Web Video / The Solve-It Squad: Back in Biz

Mayberry’s finest fucked-up former kid detective gang, the Solve it Squad, is back in biz and ready to crack the case. Exotic animal dealers, tech billionaires, drug cartels, and child-nappers beware! Unless, that is, the Squad bungles it first…

The Solve-It Squad: Back in Biz is a sequel to the Tin Can Brothers' 2017 Sleeper Hit one-act stage show The Solve-It Squad Returns!, announced on March 2 and premiering exclusively online on March 13 and March 20, 2021.

The somewhat meta Framing Device is that the Solve-It Squad — a parody of the Mystery, Inc. gang from the Scooby-Doo franchise, four kid detectives all grown-up with the accompanying traumas and neuroses of adulthood — successfully became a crimefighting team again after the events of The Solve-It Squad Returns!, and their new adventures are documented in an ongoing animated series... that the Tin Can Brothers discovered it would be "fiscally irresponsible" to actually make, forcing them to provide two livestreamed readings of the scripts of the animated series via Zoom as a "preview" for their supporters.

In Real Life, of course, these performances are entries in the COVID-19 Pandemic-mandated new entertainment genre of Audio Dramas read over Zoom to avoid the problems of producing Web Video without putting actors in the same room. Back in Biz was inspired by the success the Tin Can Bros' sister troupe Team Starkid had with their Horror Comedy series in the Hatchetfield universe, Nightmare Time.

The livestreamed readings consist of four supposed episodes of the animated series, presented in two different reading sessions. Each episode features the original cast of The Solve-It Squad Returns!, with Gabe Greenspan as Keith, Joey Richter as Scrags, Ashley Clements as Gwen and Lauren Lopez as Esther, along with one Special Guest star per episode plus Brian Rosenthal as "Everyone Else".

The Solve-It Squad: Back in Biz, Vol. 1 takes place at 2:00 pm Pacific Time on March 13, 2021, consisting of the episodes "The Solve-It Squad to the (Dog) Rescue!" and "The Solve-It Squad Takes a Chill Pill!", with guest stars Jiavani Linayao and Robert Manion, while Vol. 2 takes place at 2:00 pm Pacific on March 20, 2021 and consists of "The Solve-It Squad Cashes Out!" and "The Solve-It Squad Just Says No to Drugs!", with guest stars Darren Criss and Joanna Sotomura.

Tickets are available here; note that while digital replay tickets will be available for a limited time after the initial livestreams, there are currently no plans to ever release these streams as free videos on YouTube.

The Solve-It Squad: Back in Biz contains examples of:

