Fed up with the trio doing nothing all day, Duck Guy wants to get a job. A talking briefcase teaches them about the wonders of jobs through song but it abruptly stops in the middle of a montage, trapping the trio in a factory where they get jobs. While Red Guy and Yellow Guy seem to fit their roles well, Duck Guy has trouble with his.
Tropes:
- An Arm and a Leg: Yellow Guy loses his right hand after trying to rescue the card that was thrown into the grinder.
- Animalistic Abomination: When Duck Guy finally meets the so-called Carehound, he finds out that its looks definitely doesn't fit with it's name, for starters dogs shouldn't have four eyes. Let alone be able to devour you alive and strip away and kill any free spirit that may have been lingering in your soul...
- Brick Joke: When Mr. Lunch asks Yellow Guy about his child, Duck points out that he doesn't have one. Cut to a four decade time skip, and we eventually see he does indeed get a child in the form of a yellow wrench girl.
- Butt-Monkey: Duck Guy has a hard time adjusting to his job, failing to make any proper parts, not being given a uniform, and being denied lunch from the vending machine because he doesn't have a lunch token (which nobody else needed to present).
- Continuity Nod: The Old Man puppet for Red Guy is the same one used during the rotting alive segment in episode 2 of the Web Series.
- Cheated Angle: Played with the Carehound. Most images or posters we see of the Carehound has both of its eyes on the side of the head, cartoon character style. Once we do meet the Carehound for real it turns out that it has four eyes.
- Drunk with Power: Red Guy turns into a pompous git pretty much instantly once he becomes upper management.Red Guy: This is laminated tag. The lanyard itself is the fabric festooning it. I thought everyone knew that.
- Dumbass Has a Point: Duncan was right when he pointed to the first aid kit when Red Guy asked where the Briefcase was. Which is odd considering that they walked in the opposite direction.
- Eye Scream: The Briefcase rewards the trio for learning the importance of having a job and tosses them a golden coin, which then proceeds to pierce one of Duck's eyes.
- Foreshadowing:
- When the Briefcase makes his way into the closet, he can be heard singing "Or you could be the one who digs a hole for a funeral" which ties into the next episode.
- And when the Briefcase disappears and Red Guy asks if they saw any "box person", Duncan points out to the first aid kit, only for the Red Guy to dismiss it. By the near end of the episode it turns out in the Duncan was actually right.
- When they first arrive at the workplace, Red Guy and Yellow Guy both try to figure out where the Briefcase has gone and, although the workers are unhelpful, they still acknowledge the two while Duck Guy's attempts are ignored and work resumes as normal. Red Guy and Yellow Guy quickly fall into roles within the workplace, while Duck Guy spends most of the episode struggling to fit in.
- Furry Confusion: Invoked. When the Briefcase is about to leave, he then quickly pulls out another smaller non-sentient briefcase. Yellow Guy comments that "he's one of those ones with one of himself."
- Gainax Ending: After his encounter with the Carehound, Duck Guy suddenly finds himself forty years in the future where an aging Red Guy celebrates Yellow Guy's retirement party, who has also aged and even started a family. Duck Guy has a breakdown and throws Yellow Guy's card into the shredder — which causes Yellow Guy to stick his hand in it and tears his arm apart. As the workplace descends into chaos, Duck Guy frantically tries to open the first aid kit when it is suddenly revealed that the Briefcase was hiding there all along. The Briefcase continues his song from the start as if nothing happened at all and warps the trio back home as their original selves. Duck Guy questions why he sent them to the factory in the first place but gets no answer. Instead, the Briefcase tosses them a gold coin for his hard work that lodges into Duck Guy's eye.
- Glasses of Aging: After the Carehound conditions Duck to get back to his job, Duck finds out that 40 years have passed and Red Guy, taking the role of their boss Mr. Peterson, has gotten older, with some of his hairs having turned gray and him now wearing glasses.
- Gorn: When the elderly Yellow Guy tries to reach for his farewell card on the conveyor belt, he accidentally gets his hand caught on a giant shredder and all hell breaks loose.
- Gross-Up Close-Up: The welt on Yellow Guy's arm is disgusting.
- Irony: At first Duck Guy was eager to get a job and do something, while Red Guy wasn't so enthused as he wanted to sit around and do nothing. However, once the latter gets a cushy job as upper management and the former has a hard time in Peterson's and Sons and Friends Bits & Parts Limited. Their attitudes completely turn around, with Duck Guy growing increasingly frustrated while Red Guy very much enjoys his new position.
- Jump Scare: As Duck Guy tries to take Duncan's hard hat believing that he deserves one we suddenly get a glimpse of something underneath Duncan's helmet which starts screaming for a split second before lunch comes along and it's never shown again. Might also double as a Shout-Out to Eraserhead, as the brain creature has very similar looks to The Baby.
- Legacy Character: Red Guy being referred to as "Mr. Peterson" after the 40 years Time Skip seem to imply that whoever ends up in the management position at Peterson's and Sons and Friends Bits & Parts Limited eventually gets thought of by the factory workers as Mr. Peterson. This makes it rather ambiguous if there ever was a real "Mr. Peterson" to begin with.
- Looking Busy: Red Guy's job as a manager mainly seem to consist of answering the office phone. This leaves him with a lot of time where he is just lazing about at his desk in the office and doing nothing in particular. When Duck Guy enters to have a talk with him, he quickly picks up a pencil and pretends to be busy with some paper work.
- Meaningful Echo: Unemployed Brendon laments, "I don't want to do this anymore!" the same way Duck Guy did in the "Health" episode of the original series.
- Patchwork Kids: Janet, the daughter of Yellow Guy and Claire, has yellow skin, blue hair, and a round orange nose like her father. But she also has a wrench-shaped head, pincer hands, and a handle-like collar just like her mother.
- Selective Enforcement: Duck Guy is the only one who needs a token to use the lunch machine.
- Sword of Damocles: The factory is very upfront about the notion that no matter how careful they are, a freak accident is bound to happen by sheer statistical probability if nothing else. Some of the workers outright cheer in relief when Duck Guy's carelessness causes it to happen after forty years of waiting.
- Take That!: It's probably not a coincidence that Red Guy becomes upper management by literally doing nothing. Or that he continues to do pretty much nothing even afterward. In fact, all his job as a manager seems to consist of is occasionally answering the phone.
- Temporary Bulk Change: Invoked in-universe when the characters return from their forty years time-jump.Red Guy: (with sadness upon realizing they're gone) Oh, my lanyard... and my weight gain...
- Time Skip: Apparently, the trio has been working at the company for four decades. Duck clearly points out that they shouldn't have been here for this long.
