When Linda and Tina go to the shoe store, Gene is accidentally left home alone; Bob, Louise, and Teddy go to buy restaurant equipment from a creepy guy whom Bob found on the internet.
Tropes
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Left alone in the house, Gene decides to do all the things he's not allowed to do: eat from Linda's secret stash of crackers, play with Louise's toys, read Tina's diary, and... hold all the spoons in the house at once.
- Call-Back: One of the things in Gene's song about what he likes to think about is Vietnamese Banh mi, which he also wanted the family to order in "The Bleakening".
- Cell Phones Are Useless: Linda loses her phone and decides that she can part from it for a few hours. When Gene tries to call her, he finds the phone under the couch cushions. Gene can't remember Bob's phone number, so he looks for it on the fridge door, but the last two digits are smeared with ketchup, leaving them unreadable.
- Dirty Coward: While discussing whether or not the guy selling the grill hood's a serial killer, Teddy makes it clear he'd abandon Bob and Louise to save his own skin. He wouldn't even bother calling the police, assuming they wouldn't get there in time.
- Hates Being Alone: Gene, to the point that he still gets changed in Bob & Linda’s bedroom every morning (whether or not they’re awake).
- Imaginary Friend: The first thing Gene does when he realizes he's home alone and can't call his parents is to pretend to be getting a call from Ken* , using a pair of salad tongs as an earpiece. Eventually the fantasy gets too real when Ken decides to hang up, leaving Gene alone with his thoughts.
- Insistent Terminology: Every time Bob says the new hood is “refurbished,” Teddy says it’s “old.”
- Karmic Jackpot: Linda and Tina venture out of the Sale section and into normal-priced shoes section. They go a little wild trying on different shoes, leaving boxes around. When the disapproving, overworked sales woman tries getting them to leave, Linda and Tina feel bad and start picking up and putting shoes away themselves. Linda also apologizes to the worker and commiserates over how depressing the Sales section is. In the end, the sales woman offers to sell them a pair of new, non-sale sneakers for 20% off.
- Locked in a Freezer: Gene walks down to the basement to use the meat grinder when the old grill hood falls on the door and pins it down, trapping him.
- Mistaken for Murderer: Louise is convinced that Adam, the guy selling Bob the grill hood, is a serial killer luring people online to his home so he can kill them. Bob thinks she's just being paranoid, but when Adam takes too long to get the receipt, he slowly starts to think she's right. In the end, however, Adam just turns out to be a nice, albeit socially-awkward man.
- Never Split the Party: Bob tries to go inside to check on Adam himself, but Louise refuses to let him go alone. Teddy volunteers to go with Bob, and Bob asks if maybe Teddy could go in alone. He refuses, so all three of them go inside together.
- Running Gag: Gene's Imaginary Friend Ken makes a reappearance. He's apparently now a filmmaker.
- Shout-Out:
- The opening store next door is Lionel Stitchy Plastic Surgery and the exterminator van is for Song of the Flea.
- When Gene can't decide whether to go with Bob or Linda, Tina says that it's "a real Kramer vs. Kramer. I think that was a Seinfeld episode."
- The Burger of the Day is the The Green a Little Bean of Me Burger
. - Louise wants to call the new hood Robin.
- Linda and Tina visit Shoe’s the Boss Shoe Warehouse.
- While Gene is alone, he dances on the counter in Bob's Burgers. While talking to Ken, he says, "I do feel like the bartenders in Coyote Ugly!"
- When he gets trapped in the basement, Gene yells, "Call Richard Belzer! Call Ice-T! Call Mariska Hargitay!" (All three actors are on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.)
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Linda doesn't want to leave Gene home alone. “And not because I don’t want you to find Mommy’s special crackers that I don’t really have, forget I said anything.”
- Wrong Assumption: Because of Gene's indecisiveness, both Bob and Linda assumed he was going with the other, and so accidentally leave Gene home alone. It's only when they return and discover that Gene is with neither of them that they realize what happened.