• The '90s: Back in Biz goes ham with the original show's moments celebrating the '90s as the time period the Solve-It Squad (and the Tin Can Brothers grew up in), with plenty of references to '90s music, fashions and pop culture, often deliberately contrasting the Squad's '90s aesthetic with references to modern 2021 pop culture to emphasize how old the Squadsters feel despite not actually having matured all that much. The Opening Narration even specifies that the Squad's heyday was in 1995 and describes their adventures as "'90s-style".
• Adventure Town: The Squad has returned to their old "Middle American" hometown of Mayberry, which, as is typical for this kind of show, gets bigger/smaller and more/less important as the plot demands.
• Ambiguous Time Period: Back in Biz takes place not long after The Solve-It Squad Returns!, which came out in 2017 in Real Life, but makes tons of contemporary references to the pop culture of 2021. At one point, Scrags says he's 35 years old, and the Opening Narration says the Solve-It Squad formed in 1995, which creates certain issues with the timeline (if the present day is 2021 then he was only nine years old back then and he definitely seems older than that in the flashbacks). A lot of this can be chalked up to the Squad's original adventures being stretched across multiple years (in the original show Scrags says "We put away hundreds of criminals before we hit middle school", fitting a timeline where the Squad breaks up in 1999 when Scrags turns 13) as well as, of course, Rule of Funny and Bellisario's Maxim.
  • The vagueness of the timeline can also be chalked up to this show taking place in an Alternate History based on a deliberate Failed Future Forecast — Back in Biz takes place in a version of the "present day" that doesn't acknowledge the COVID-19 Pandemic that was the whole reason for it being created in this format in Real Life (as is the case with many Zoom-based productions). Gwen's husband Nicholas apparently got out of a traffic ticket by offering the police chief admission to the red-carpet premiere of Trolls World Tour last year in 2020 — a red-carpet premiere that, of course, never happened in Real Life.
• And the Adventure Continues: The Solve-It Squad Returns! ended this way — cue the fanbase's surprise that we actually get to see some of those adventures continuing.
• Animated Credits Opening: Not fully animated, but there is a Title Sequence and a new Theme Tune, set to a storyboard animatic by Meg Lloyd to provide a taste of what The Solve-It Squad: The Animated Series might actually look like.
• The Bad Guys Are Cops: This show was written at the height of Black Lives Matter discourse online and gets in a lot of digs at cops being incompetent, corrupt and violent.
• Call-Back: The new Theme Tune starts with an Opening Narration over the melody of the original Title Theme Tune from the stage play, then switches to a new version of the actionized "hard rock" theme tune Keith briefly played in his van in the play.
  • Back in Biz avoids directly talking about the plot of The Solve-It Squad Returns! (especially keeping off-limits any discussion of the ending of that show and the fact that Keith was the Big Bad), but does Call-Back several times to Noodle Incidents from the play, like Gwen's poor relationship with her children, Scrags' diabetes and eating disorder, etc.
  • The Back in Biz episodes repeatedly using real '90s pop songs in their soundtrack is arguably a Call-Back to the surprising appearance of "Ants Marching" by the Dave Matthews Band showing up for real in The Solve-It Squad Returns! (which is also directly referenced by Esther having a Dave Matthews poster on the wall of their room in the Title Sequence), with the added joke that this time they don't have to pay any licensing fee to use them because the songs are only mentioned in the stage directions and not actually played.
  • The Title Sequence shows us a few scenes from the original play as they "really" looked, giving us brief glimpses of the villains Clyde Buchanan (the Werewolf), Melanie Butler (the Fish Monster) and Professor Baxtresser (the Mummy) as distinct characters rather than Brian Rosenthal in wigs, and showing us Cluebert as a real Big Friendly Dog rather than a puppet on Scrags' left hand (including a horrifying image of what Cluebert's real dismembered body used to draw a pentagram would look like).
• Cardboard Pal: The Title Sequence shows us Keith has a cardboard cutout of himself (as he looked in his prime) in the driver's seat of the van, so passersby won't notice the real, schlubby modern-day Keith passed out in the backseat with a hangover. (The cutout is in bad shape made of several pieces taped together, indicating Keith made it a long time ago and hasn't bothered to keep it maintained, as part of the general downward spiral of his life).
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The Squad always appear in their Iconic Outfits, with Keith dressed in shades of blue, Gwen in pink, Esther in green and Scrags in a beige coat with his plain white shirt and black tie.
• Credits Gag: Darren Criss poked fun at his status as the Celebrity Star of this production by submitting a bio saying only "From CBS's Cold Case, Episode 720, 'Free Love'".
• Cross-Cast Role: Averted this time in the episodes with female Special Guests, where Jiavani Linayao and Joanna Sotomura can play the female side characters while Brian plays only the male ones, but played straight for the others, with Brian going back to playing both the male and female members of "Everyone Else" with copious use of Wig, Dress, Accent. Also applies to Robert Manion playing Gwen's daughter Paris, implying that she physically takes after her father Nicholas.
• Cutaway Gag: The switch to a Web Video format away from a live stage show means that the show can now indulge in these, although it's relatively sparing with them compared to Family Guy.
• Darker and Edgier: Back in Biz arguably pushes this further in some ways than the original stage show, with the Theme Tune diving right into references to drugs, violent murder and a Precision F-Strike to make it clear it's not for kids.
• A Day in the Limelight: Each of the four episodes of Back in Biz puts one member of the Solve-It Squad in the spotlight for the episode, although the degree to which this is true varies — Esther's episode is far more of a limelight episode for them than any of the other three given that they're the show's Breakout Character (half the episode literally takes place inside Esther's mind in a surreal universe where every character is a duplicate of Esther).
