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Recap / The Cleaner UKS 1 E 5 The Influencer

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Wicky finds himself reliving his youth when called to clean the den of online influencer Hosea and discovers it's a shrine to the 1980s, before realising said influencer is desperately lacking a father figure (after his parents moved abroad without him when he was 16) and gets enlisted to recreate the crime scene to boost Hosea's flagging profile.

Tropes:

  • Audience-Alienating Erainvoked: Hosea is suffering from this in-universe. A social media influencer, he was popular when he was a sixteen year-old living on his own, but is less so as a man in his early 20s living on his own. He had hoped that showing a scene of utter carnage in his den would boost his flagging profile, hence his horror when he finds that Wicky's cleaned it up.
  • A Bloody Mess: Intentionally invoked, as Hosea and Wicky deliberately set out to recreate the blood splatter patterns after the latter has cleaned up.
  • Brand X: Inverted when Wicky opens and swigs from an actual 1980s Coca-Cola can, only to find that the product contained within has deteriorated somewhat. Later invoked when he makes a cola drink with Hosea's SodaStream machine and points out that it can't be called by one of the obvious cola-related brand names, "because it's shit".
  • Cool Car: Hosea's Lotus. Which he may or may not be able to drive.
  • Embarrassing First Name: Hosea's actual first name is Bernard.
  • Fan of the Past: Hosea is this to The '80s to the point where his den is full of stuff from that decade.
  • Given Name Reveal: Hosea's real name is Bernard.
  • Insistent Terminology: Hosea's manager refers to the crime scene / blood as "content".
  • Mysterious Cube of Rubik: Hosea sees his Rubik's Cube as this, and is stunned when Wicky easily solves it.
  • Parental Abandonment: When Hosea was 16, his parents wanted to move to Italy. He did not, so they just left him at home.
  • Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: On both sides of the divide:
  • Shout-Out:
    • Hosea namedrops Stranger Things as the inspiration for his online persona.
    • Hosea's online persona is derived from Home Alone, although he was somewhat older than Kevin was when he was left at home by his parents, and it was a deliberate choice.
  • There's No Kill like Overkill: Although accidental, the death in this episode resulted in several major blood vessels being severed and blood spurting out all over Hosea's den as a result.

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