AM, the right music at the right time!"Richard: Perfect!
- That Was Not a Dream: Richard dreams he's trying to wake up the kids because it's 7:30 AM and they're late for school. He was dreaming, but the only difference from reality was that it was 8:30 AM. When he goes into Gumball and Darwin's room and finds they are not there, he assumes that he's still dreaming, so he jumps out the window to check. Since he couldn't fly, he figures he's really awake.
- Unfortunate Item Swap: Richard finds a bunch of school supplies in place of the kids in their beds. He initially assumes they were turned into school supplies, then realizes he mistook the items for his kids and put them to bed. Even moreso, he was so tired that he got into a car that looked exactly like his without even realizing it.
- We Want Our Jerk Back!: In the opening, all the students on the bus think things are unusually nice. As soon as they realize that Darwin and Gumball's absence is the reason why, they're all genuinely concerned for the pair.
- What Did I Do Last Night?: Thirty minutes of back-to-school shopping made Richard so tired that he was delirious on the way home and has to retrace his steps to figure out where he left the kids.
- What the Hell, Hero?:
- The last of Richard's flashbacks turns into an Imagine Spot of a hellish landscape with demonic versions of his kids. The demon version of Darwin then chews Richard out for leaving the kids at the mall.
- When John sees Richard's flashback of how he left the kids in the ball pit, Richard meekly responds that it was better than locking them in the trunk, as he was afraid he did. John implores Richard to stop defending his actions and hurry up after them.John: You know what's worse than leaving your kids in a ball pit overnight?
(Richard shakes his head)
John: Standing here talking about it!