  • "The Solve-It Squad to the (Dog) Rescue!" is about Scrags' quest to find a Replacement Goldfish for Cluebert.
  • "The Solve-It Squad Takes a Chill Pill!" is about Gwen trying to spend the day relaxing and finding herself while the rest of the Squad tries to help her resolve her issues with her family.
  • "The Solve-It Squad Cashes Out!" is about Keith's one-sided rivalry with jet-setting tech CEO Tucker Bossman.
  • "The Solve-It Squad Just Says No to Drugs!" is about Esther's Dark and Troubled Past catching up with them while an experimental drug creates a crisis inside the surreal dreamscape of their mind.
• Denser and Wackier: Doing the show as a live script reading of an imaginary animated series means it can indulge in antics that it would be impossible to show onstage, allowing for way more elaborate sight gags and gratuitous violence than the original stage show. Also, to an extent, switching to the format of an ongoing series with enforced Status Quo Is God means a lot of the "serious" Cerebus Syndrome moments from the stage show are toned down, with the Squad being Karma Houdinis who never actually learn any lessons or experience permanent Character Development.
• Drugs Are Good: The show doesn't exactly portray drugs in a positive light, but part of the Black Comedy of the show is that in sharp contrast to an actual children's cartoon most of the characters are shown blatantly and habitually indulging in illegal substance use and not suffering any permanent consequences for it.
• Dysfunction Junction: Just as in their initial show, the Solve-It Squad continues to have as many problems caused by their own neuroses and personality conflicts as the actual bad guys. (Indeed, The Reveal in "The Solve-It Squad Takes a Chill Pill!" is that there are no bad guys.)
• Expository Theme Tune: The point of the Back in Biz theme tune is to rush through the basics of the story of The Solve-It Squad Returns! as hilariously efficiently as possible.
• Failure Hero: Only one of the four cases presented here ends with the Squad actually stopping a bad guy, "To the (Dog) Rescue!" In "Takes a Chill Pill" there is no bad guy, just a misunderstanding, and both "Cashes Out!" and "Just Says No to Drugs!" more or less end with The Bad Guy Wins.
• Four-Man Band: The classic ensemble is back, with Only Sane Man Scrags, The Smart Girl ({retcon}}ned to the Smart Enby) Esther, Casanova Wannabe (here a celebrity wannabe) Gwen and Butt-Monkey Keith.
• Framing Device: We're meant to think of The Solve-It Squad: The Animated Series as an ongoing, longrunning TV show akin to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and its many, many sequels — part of the fun is imagining the long ongoing adventures we're only catching a few episodes from the middle of.
• Genre Mashup: In-universe, Gwen's old TV show was a bizarre mash-up of a Police Procedural and a Medical Drama, Dr. Officer Cop, MD. Back in Biz takes the joke about The Coroner being a thankless job on a typical Police Procedural and takes it up to eleven, imagining Gwen being on a show where she does both the job of a doctor and a cop at the same time, depicting her holding a patient/suspect at gunpoint and interrogating them about their crimes while simultaneously prepping them for a lifesaving surgery.
• The Ghost: The Solve-It Squad's Expy of Scooby-Doo himself, Cluebert, remains sadly deceased.
• Gunpoint Banter: The Title Sequence gives us a brief glimpse of Gwen's show, Officer Dr. Cop, MD, which parodies the Reckless Gun Usage of a badly-written cop show up to eleven, showing her with her pistol out to interrogate at gunpoint a patient in the hospital hooked up to an IV and respirator.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: In The Solve-It Squad Returns! it was implied that all of their Kid Detective adventures had titles starting with "The Case of..." Nowadays, their adventure titles start with "The Solve-It Squad..."
• It Always Rains at Funerals: The Title Sequence shows one of these stereotypical scenes as the site of the Squad's initial Breaking the Fellowship.
• Kid Hero All Grown-Up: The theme of the show continues to be what happens when a Kid Detective grows up and finds out the real-life consequences with having to face adult challenges and traumas.
• Jump Cut: The Title Sequence has a hilarious one jumping directly from Cluebert's grinning face after solving the case of the mummy in the museum to his slack-jawed decapitated head upon his murder by the Demonic Apostle.
• Lyrical Dissonance: See Jump Cut above — it's an amazing Black Comedy moment to have the peppy cartoon Theme Tune singing "But Cluebert got murdered in a Satanic ritual!"
• The Narrator: Corey Lubowich, who usually directs the TCBs' major productions and doesn't appear in them, takes center stage here as The Narrator reading the stage directions for the livestream (as did Nick Lang for Team Starkid's Nightmare Time). (Nick Gage is also briefly the narrator for the Opening Narration in the Title Theme Tune.)
• Newspaper Backstory: The Framing Device of the Title Sequence is an unseen individual taking news clippings and photos of the Solve-It Squad's past exploits and putting them up on a bulletin board.
• Opening Narration: The Theme Tune starts with Nick Gage in character as a TV news anchor talking about the Squad's history before launching into the music.
• Painting the Medium: After personally complaining about the limitations of Zoom as the technical director for Nightmare Time, Corey Lubowich put a lot of effort into making Back in Biz's livestream "not look like a Zoom" as much as possible, including having a Solve-It Squad themed desktop background behind the windows, having Instagram-style emoji reacts for the livestream audience geared to the story in question (a dog emoji for "To the (Dog) Rescue", a pill emoji for "Takes a Chill Pill", a bundle of cash emoji for "Cashes Out", a syringe emoji for "Just Says No to Drugs"), Idiosyncratic Wipes to mark scene transitions, a We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties card (which sadly got a lot of use in the second livestream) that says "Zoinks!", etc. Rather than having a motley set of personal Zoom backgrounds the way Nightmare Time did, all of the actors had the same plain background of a set of black stage curtains, to give the same bare-bones feel as the The Solve-It Squad Returns! stage show.
