Ray and Fraser (well, mostly just Fraser) resolve to help a pizza boy retrieve his car after it is stolen by car thieves while delivering a pizza to Fraser's apartment. If they can't get his car back soon, Lenny will be fired, which means he'll go back to jail for violating the terms of his parole (maintaining employment). They go undercover as used car salesmen when they suspect the dealership of selling stolen cars... and stealing them back.
Tropes
- Bad Liar: Fraser has difficulty going undercover, not to mention being a used car salesman, because he is compulsively honest.
- Brick Joke: At the end of the episode, Ray and Fraser help Lenny deliver pizzas so he can keep his job. When they're running late, he tells Ray to just say they couldn't find the place, pointing out that it worked on Ray and Fraser at the start of the episode.
- Comically Missing the Point: A gorgeous woman insists on taking every car in the lot for a test drive with Fraser. It is only later that he lamely suspects she didn't want to buy a car to begin with.
- Didn't Think This Through: Rather than let Ray and Fraser's investigation run its course (they were already well on their way to figuring everything out), the pizza boy tries to steal his car back, getting himself arrested for car theft while already on parole.
- Epic Fail: Fraser relates a story of an earlier attempt at undercover work. He joined a group of hunters hoping to identify a group of baby seal hunters. He ended up getting clubbed repeatedly.
- Everything Is Big in Texas: Tex Markle is a big, boisterous fellow in a cowboy hat.
- Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: At the end, after standing in the middle of the road and goading the car salesman's wife to run him over so Ray could catch up with another car from the lot and and T-bone her, Frasier explains the "plan" to Ray and says he knew it would work because of how fast the acceleration is on the car Ray would've borrowed. Then Ray states he used a different car, immediately deflating Fraser's boast and making him upset.
- Hometown Nickname: "Tex" is not a likely given name for an American, even one from Texas.
- Honest John's Dealership: A car lot that steals cars back after selling them. As it happens, the sleazy owner doesn't know this is going on, and his wife is the ringmaster of the operation.
- Never Heard That One Before: When Fraser visits a juvenile penitentiary, two separate people make the same joke about stealing maple syrup within five minutes.
- Punk in the Trunk: Ray has Francesca buy the stolen Comet, then hides himself in the trunk to find out where the bad guys take it. They figure out he's in there and dump the car in the river, necessitating a rescue from Fraser when Ray's gadget to get the trunk lid open fails to work.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Tammy starts loading all of Tex's money into a bag to make her getaway when he catches her, leading to the final confrontation.
- Spy Speak: Parodied. Ray insists on using code words on the radios, and naturally has given himself an overly flattering callsign and Fraser an embarrassing one. Frannie butts into the conversation to give Ray an insulting callsign instead.
- 30 Minutes, or It's Free!: Ray intentionally orders a pizza from far away to exploit this trope. Fraser finds the tactic disingenuous and argues with Ray over it, and then insists on paying for the pizza anyways when it inevitably arrives late. And then the pizza boy's car gets stolen, kicking off the plot.
- Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Parodied. Fraser never actually explained the plan to Ray, and then got upset when Ray unknowingly changed it without telling him.
- Unwanted Harem: Tammy Markles and Frannie both vie for Fraser's attention much to his discomfort.
- We Need a Distraction: Ray sends Fraser to talk to Tammy so he can poke around in the offices. It turns out that Tammy is interested in Fraser for the same reason most other women in Chicago are.
