The people of Earth receive a $300 tax rebate, and the episode follows the effects of their purchases; Leela wants to swim with a whale... that ate a gift Kif bought for Amy. Bender buys burglary tools so he can steal the world's most fabulously expensive cigar. Professor Farnsworth buys age-reducing stem cells, and meets a hot punk girl. Fry spends his rebate on one hundred cups of coffee, and experiences caffeine overload. Zoidberg, with more money than he's ever had, wants to live like a rich man, but finds that to be harder than he imagined.
Tropes
- All Part of the Show: When Mushu jumps and swallows the watch, the audience applauds thinking it was part of a trick.
- Androids and Detectives: Smitty and URL hunt down Bender and give him a good beating.
- Animated Tattoo: Amy gets one with her tax rebate, a little devil who makes sarcastic remarks at Kif. We also hear some on her butt, including one that sounds like a horse.
- Big Fun: The Professor's new girlfriend reveals that she only looks skinny and beautiful because she spent her $300 on a navel piercing that somehow contains all of her fat. As soon as the takes it out, she balloons up to her normal size.
- Blatant Burglar: Bender's face mask when he breaks into the cigar shop.
- Brick Joke: Mushu vomiting up Leela's swimsuit.
- Brutal Honesty: The whale biologist. It's a prerequisite to being a whale biologist, according to him.
- Bug War: Earth's war against the Spiderians. It's implied that the Spiderians were trying to surrender while Zapp was killing them en-masse.
- Celebrity Cameo: Roseanne Barr randomly guest stars as a hologram used by the whale biologist to give the dictionary definition of ambergris.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Implied with Scruffy, who knows a lot about prison life.Scruffy: Prison ain't so bad. You can make sangria in the turlet. 'Course it's shank or be shanked.
- A Day in the Limelight: Because it was known by this point that the show wasn't going to be renewed, the writers came up with this episode as a way of giving as many secondary characters as possible one more appearance.
- Dissonant Serenity: What Fry goes into after drinking his 100th cup of coffee, remaining calm and tranquil despite the fact that he and his friends are trapped in a burning building. This episode currently provides the page image.
- Droste Image: The tapestry that the Spiderians wove of Zapp's conquest of them includes a picture of itself.
- Drugs Causing Slow-Motion: After drinking the hundredth cup of coffee, Fry sees the world this way, going so slowly that people are practically frozen, and even a hummingbird's wing beats take a second each. He then uses his caffeine-induced super speed to pull everyone out of the burning building.
- Easy Come, Easy Go: In the end, the entire silk surplus is destroyed, costing Nixon and the government millions over the tax rebate.
- Exact Words: One man receives his $300 and declares "no more cheap crack houses for me". Cut to him walking up to a building labelled "Crack Mansion".
- Failsafe Failure: There's a bit of irony when a fire breaks out at the climactic party and no one can escape because the fire door is also on fire.
- Foreign Queasine/Haute Cuisine Is Weird: Zoidberg orders foie gras and caviar and is disappointed by what he gets.Zoidberg: Goose liver? Fish eggs? Feh! Where's the goose? Where's the fish?
Elzar: This is what rich people eat; the garbage parts of the food.
Zoidberg: I ate garbage yesterday, and it didn't cost me 300 dollars. - Fountain of Youth: Farnsworth spends his tax rebate on stem cells to make himself younger temporarily.
- Four Lines, All Waiting: This episode focuses on each of the main characters, with no breaks or supporting commentary from the other characters.
- Gag Haircut: Scruffy spends all his money on a new haircut because his old one "has lost its pizzazz." He spends the rest of the episode sporting a pink Mohawk.
- Great Offscreen War: As the episode begins, Earth has just won a Bug War against a planet of Giant Spiders, and the spoils are being passed onto the populace as a tax rebate.
- I Want My Mommy!: As Hermes and Dwight are on a pair of out of control stilt boots, Dwight cries out "I wish I had two mommies!".
- Insufferable Genius: The whale biologist is a total jerk, even during shows.
- Karmic Nod: As everyone's stories come to a resolution, Bender feels like his story petered out without him getting his comeuppance for stealing the cigar. Smitty and URL immediately turn up to arrest him and start beating him, and he yells out, "Alright! Closure!"