• Pilot: In the Q&A sessions the Tin Can Brothers talked about this livestream series being a speculative longshot toward eventually making an actual The Solve-It Squad: The Animated Series — which is probably unrealistic without partnering with another established company that does professional animation, but with the COVID-19 Pandemic having upended the industry, anything can happen.
  • More specifically, "The Solve-It Squad to the (Dog) Rescue!" was written as an actual pilot episode that serves as a direct sequel to The Solve-It Squad Returns!, with the other three episodes meant to be imaginary episodes from later on in the series' run.
• Pstandard Psychic Pstance: The Title Sequence briefly shows Esther in this pose, apparently attempting to read the mind of a goldfish.
• Retcon: There's a number of discrepancies between Back in Biz and the original The Solve-It Squad Returns!, which the Tin Can Brothers have said they prefer to think of as retcons than as an Alternate Continuity. The most obvious of these is that Esther now goes by they/them pronouns and is ambiguously non-binary. There's also stuff like moving everyone's location to always having lived in Mayberry as opposed to the situation in Returns where Scrags had to travel the whole country to reunite them, changing the names and genders of Gwen's kids, the name and nature of the TV show she worked on, messing with the vague timeline of the Squad's childhood exploits, etc.
• Retroactive Legacy: One layer down in the multilayered Framing Device, we're meant to imagine The Solve-It Squad: The Animated Series is some kind of Distant Sequel Soft Reboot to a much earlier show that took place in The '90s that played the Kid Detective Scooby-Doo tropes straight.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The TCBs revealed that they deliberately put as many references to recent news, pop culture and online memes into the scripts of Back in Biz as they could, deliberately inviting the possibility that it'd turn Totally Radical by the time an actual animated series is greenlit, since they'd most likely have to go back and edit everything about the show when producing an animated series anyway. The end result is a show that's very much from the POV of an "elder millennial" from The '90s struggling to adapt to the dizzying rate of change in the world of 2021.
• Special Guest: Jiavani Linayao, Robert Manion, Darren Criss and Joanna Sotomura.
  • Jiavani Linayao has a full résumé as an LA-area comedian and actor, probably best-known to the general public for playing Boom Boom on Between Two Ferns: The Movie. This is her TCB debut.
  • Robert Manion is well-known to Team Starkid fans for his appearance in Twisted and the Hatchetfield series. He created the set design for the original The Solve-It Squad Returns! run in LA, although this is his first time appearing onstage for a Tin Can Brothers show.
  • Joanna Sotomura is probably best-known to Internet audiences as the star of Emma Approved, as well as having shown up as Beth Marmie on Classic Alice and the Duchess of Kart on Video Game High School. She's previously worked with the TCBs as Sheriff Madison Reynolds on Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye.
  • The most famous of these guests is, of course, Darren Criss, known to Team Starkid fans as Harry Potter from A Very Potter Musical and to everyone else for his work on Glee, American Crime Story and Hollywood (2020), as well as recently appearing on Tin Can Brothers' Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye as Dead Star Walking Ryan Reynolds (Madison's brother).
• Sociopathic Hero: Back in Biz doubles down on the idea that, for all they may try to be heroic detectives because that's the point of the show, the Solve-It Squad are all ultimately terrible people, each in their own unique way. Esther, in particular, is a multiple murderer.
• Surf Rock: Nick Gage returns to compose both a Title Theme Tune and "intermission" music for the livestream in this style, as an homage to the original Scooby-Doo's '60s vibe.
• Take Our Word for It: The basic idea of a Zoom-based livestream — lots of wacky hijinks it would be very expensive to animate (and impossible to stage or film in live-action) narrated as stage directions.
  • It becomes a bit of a Running Gag that the scripts can use any real piece of licensed music they want despite how expensive this would be in a fully-produced show because in the show we're actually seeing all that happens is the song gets mentioned by The Narrator. (In the Q&A the TCBs outright said they were hoping to encourage their young Gen Z fans to go and buy the real tracks afterwards.)
• Theme Tune Roll Call: Just like the original Theme Tune from The Solve-It Squad Returns!, although this one goes by much faster.
  Narrator: Esther's on LSD every other day!
  Gwen went into acting to pretend the pain away!
  Scrags was in the FBI with PTSD!
  And Keith is just a fuckin' loser living in a van!
• Title: The Adaptation: Back in Biz itself isn't named this way, but it's intended as a pilot for a future show called The Solve-It Squad: The Animated Series. This led to a retronym calling The Solve-It Squad Returns! The Solve-It Squad: The Play.
• Try to Fit That on a Business Card: The new title of Gwen's show is multiply redundant, saying that she's both a cop and a doctor twice (Officer Dr. Cop, MD).
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: According to Word of God, Back in Biz is intended to be fully upfront about the fact that every single member of the Solve-It Squad is an utterly self-involved horrible person (for different reasons) and that, while they are trying to make progress and get better, they're not really doing a very good job of it.
• The 'Verse: "The Solve-It Squad Cashes Out!" builds on the previous hints of one big continuity connecting The Solve-It Squad, Spies Are Forever and Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye, with the stage directions commenting that one of the scientists at Corporate Jerks HQ is Charlie from Spies Are Forever (Esther Fallick's character in "Pay Attention!", Barb's assistant who invented the hard drive) looking "much the worse for wear" from the 60-year Time Skip.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: The Title Sequence treats us to a hungover Keith puking out the side of the van from the backseat.
• You Meddling Kids: No one actually uses this phrase in the show itself, but the Opening Narration in the Theme Tune describes the Squad as "four meddlesome teenagers".

