After a pair of burglars rob the apartment and tie him to a chair, Felix decides to start looking for a new, safer place to live. Oscar laughs at this, but soon has to ask Felix if he can live with him, thanks to a gunfight outside the building. However, the price of security may take much of the roommates' freedom as well.
This episode includes examples of the following tropes:
- Big Rotten Apple: The apartment gets burglarized, and Oscar walks into the living room to find Felix bound and gagged. Horrified, Felix moves into a new building with ultra-high security. Oscar pooh-poohs Felix as being overly paranoid...then moves in with him just a few days later after he hears a wild gun fight right outside the apartment. It takes some serious issues with the new building to get Felix and Oscar to move back into their old place. And even the alleged ultra-safe building gets robbed by the end of the episode… right as its owner boasts about its safety.
- Crazy Jealous Guy: The clincher that gets Felix to decide to move out occurs when Gloria comments offhandedly about Mr. Duke grabbing her upper arm when she tried to visit her ex-husband without 24 hours' notice. Felix gets furious that Mr. Duke dared to touch her in a semi-intimate place.
- Delayed Reaction: Oscar comes out of his bedroom, pats the bound Felix on the shoulder, and gets a drink before he notices that the apartment was robbed and Felix was gagged and tied to a chair.
- Dirty Communists: When Felix chews him out and makes it clear he's not taking the apartment, Mr. Duke snaps that he doesn't care; he had Felix pegged as a pinko from the start.
- Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Worrying about the safety of the apartment, Felix reminds everyone that one of the tenants, Mr. Sweetzer, suffered an assault the previous month, and Murray makes a note of it. Oscar scoffs that the assault doesn't count because his wife did it. Murray scrubs out the note.
- Everyone Has Standards: Felix, the worry-wart safety-conscious germ-phobic member of the Odd Couple, decides by the final act of the episode that Security Arms' overkill measures are too creepy even for him to endure.
- Fluffy the Terrible: Mr. Duke owns a large German Shepherd called Peaches.
- Instantly Proven Wrong: After Felix verbally tears him apart, Mr. Duke goes into a rant about how safe the building is. As he's speaking, Mel the security guard dashes in to announce a robbery.
- Living Is More than Surviving: Felix moves into a different apartment after his and Oscar's place is robbed. The apartment complex has been designed for extreme safety, including things like inside locks, two-way mirrors and tons of rules. Eventually even Felix decides the problems with the new apartment outweigh any safety benefits. Oscar sums it up with an epic rejoinder when Mr. Duke tries to reassure him all the creepy and troublesome security measures are for their own good:Oscar: When I look back on the best times of my life, none of it was for my own good!
- Post-Robbery Trauma: A non-violent example; Felix, who caught the robbers in the act and got bound and gagged, feels unsafe in the apartment after the experience and starts looking for a safer place to live. Even as the "security measures" for the new apartment start becoming increasingly restrictive and/or creepy (like mirrors the staff can see through), Felix brushes it off as just the price of security. Even he eventually decides it's not worth it.
- Safe Zone Hope Spot: The big selling point of the Security Arms apartment building is its extreme safety, and Mr. Duke stands by it as he is arguing with Felix about the overkill safety measures that are creeping Felix out. And the moment he finishes his diatribe, the head of the building's security tells him that robbers just broke in.