- Klatchian Coffee: Fry decides to spend his tax rebate on 100 cups of coffee, with a counter in the screen corner letting us know how many he's had. At 99 cups, he's a jittery, gibbering mess. As soon as he drinks that 100th cup, he immediately becomes extremely calm and serene as he becomes fast enough to get everyone out of the burning museum and put the fire out.
- Malaproper: Kif calls ambergris "hamburgers."
- "Mission: Impossible" Cable Drop: Bender does it during his break-in at the cigar shop.
- Money to Burn:
- Parodied by Le Grand Cigar. Its wrapper is a piece of the original U.S. Constitution. It was hand-rolled by Queen Elizabeth during her "wild years" and was buried with George Burns until grave robbing space mushrooms stole it. Bender then decided to steal it rather than pay its $10,000 cost.
- Mom (possibly the richest person on the planet) decides to use her rebate...as a handkerchief, blowing her nose on it while the bill protests. This comes as a shock to Zoidberg, who had thought his rebate was enough to make him truly wealthy.
- Must Have Caffeine: See Klatchian Coffee above. And like Dissonant Serenity even further above, this episode also serves as the page image for this trope as well.
- No Name Given:
- The Professor's new girlfriend. In the commentary for the episode "Neutopia", her name is revealed to be April.
- The whale biologist isn't named
- Noodle Incident:
- Why Scruffy was in jail.
- The entire existence of Le Grand Cigar, given that was it was somehow made from a piece of the original U.S. Constitution by Queen Elizabeth during her "wild years" and was then buried with George Burns until grave-robbing space mushrooms... well, you know the rest.
- Apparently, Zoidberg once swallowed a previous watch that Kif had gotten Amy.
- Perfumigation: Amy is so elated by the romantic gesture of Kif giving her a bottle of ambergris that she doesn't even wait until he actually makes it into perfume. Putting it on makes her talking devil tattoo sputter and everyone at the party gag and groan about the smell.
- Riddle for the Ages: We never find out why the whale biologist chose his occupation in spite of hating whales. When asked by Leela, he states he doesn’t know her well enough to discuss it with her. There's also no explanation as to how Le Grand Cigar wound up in a random tobacconist's shop in New New York after being stolen from George Burns' grave by space mushrooms.
- Ripped from the Headlines: The story was partly inspired by plans that the newly-elected George W. Bush had in 2001 to give out a rebate to all American taxpayers using a budget surplus, before the September 11th attacks and the ensuing invasion of Afghanistan rendered any such plans out of the question.
- Second-Face Smoke: Bender wants to use Le Grand Cigar for the sole purpose of blowing smoke in the faces of the people at the showing of the Silk Surplus.
- Shout-Out:
- Farnsworth buys his stem cells at GeneWorks S.K.G., a reference to Dreamworks Animation (down to including the iconic moon logo).
- Kif is interred at Commander Riker's Island, a play on Ryker's Island.
- Skewed Priorities: While everyone else was trying to get out of the burning museum, Fry was more focused on finding his last cup of coffee. This ends up getting inverted when it allows him to save everyone.
- Slippery Swimsuit: Leela lost hers while feeding Mushu rotten fish. We see her later wrapped up in a banner.
- Super-Speed: After drinking 100 cups of coffee, Fry becomes so fast that it looks like everyone is standing frozen, and he seems like a speeding orange blur in regular time even though he's moving at a casual pace.
- Take That!:
- Elzar says the fish Leela sabotaged are slightly too rotten to make jambalaya.
- Dwight says he'll invest one cent for five shares in Amazon.com and Hermes calls him a risk-taker.
- Tandem Parasite: Kif does most of the work on a two-person a flying bicycle (the pedals power the wings). In this case, Amy is just easily distracted (waving to some friends on the ground below) and wasn't trying to be rude.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Poor Mushu. And what's worse is the noise indicates that it just keeps going, and going, and going...
- Worthless Yellow Rocks: Bender uses a huge diamond to cut open the glass case protecting the Le Grand Cigar, then promptly hucks it into a nearby trashcan.
- Zillion-Dollar Bill: The $300 rebate is given out as a "Tricky Dick fun bill".