Tropes for individual episodes:

Vol. 1, Episode 1, "The Solve-It Squad to the (Dog) Rescue!"

• Author Appeal: Lauren Lopez works with a dog rescue in Real Life as one of her major passions in life, and her and Joey Richter's chihuahua Diane is a rescue dog who's their prized companion and who's cameoed multiple times in Tin Can Brothers productions (including "playing" Cluebert in promotional materials for The Solve-It Squad Returns!).
• Bait-and-Switch Gunshot: Scrags instinctively pulls out his sidearm when Rhoda is fleeing in the ending only for a "BANG!" to ring out and reveal Esther shot her, with the tranquilizer dart gun from earlier.
• Cat/Dog Dichotomy: We find out a lot of the personality conflict between Gwen and Scrags can be summed up by her being a cat person while Scrags is a dog person.
• Chekhov's Gun: The tranquilizer dart gun that Ken drops when he's arrested, and the hand gesture his accomplice uses to freeze Doinky in his tracks and make him start licking himself.
• Evil Poacher: The case the Squad is on during this episode involves a tiger stolen from the Mayberry Zoo. It turns out to less be an Evil Poacher than a Crazy Cat Lady taking her obsession too far.
• Hopeless Auditionees: We go through a whole sequence of talking dogs trying to get adopted by Scrags, all of whom have bizarre personalities from pop culture, before he finally decides to adopt the most hopeless specimen of all. His kindness is not paid back by the universe.
• Immune to Drugs: Esther pops open a trank dart intended to incapacitate a tiger and drinks it down, remarking that it barely gives them a buzz. Later on they're directly shot with one and don't feel anything.
  Esther: 500 mg? Do I look like a squirrel to you?
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: A gratuitous and pointless one just designed to get Keith alone with Gwen (as usual for this trope with Fred and Daphne on Scooby-Doo).
• Loony Fan: SadDad77 for Gwen. A bit of Self-Deprecation and Take That! for Real Life fans of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries who are now old enough to be divorced dads.
• Malaproper: Keith mistakes the word "postmortem" for "post-Nordstrom".
• Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize: Having run out of time in the episode to introduce any other characters who could possibly be the tiger thieves, we find out one of them is Ken the zookeeper himself and the other is Rhoda, the animal shelter lady from the beginning.
• No Doubt the Years Have Changed Me: Uncle Wyatt talks about Keith's ex-girlfriend from high school right in front of Gwen, who is that ex-girlfriend. He doesn't recognize her, just remarking that she looks like she "could be that girl's mother".
• Painting the Medium: The show starts with Gwen livestreaming the Solve-It Squad's meeting on Instagram and the screen filling with comments and emoji reacts. This is, of course, mirroring this episode itself being broadcast on stream by the Tin Can Brothers, with an interface designed to mimic Instagram comments and reacts as closely as possible.
• Police Are Useless: The circus' security team is staffed with literal clown cops.
• Reckless Gun Usage: Uncle Wyatt accidentally fires a shotgun directly at Keith's face, leaving him with an Ash Face, and joking that it's lucky the gun was only loaded with blanks.
• Replacement Goldfish: Scrags tries to adopt a new talking dog from a rescue to fill the void Cluebert left in his heart. This goes as hilariously badly as you might expect.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The episode revolving around someone hoarding exotic animals feels like it must be referencing Tiger King.
• Rube Goldberg Device: Keith sets one up as a trap for the tiger thieves at the circus, only for it to predictably completely fail (like everything else Keith does).
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: No pun intended. The circus and Keith's Uncle Wyatt are both total dead ends that had nothing to do with the tiger theft; Wyatt even lampshades that just because he's an expert hunter doesn't mean he's all that much better a source for information than just going online.
• Shout-Out:
  • We get one to Scooby-Doo with Uncle Wyatt trying and failing to remember Gwen's name — in front of Gwen — guessing "Tiffany? Daphne?" only for Keith to break in and say his ex's name was "Taffnee".
  • When Keith is describing his plan he says it'll be "just like Ocean's Twelve".
• Social Media Before Reason: The Black Comedy ending of the episode is Rhoda apparently being horribly mauled by her own animals and none of the Squad reacting until Gwen slowly raises her phone and begins to record a Tiktok.
• Talking Animal: Doinky is a sapient, talking dog just like Cluebert was, and of course no one in this setting finds this to be notable. Rhoda in fact has a whole barn full of talking dogs (soundproofed, so as not to upset the other animals) with varying wacky personalities.
  • Reginald the chimpanzee is the one remaining animal at the circus after the circus abolished the use of animal performers; he no longer goes onstage but works in the back office doing payroll (and apparently has ambitions of becoming a serious actor, judging by his using Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares as leisure reading material).
• Take That!:
  Police Officer #2: Don’t you worry. We got ways of making him talk.
  (The officers escort Ken out. After a moment, Police Officer #1 steps back in.)
  Police Officer #1: He’s talking about torture. We’re gonna torture the living shit out of this guy. You got that, right?
  Scrags/Keith/Gwen/Esther: Oh yeah, loud and clear./For sure, for sure, for sure./I was trying to pretend like I didn’t hear it./There is a systematic problem with law enforcement in this country.
• Teeny Weenie: When Keith is huddled behind Gwen we hear her complain that "your chapstick is digging into my hip".
• Theme Naming: All of the dogs at Rhoda's Ark are named after Eddie Murphy film characters.
• Toilet Humor: A lot of it involving Doinky's unfortunate total lack of house training. Also the giant pile of tiger scat indicating the tiger voided its bowels before it was taken, indicating the thieves used a tranquilizer on it.
• Tranquilizer Dart: The tiger thieves used one to subdue their quarry before making off with it. A major subplot of the episode is attempting to ID the discarded dart to see if it will help track them down (only for it to turn up a dead end because these darts are standard equipment for animal control).

