7 Swans a Singin'
- Written by Rockne S. O'Bannon
Directed by John Dahl
Airdate: December 12, 2019
Bishop Marx directs the trio to investigate a Catholic girls' school where students have been captivated by an infectious song.
Tropes:
- Artistic License: The Youtube stream opened is live, but shows on-screen graphics and edits that could not be added in real time.
- Bag of Kidnapping: When Sheryl calls Leland in his office, sounds of a struggle are audibly heard before the camera pans over to what is clearly a person trapped inside of a bag on his couch, attempting desperately to get out.
- Brown Note: A Jonathan Coulton song about Santa tripping on edibles carries a barely audible signal that makes kids want to puncture their own eardrums. No, really.
- Christmas Episode: Takes place around the holidays, and it was the last episode aired in 2019.
- Cliffhanger: David is meditating at a Nativity display when a strange man roars and tackles him, attacking him with a knife and leaving him with deep stab wounds. The episode ends with his phone ringing, just out of reach, and David, clearly on the verge of bleeding out, deliriously praying for God to let him live as he stares at a set of three stars in the sky.
- Dissonant Serenity: Leland carries on a perfectly pleasant phone conversation with Sheryl... as the muffled noises of someone struggling are heard in the background, before the camera pans to reveal that the source is a man on his therapist's couch, trapped inside a bag.
- Ear Ache: One of the girls tries to stop hearing the song by jamming scissors into her ear, and Kristen's daughter Lila after hearing Kristen listen to the song in her room as part of the investigation, has to be physically restrained by her father and her siblings to keep from shoving the pencil portion of a drawing compass into her eardrum.
- Forbidden Fruit: Leland advises influencer Malindaz to take down her video in order to popularize it, using the analogy of the King of France popularizing potatoes by walling them off from the peasantry.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Considering that this is an episode about a song with a chorus so catchy that it infects people with it and makes them want to kill themselves, and the chorus itself is so frequent throughout that it even replaces the both the show's own title theme and the credits? Oh yeah.
- Pun-Based Title/Titled After the Song: Takes it's title from a line in "The Twelve Days of Christmas", except with "singin'" replacing "swimming."
- Special Edition Title: "Pudsy's Christmas" plays over the title sequence.
