Recap / Clone High S1E08 "A Room of One's Clone: The Pie of the Storm"

Teletoon air date: 12/15/2002

MTV air date: 8/2016

Written by: Adam Pava

Storm's a-brewin' in Exclamation, USA, and when lightning burns down their house, Joan and Toots are forced to move in with Cleo and her alcoholic foster mother. Abe finds himself in the middle of a Civil War between his best friend and the woman he loves and tries in vain to help them get along, but that's not the only conflicting relationship going on around him: JFK starts picking on Gandhi, whom he accuses of stealing both his jokes and his peeping spot, and Mr. Butlerton feels neglected when Scudworth starts spending too much time with a robot dog that the Board of Shadowy Figures buy for him.

"Tropes a brewing!"

• The Art of Bra Removal: Abe has not mastered it, as in trying to remove Cleo's bra while making out, has to sidebar with Joan and ask if one pulls over their head like a shirt or step into it like pants. He later tries to mediate Joan and Cleo's conflict by say that they both put their bras on one leg at a time.
• Black Bra and Panties: Joan, being the edgy goth girl, wears these during her fight with Cleo.
• Brick Joke: When Joan becomes homeless, Cleo gives her a Hypercolor shirt (a popular piece of early '90s fashion famous for changing color with heat). Joan is later seen wearing it as sleepwear when Cleo and Abe are making out and it turns bright orange as she seethes.
• Cat Fight: Joan and Cleo briefly engage in one when their tensions finally reach a boiling point.
• Clue, Evidence, and a Smoking Gun: Mr. B doesn't trust E-Cybo-Pooch because his "robot's intuition" told him that the robo-dog was a spy. And he found his business card.
• The Complainer Is Always Wrong: Played with. Abe's concept of conflict mediation is to stop conflict from happening at all and refusing to speak of it once he thinks his work is done.
• Did Not Think This Through
  Abe: I sure didn't think you'd paint the line horizontally.
  Cleo: Bunk beds, Abe! THINK!!
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Abraham Lincoln is forced to mediate a war between the occupants of a literal house, which they have literally divided against themselves into norther and southern regions. And in case it wasn't already obvious, Joan and Cleo even call one another Yankee and Dixie, respictively.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Joan tells Abe and Cleo not to pity her, albeit for different reasons: she doesn't want Abe to patronize her and Cleo would only do it to embarrass her.
• Dung Fu: In the midst of Joan's and Cleo's turf fight, Cleo tells Abe that Joan has started acting "like a monkey in every way." A dubious brown substance then flies by their heads from Joan's direction.
• Exact Words: "This house... is flood proof." It is not, however, lightning proof.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: Zig-zagged with Joan and Cleo living together. There is some fanservice when the two start getting physically violent with one another, resulting in some quick shots of them ripping one another's clothes off and pillow fighting in their undies, but it's quickly superseded by a Benny Hill parody in which the girls switch clothes with Gandhi and JFK.
• Hurricane of Euphemisms: JFK amuses himself by giving an unenthused Grassy Knoll waitress Marie Antoinette orders playing off of her huge tracks of land, asking if his smoothie comes with "melons," "coconuts" or "cans of milk." And then Gandhi steals his jokes and causes a fight in the Grassy Knoll.
• Mediation Backfire: Abe's attempt to resolve a pie fight ends up being so pathetic, everyone decides to throw pies at him.
• Pink Is Feminine: Joan upon seeing Cleo's room for the first time.
  "I never thought hell would be this pink."
• Shout-Out: The Benny Hill-esque chase when JFK notices Cleo and Joan's pillow fight.
  JFK: Holy Toledo! They’re fighting in their skivvies!
• Song Parody: The last scene of the second act, in which Abe looks on in despair at all of the conflict around him, is scored to a sound-alike of "For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield.
• This Is My Side: Played with. Abe encourages Joan and Cleo to paint their feelings with a dividing line across their room because "that sort of thing works out on situation comedies all the time!" Unfortunately, he neglected the fact that they're sleeping on bunk beds, meaning the line has to be drawn horizontally. See also "Does This Remind You of Anything?."
• Vorpal Pillow: Cleo tries to do this to Joan, but Joan wakes up before she can go through with it, resulting their their cat fight.
• Writing Around Trademarks: Parodied with Unspecified Rodent-Themed Amusement Park, which doesn't even try to hide the fact that it's a spoof on Disneyland. The ride Abe goes on is itself a deliberately gaudy mishmash of The Enchanted Tiki Room, The Hall of Presidents and Splash Mountain.

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