Vol. 1, Episode 2, "The Solve-It Squad Takes a Chill Pill!"

• Accidental Kidnapping: It's bad enough that Keith went and picked up Gwen's kids in an unmarked van without anyone letting the school know who he was. Then he stops at a gas station and puts on a balaclava and starts playfully threatening Cam and chasing him around to try to win him over.
• Ambiguous Gender: In-universe. Esther says they identify as gender-non-conforming/non-binary, but casually accepts Gwen taking them along for her "girls' day out" anyway, possibly because it gives them the opportunity to spend the day cadging free food and swag off of her.
• Babysitting Episode: For Keith and Scrags, neither of whom seem terribly prepared for the difficulties of watching over young children.
• Bait-and-Switch: The episode description made it sound like an actual criminal interrupts the episode to kidnap Gwen's kids. Instead it's just Keith and Scrags being mistaken for kidnappers and ending in a car chase due to a misunderstanding.
• Bait-and-Switch Lesbians: The episode throws in a number of deliberate queer-baiting moments for fans who ship Esther and Gwen together, like reenacting the Lady and the Tramp kissing scene or Esther calling Gwen their "wife" at Pizza Rat, although this is probably mostly down to the effects of the molly.
• Breather Episode: The episode looks like it's going to be one for the Squad, with no actual bad guy or case to solve, until the AMBER Alert goes out identifying Scrags and Keith as the kidnappers of Gwen's children.
• Constantly Curious: Scrags and Cam get an extended "Why?" scene with each other.
• Creator Backlash: In-universe — Gwen loses her plum job as the star of The CW's live-action adaptation of The Magic School Bus because of a leaked group chat where she rants about how much she hates writers of Fan Fiction.
• Darker and Edgier: In-universe, The CW is apparently doing a gritty, realistic reboot of The Magic School Bus as a live-action series and Nicholas has talked them into letting Gwen star in it. As a bonus, it's pretty clear that Gwen is a Questionable Casting choice to play Miss Frizzle, having little in common with her other than her natural hair color.
• Didn't Think This Through: Gwen spontaneously decided to let Keith and Scrags — two men who've never met her family at all before — pick up her kids from school and take them driving around for the day, in an extremely sketchy-looking van. She does this without calling the school or her husband to let them know — in fact, as soon as she decides to do this she gives her phone to Keith so she's completely out of contact. Is it any wonder that someone at the school ends up calling the cops, who end up putting out a warrant for Keith's arrest?
• Drugs Are Good: The Hard Truth Aesop of this episode is Gwen getting her groove back and recommitting herself to her career and her marriage after a forced, fake bonding episode with Esther mostly fueled by the power of MDMA.
• Exact Words: Keith almost irrevocably sabotages Gwen and Nicholas' marriage by sending Nicholas a text on Gwen's behalf demanding a divorce, because Gwen's to-do list says to "End things with Nicholas" and she didn't clarify that "things" meant her professional relationship to him as a talent agent.
• Gender-Separated Ensemble Episode: This episode revolves around Gwen and Esther having a "staycation" at Gwen's house, with the boys Keith and Scrags out doing Gwen's errands for her to give the two of them a chance to bond. Notable because Joey Richter had previously expressed regret that The Solve-It Squad Returns! blatantly fails The Bechdel Test despite only having four major characters; this episode seems written to explicitly address the lack of Gwen/Esther interaction in the original show. (Although it then goes on to kind of parody the idea of doing so, with Esther and Gwen only bonding because Esther drugs Gwen's drink with molly and openly saying they're only quoting the "supportive best friend" character in movies.)
• Heroic BSoD: Nicholas thinking Gwen's dumped him sends him into a hilariously awful Black Comedy downward spiral.
• Metaphorgotten:
  Gwen: You know what Esther? I feel like a zombie too! A zombie with a to-do list! I’m just expected to trudge along, in an undead state, eating the brains of my kids, the brains of my career, the brains of keeping the Squad relevant on TikTok... Plus things have been sorta strained with Nicholas, and I’m not even sure that I should keep eating his brains...
• Missed Him by That Much: Gwen and Esther find themselves ending their day at the same Suck E. Cheese's Keith and Scrags took the kids to for dinner, and never actually run into each other before the latter leave. If they had, they might've been able to stop the massively destructive car chase when Keith and Scrags get an AMBER Alert called on them as soon as they get on the road.
• Not So Above It All: Nicholas gets a little bit of revenge on Keith at the end of the episode, despite his consummate Nice Guy status, by letting Keith think he's going to prison for child kidnapping even though the cops are really just going to drop the charges and let him out after a night in jail.
• Percussive Therapy: One of the businesses Esther and Gwen patronize on their "girls' day out" is the "Smash 'N Trash Rage Room", which provides a full-service experience of this trope to customers, letting them take hammers and smash household items steadily increasing in size and value all to the tune of "The Hall of the Mountain King".
• Retcon: In The Solve-It Squad Returns! Gwen's husband Nicholas was supposed to be a venture capitalist, and her children were two boys, the younger of whom was named "Yuri K. Sardarov". This has been retconned to Nicholas being her talent agent (although, of course, he could've changed jobs at some point to support her career) and her having an older daughter Paris and younger son Camry, all of whom share her surname "Barrywood" (implying it's actually Nicholas' surname and not her maiden name). Word of God is the Tin Can Brothers regret the "Yuri Sardarov" joke, which was a Tuckerization and/or Shout-Out to the Real Life name of an actor friend of theirs but wasn't actually funny enough to make anyone laugh. (Sardarov played Otis Zvonecek in Chicago Fire.)
  • It's also a bit of a retcon that this episode implies Gwen's family has been living in Mayberry this whole time — Paris and Camry are familiar with Pizza Rat as the place Gwen and Nicholas would take them whenever they were fighting — rather than Gwen living in LA and coming back to Mayberry for the first time in years in the original stage show. (Which in turn implies that this version of Mayberry is still local to LA, since it's within driving distance of Spago in Beverly Hills, where Nicholas books their celebration dinner.)
• Shout-Out:
  • The montage of Esther and Gwen's day out is set to an imaginary soundtrack of Del Amitri's "Roll to Me", a Standard Snippet from The '90s for a Falling-in-Love Montage (setting up a deliberate Bait-and-Switch Lesbians moment with their kiss).
  • The Incredibly Lame Pun where Keith sets off the sprinklers in the toy store, ruining their whole stock of plush Finding Nemo toys.
  Employee: And bring a bucket and a mop for these wet-ass plushies!
  • Esther and Gwen end up reenacting the kissing scene from Lady and the Tramp.
  • The Suck E. Cheese's at the mall is called "Pizza Rat", after the meme from 2015.
  • The car chase between the Solve-It Squad van and the cops quickly turns into a game of Mario Kart.
  • Keith's version of the Captivity Harmonica is singing "All the Small Things" by blink-182.
• This Is Reality: Scrags starts screaming this to Keith when Keith compares himself to various actions heroes from famous car chase scenes as the cops pursue them.
• Totally Radical: Scrags gets the indignity of being called out with an "OK, Boomer" from a ghost (who presumably died decades ago and is much older than him).
• Unconventional Vehicle Chase: A giant camper van is not a particularly great vehicle to run from the cops in, especially one that's over twenty years old and being maintained by Keith.
  Keith: This baby can hit 55 if she's going downhill!
• Vacation Episode: The point of this episode is the Squad taking a break from solving cases so Keith and Scrags can help Gwen catch up on her to-do list while Esther and Gwen have a "girls' day out". Thanks to a hilarious misunderstanding, the episode ends up with an action-packed car chase anyway.

