Tuca and Bertie visit their respective families to celebrate the holiday "Corpse Week." Speckle tags along while sporting a new look.
Tropes:
- Clothing Switch: Speckle's luggage gets swapped with a rancher's, so he spends the episode dressed like a cowboy. He gets really into it, and starts talking and behaving like a cowboy as well.
- Elephant in the Living Room: The Songthrush house is covered with garbage, and Bertie's parents keep trying to divert attention from it. Bertie claims that they ignore obvious issues like this all the time, including her sexual trauma, which they only addressed with a few school counselor meetings and then never spoke to her about it again.
- Family Disunion: Both Tuca and Bertie's reunions with their families go pear-shaped quickly. Tuca fights with her sister Terry for treating her like a child, while Bertie lashes out at her parents for refusing to talk about their mental issues and forcing her to bottle up her feelings. Surprisingly, Tuca's able to come to peace with Terry and the two end up on good terms. Bertie however...
- Faux Horrific: Tuca tells Tulip a scary story about a demon who haunts people by making them listen to his terrible mixtape, which is so awful that it makes the listener's brain melt and drip out of their ears. If you question the demon's song selection, he'll cry tears of blood.
- Furry Reminder:
- During a heated argument, Tuca and Terry's feathers puff up, which happens to real birds when they feel threatened.
- Bertie's father had "open breast surgery," a bird analogue to open-heart surgery.
- Going to the Store: To get out of Bertie confronting her parents, Bertie's dad jumps out of a window claiming to get ice, prompting Tuca to snark that that's needed.
- Halloween Episode: "Corpse Week" is a bird version of Halloween with some Day of the Dead elements and a side of Thanksgiving; honoring your deceased ancestors by sitting down to a family dinner and elaborate cake, and going door to door asking for candy. Despite this, the episode aired in late July.
- Incredibly Lame Fun: Terry's husband Thomas is passionate about competitive leaf-raking, which nobody else (besides Speckle) finds interesting at all.
- Plot Allergy: Tulip has a severe allergic reaction to the beets she plays in with Tuca, which reinforces Terry's idea that Tuca is irresponsible.
- Shout-Out: The books in Tuca's sister's house include "The Crepe Gatsby" and "Fantastic Tastes and Where To Find Them".
- Talk About the Weather: Bertie's dad tries to divert attention away from the family's mental issues by talking about how mild the weather has been recently.
- Therapy Is for the Weak: Bertie's dad believes that Bertie doesn't need therapy because she's "normal". He says the same about him and Bertie's mother, despite them clearly having some repressed mental issues.
- Trash of the Titans: Bertie becomes quite disturbed when she returned to her childhood home and it appears that her mother became a hoarder.
- Visual Pun: The Songthrushes' house is full of garbage piling up that nobody seems to address except Bertie. This represents how the family lets their mental issues pile up until they become too big and too rotten to ignore.
- You Mean "Xmas": Corpse Week is a combination of Dia de Los Muertos, Halloween, and Thanksgiving. Trick-or-treating is replaced by "yum-or-yell", with the only major difference being that you scream at someone if they don't have any candy to give out.