Vol. 2, Episode 1, "The Solve-It Squad Cashes Out!"

• Always Someone Better: Keith's obsessive hatred for Tucker Bossman is based on this, even though Tucker is a deeply loathsome person there's no good reason to admire. Esther even points out that Keith and Tucker are not that different in the first place, which Keith incorrectly takes as a compliment.
• Arbitrarily Large Bank Account: Tucker Bossman has one to the point of being able to buy a new car every day just because he feels like it. Corporate Jerks, LLC rolls out the ostentatious hospitality whenever guests come by, including (illegally) dispensing Esther a dose of Percocet and bringing Scrags to a "Cathedral of Chips".
• Artistic License – Law: Pretty much everything about the lawsuit between the Solve-It Squad and Corporate Jerks, LLC at the end, except for the result (the fact that Sinister Surveillance by tech companies is mostly legal because it's seen as consensual is, sadly, Truth in Television).
• Bait-and-Switch: Gwen thinks that Tucker is going to hire her as The Game's celebrity spokesperson, only to find herself given a demeaning volunteer job handing out water bottles at the launch party, leading to a Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal.
• Calvinball: Tucker's new game, just called "The Game", is a hybrid of a ridiculously escalating series of unlikely other games (starting with combining beer pong and Frisbee golf, then adding an opportunity to challenge your opponent to a Krav Maga match, then going on from there).
• The Cameo: Esther Fallick doesn't actually appear in this episode, but the stage directions call for an (animated, silent) appearance of her character Charlie from Spies Are Forever in a quick gag.
• Chekhov's Gun: Gwen's idea for a slogan for The Game that she utters while the Squad are taking home Keith's Corporate Jerks merch, which Tucker unthinkingly repeats the next day.
• Cutaway Gag: One of the more extreme ones in the show; when Tucker makes a comment about recycling his discarded Tesla for the sake of the environment we just cut to a scene of the ice floes melting around a trapped and helpless polar bear.
• Designated Hero: Even more so than usual, since even though Tucker Bossman is obviously a scummy guy, the Squad is clearly investigating him — and abusing his hospitality and committing several crimes in the process — just to assuage Keith's wounded ego. And then Esther ambiguously murders an innocent employee who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• Didn't Think This Through: The reason Keith didn't get his Kickstarter backer rewards is that not only was he using an obsolete email address but there was no place to deliver the packages to because he is, in fact, technically homeless (and listed his mailing address as the Solve-It Squad treehouse).
  • In a bit of a Take That! toward the parasocial relationship Kickstarter promises fans with creators, Keith finds out that all Kickstarter backers, of whatever tier, are given a lower-level badge at the launch party than actual investors and actual friends of the CEO.
• Epiphany Therapy: Parodied. Keith realizes in the middle of the episode, with Esther's help as a concerned therapist, that his obsession with taking down Tucker is due to his trauma from his Sports Dad forcing him to play baseball and quit Drama Club as a child, making him feel like he's spent his life without the chance to pursue his dreams. This doesn't really do anything to fix Keith's life at all but does give him the ability to give a similar "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Tucker at the end of the episode.
• Freeze-Frame Ending: The episode ends on Tucker Bossman being acquitted of any criminal actions and Esther violently attacking the courthouse with their army of drones to keep the Solve-It Squad from being charged with any of the crimes they committed themselves, ending on a freeze-frame of them running into the distance.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Parodied. We don't actually see what happens when a Corporate Jerks employee catches Keith and Esther snooping and Esther confronts him with their Attack Drone, but at the end of the episode Keith awkwardly tells Scrags and Gwen they may have murdered him.
• Hollywood Hacking: Esther gets into all of Corporate Jerks, LLC's systems with little effort toward the beginning of the episode, making the end of the episode a bit of a Foregone Conclusion (if they weren't too lazy to really try to help Keith). It helps that Tucker's Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! has him absent-mindedly answer all her questions about his security questions.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: What Keith's "The Reason You Suck" Speech diagnoses Tucker's problem as.
• Is This Thing Still On?: How Tucker gets Hoist by His Own Petard, given that his Evil Plan involved Sinister Surveillance on the rest of the world.
• It's Personal: The rest of the Squad doesn't believe there's an actual crime going on, but gets roped into this case because of Keith's personal resentment of the tech billionaire behind it.
• Karma Houdini: Tucker Bossman completely gets away with his crimes at the end of the story, despite being exposed and having his reputation ruined, because, unfortunately, none of them were actually illegal. The Squad declares this a wash, since they got away with a number of actual crimes in the course of the story, including Esther possibly murdering an innocent employee with an armed drone just to keep from getting caught breaking and entering.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: The line isn't used in this episode, but the investigation does split up between Gwen and Scrags taking a meeting with Tucker to discuss his business while Keith and Esther sneak into the building and try to scour it for information illicitly. Notable because The Solve-It Squad Returns! lampshades how on Scooby-Doo this was almost never the pairing — it was always Fred/Daphne and Velma/Shaggy/Scooby — with Esther reacting to being paired up with Keith for the first time with "I've been avoiding this moment for twenty years." Justified in that Scrags is being driven by his eating addiction to tag along for the free snacks at Corporate Jerks HQ, while Keith actually needs Esther's Hollywood Hacking skills to carry out his part of the plan.
• New Media Are Evil: A Ripped from the Headlines-style case about the relatively mundane problem of a scammy-looking Kickstarter (with the meta Reality Subtext that the Tin Can Brothers run Kickstarters themselves all the time and drama from creators calling out other creators' Kickstarters for being "sus" is something they know all too well). Goes on to critique the excess of Silicon Valley VC culture and the Sinister Surveillance we've all accepted as a result of it.
• Obsessed with Food: In a bit of a role reversal from the constant jokes about Esther's drug problems, Scrags spends this episode under constant pressure to go Off the Wagon from his recovery program for his compulsive eating disorder, which leads to him seeing Anthropomorphic Food everywhere begging him to eat it every time he has an opportunity to chow down and is denied.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The trial at the end declaring that a verbal statement can't be slander because it was too silly for a reasonable person to believe is a real (and infuriating) detail from many legal cases, but was most recently successfully invoked by Tucker Bossman's near-namesake Tucker Carlson in 2020.
• Shout-Out:
  • Keeping with The '90s soundtrack theme, Keith's "work song" is apparently singing "Inside Out" by Eve 6 to himself.
  • When Scrags refuses to talk about the meetings he's been going to, Keith assumes he's in a fight club.
  • Tucker is a member of "Spirit Cycle", an obvious Brand X for SoulCycle.
  • Tucker's meditation leader finds himself unwittingly quoting Rednex.
  Guru: Where do they come from? Where do they go? Where do they come from... Cotton-Eyed Joe?
  • Esther has taken to replacing their Catchphrase "Jinkies!" with "Jinkles!" as a copyright thing.
  • Even though it's established that Esther is a Cop Hater, they're also a huge fan of DCI John Luther's "brutal but effective policing methods".
  • When Esther hacks Tucker's drone butler "Walter", they rename it (and re-gender it) "Catherine Zeta Drone", and it begins to play "All That Jazz" from Chicago. When it multiples into an army of armed Catherine Zeta Drones, they begin playing "The Cell Block Tango".
• Sinister Surveillance: Tucker Bossman's evil plan. Pretty much the same Evil Plan as any other new media tech company, just taken up to eleven in his case.
• Stealth Pun: Esther reacts to Keith describing Corporate Jerks' tech as "state-of-the-art" by saying "more like state-of-the..." and then actually farting.
  • Word of God has kept mum on whether "The Game" is a Shout-Out to the informal social game known as "The Game" that was a fad at the Turn of the Millennium (whose goal is to not remember its existence when you hear the phrase "the game", triggering the phrase "You just lost the game"), but many fans took it as such and started complaining loudly about "losing the game" in the chat.
  • Esther appears to be a fan of Chicago, naming her new pet Surveillance Drone "Catherine Zeta-Drone", which seems like just an Incredibly Lame Pun... until you remember that Catherine Zeta-Jones' character in Chicago was named Velma Kelly.
• Take That!: A huge one to new media and tech companies in general. Also ones along the way to several related fads from The New '10s, like SoulCycle or Teslas (harshly mocking the idea that buying a new incredibly expensive vehicle will help the planet by saving more in emissions than it took to build the car in the first place).
• You Owe Me: Apparently the rest of the Squad is only taking this case because they owe Keith a favor from back when they were kids. (As though his actions in The Solve-It Squad Returns! hadn't already called in that marker.) It turns out the "favor" is just a birthday present — a card that says it can be turned in to let Keith pick the case for once — that Keith saved for twenty-six years. As an added Fridge Brilliance bonus, Keith never seems to consider that them giving him a card like this meant they never actually saw him as The Leader.

Vol. 2, Episode 2, "The Solve-It Squad Just Says No to Drugs!"

• Arc Symbol: The Orlov crime syndicate's symbol is an eagle with an anatomically unlikely hugely erect penis.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: When the TRPL-X symptoms begin taking effect on Esther's Train of Thought, Soldier Esther screams in despair, "I forgot about this plotline!"
• Call-Back:
  • Keith's Epiphany Therapy in the last episode that his true dream in life has always been to be an actor appears to have stuck, and now he won't stop talking about his favorite musicals and stage plays at every opportunity.
  • The imaginary animal from "To the (Dog) Rescue!", the Tigiralephant Bear, actually appears in Esther's mindscape once they hit the Psychedelic Visions phase of TRPL-X.
  • Annika calls back to a legendary Blooper from The Solve-It Squad Returns! when describing Esther's role in the Orlov marriage as "the glue of our gloop".
• Crossdresser: Young Vince Hutcherson seems drawn to these kinds of roles, saying his favorite role so far has been playing Angel in RENT and currently working on a rendition of "Defying Gravity" from Wicked as Elphaba for a "Gender Flip Cabaret".
• Dark and Troubled Past: This episode delves a bit into Esther's, including the surprise reveal that they were once a high-ranking enforcer for The Mafiya responsible for countless deaths.
• Drugs Are Bad: A parody of the tendency of kids' animated series like this from The '90s to inevitably have a Very Special Episode with an anti-drug message — one that would seem to be dead-on-arrival given how Esther's whole character revolves around being an unapologetic Addled Addict. Sure enough, although Esther's drug addiction causes all the trouble the plot of the episode revolves around, they do not learn their lesson from it — quite the opposite.
• Exact Words: The note Dimitri and Annika leave Esther says "We're coming for you." They meant the other sense of "coming". The stage directions even actually spell it "cumming".
• Fantastic Drug: A designer drug with the colorful name "TRPL-X", that is unfortunately so powerful it's been fatal to many of the people who've tried it.
• Fun with Acronyms: "TRPL-X" stands for the sequential stages of symptoms the drug induces in its users — Tremors, Relaxation, Psychedelic Visions, Laughter, and finally eXtasy. Supposedly the other meaning of "Triple-X" is that all the other phases are worth it to get to the ecstasy stage because it's a high three times as intense as any other drug. The Reveal is that the Orlovs, having limited English skills, thought of this acronym as meaning "Throuple Sex", not "Triple X", and it was meant to mimic the experience of their sex life with Esther.
• Foil: Keith finds himself in an Always Someone Better rivalry with a twelve-year-old, bitter and envious that Vince Hutcherson has his parents' support in pursuing his Drama Club dreams of being an actor that he never did.
• Immune to Drugs: For once averted with Esther. They initially scoff to Mr. Farmer that TRPL-X has no effect on them — only for it to turn out that it was just taking a while to kick in, and, disastrously, that this greatly extends the trip from taking a few minutes to the length of the whole episode. It turns out that this is because the drug was designed for Esther by the Orlovs, which is why it's so dangerous for everyone who lacks their tolerance.
• Improbable Weapon User: Esther's Journey to the Center of the Mind features a Soldier Esther who's assigned to take out the Ax-Crazy conductor of Esther's Train of Thought, with a rifle whose screw-on attachment is a giant joint, designed to fire a blast of THC into the conductor's brain to counter the cocaine currently driving them mad.
• Inexplicably Identical Individuals: Esther's internal headspace is entirely populated with identical clones of themselves doing different jobs (in homage to Being John Malkovich, among other things). Hilariously, the Esther soldiers have combat uniforms that are just copies of Esther's schlubby outfit, with standard-issue flannel shirts, beanie hats and coke-bottle glasses.
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: Esther's massively fucked-up neurology is represented symbolically throughout this episode as a population of tiny little duplicates of them working at various functions within a surreal landscape dominated by their Train of Thought. (The same pun is used in the movie Inside Out.) The plot of the episode represents the effect of the designer drug as a Runaway Train that a "soldier Esther" is going on a desperate action-hero mission to try to keep from derailing and laying waste to Esther's consciousness.
• Lecture as Exposition: Parodied, when Mr. Farmer somehow pulls out a chalkboard and begins a classroom lecture to lay out the sequential stages of a TRPL-X trip.
• The Mafiya: The main case in this episode revolves around Esther's Dark and Troubled Past with the Orlov crime syndicate.
• Mushroom Samba: Esther is experiencing one in this episode, which is really saying something given their superhuman tolerance, due to a new experimental designer drug.
• Revealing Cover Up: Esther, in their drug-addled state, goes to absurd lengths to try to throw suspicion for Mr. Farmer's death on a completely random scapegoat, little Vince Hutcherson, even though they really are innocent of any involvement in his death, because they're paranoid that any inquiry into their connection to him will turn up their connection to the Orlov mob. Due to a total Contrived Coincidence, Vince Hutcherson's mother is connected to the Orlov mob, and Esther's plan throws them into exactly the situation they were trying to avoid.
• Ripped from the Headlines: There's a bit of a Failed Future Forecast in this episode, where Keith angrily defends the Ratatouille TikTok musical by arguing that it raised $2 million for the Actors Fund — even though the reason for the fundraiser in Real Life was the COVID-19 Pandemic, which clearly isn't going on in the 2021 of the series.
• Shout-Out:
  • Soldier Esther's acrobatics during their imaginary action sequence gets praised by the army of other Esthers with "Simone Biles got nothing on you, dawg!" and the narration compares them to Legolas.
  • Keith mentions he's in a cover band called "Bootie and the Flow, Bish".
  • When Esther is trying to pin down the exact point in time they fell in with the Orlov cartel they guess it was when the meme "What Does the Fox Say?" was current, i.e. late 2013.
  • Keith and Vince namedrop several Broadway shows and personalities when discussing theatre, including Vince giving a Shout-Out to friend of Team Starkid and the Tin Can Brothers Andrew Barth Feldman as "the definitive Evan Hansen", and Keith giving an angry defense of the Tiktok Ratatouille musical as "real theatre" in the face of Vince's dismissal of Internet musicals as "amateur hour".
  • The intended Ending Theme and soundtrack to Esther's orgy with the Orlovs is stated to be "The Impression That I Get" by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • The drug den Dina set up for the Orlov cartel is just as tastefully appointed as the interiors of her own home, and she complains about the Squad messing up her expensive granite countertops.
  • The Orlov crime syndicate has gone to all the effort of infiltrating a sleepy American suburb just for the sake of finding Esther and getting them back into a menage-a-trois.
• Sociopathic Hero: Esther remains the hero of this episode despite flicking a cigarette at an annoying teacher to set her hair on fire, callously watches as Mr. Farmer flings himself off the roof in the throes of a Mushroom Samba, frames an innocent twelve-year-old as Mr. Farmer's drug contact in order to get the heat off themselves, and eventually reveals that they're responsible for countless deaths as a former enthusiastic enforcer for The Mafiya who left only for selfish reasons (stealing thousands of dollars in the process).
• Stepford Suburbia: It starts with Mayberry Middle School itself and goes on with the lives of its students. It turns out Dina Hutcherson, stylish suburban housewife, is also a drug dealer in deep with the mob — in a Shout-Out to Weeds.
• Sucky School: Mayberry Middle School is presented as a public school trying to present itself as an elite, prestigious educational institution from a tony neighborhood that's actually struggling with some pretty huge problems just under the surface that are turning its principal into a Nervous Wreck.
• Take That!: To the Trope Namer of Take That!, no less:
  Mr. Farmer: Esther... are you finally ready to acknowledge the energy between us?
  Esther: Naaah. Nope. Not this. I'm out, dude.
  Mr. Farmer: But... we... were gonna trip balls together?
  Esther: Well, so far I'd say this trip is less hardcore than children's Tylenol. And the only thing I'm feeling is what it's like to be on a Joss Whedon set.
• Tempting Fate: At the beginning of the episode Scrags brags that despite his highly successful FBI career, he's never had to discharge his firearm in the line of duty. Cue the end of this episode, where he ends up in a desperate gun battle with Russian mob enforcers.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Scrags encounters a middle school student with an unhealthy fascination with the question of whether he's ever killed someone with his sidearm, and seems disappointed that Scrags can't tell him how it feels to "actually take a life". (Possibly a reference to Apt Pupil.)
  Scrags: Guys, do you think the Internet might... be bad?
• What Were You Thinking?: The Solve-It Squad agreeing to do a Drugs Are Bad presentation at their old school that includes Esther.
• Writer on Board: Done intentionally, with the recent reveal that Keith was a frustrated Drama Club kid leading him to express several opinions about theatre shared by Gabe Greenspan and the Tin Can Brothers, culminating in him having a huge argument with Vince about the validity of the Ratatouille musical as "real theatre".