There are a lot of mysterious disappearances around the Zooniverse... First, Bob Fossil doesn't take it nicely when schoolchildren point out the missing elephant. Next, Joey Moose goes missing. When Mrs. Gideon complains that her python has gone missing, Howard and Vince get involved. Vince speaks to a cobra, who reveals that he saw Dixon Bainbridge sneaking off with the python. Determined to defeat Bainbridge, rescue the animals, and woo Mrs. Gideon, Howard runs off to investigate Bainbridge's secret lab. Bainbridge swiftly captures Howard, and announces his evil scheme to create human-animal hybrids, with Howard as his next victim.
After Howard doesn't return, Vince gets worried and asks Naboo for help, and Naboo points him towards the Secret Lab. Vince easily sneaks in and rescues Howard while Bainbridge is on a lunch break, but before they escape, they discover a cage full of human/animal mutants, who worship Bainbridge as a god and know nothing but imprisonment. Vince and Howard rescue the mutants, and they perform a song and dance number before escaping into the wider world.
The Mighty Boosh episode "Mutants" contains these tropes:
- The Blank: Howard tries to get Vince to paint him, but Vince says he's not distinctive looking enough. Eventually Vince relents and paints him, but depicts him as a person with a featureless pink blob for a face.
- Boisterous Weakling: Howard boldly taunts Bainbridge and challenges him to a fight, but as soon as he realizes Bainbridge is game he immediately tries to get out of it, making a number of increasingly implausible excuses to try to make it seem like Bainbridge is the one backing out even as he reiterates his intent to fight Vince.
- Distressed Dude: Howard gets captured as soon as he discovers the secret lab, and gets tied up to be turned into a weird mutant. Vince has to rescue him.
- Don't Look At Me: When Howard and Vince discover the mutants, they shy away from from the light and urge them not to look at their hideous features.
- Evil Gloating: Once Bainbridge captures Howard, he treats him to a speech explaining his whole plan to go beyond humanity by creating human-animal mutant hybrids.
- Gratuitous Laboratory Flasks: Bainbridge's secret lab is full of round laboratory flasks full of multicolored liquids.
- Mad Scientist: In this episode, Dixon Bainbridge uses science to gain fame and fortune and god-like status by creating a bunch of mix-and-match creatures that fuse humans and animals, at great cost to his test subjects. He also operates a Secret Lab filled with various gadgets and glassware filled with colorful liquids.
- Mad Scientist Laboratory: The Secret Lab where Bainbridge makes his mutants has all the hallmarks: it's dark and cave-like, with an operating chair with straps and illuminated mostly by the light of the Gratuitous Laboratory Flasks filled with glowing colored liquids.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: The "Mutants" are various humans and animals spliced together through some sort of Applied Phlebotinum into bizarre hybrids with a generally human body but many animal features. One of the mutants, who claims to be the prettiest, is a human with an entire squid merged with his face and random hair patches all over his body.
- Mobile Shrubbery: Howard uses a series of implausible moving disguises to spy on Bainbridge: a picket sign made to look like a brick wall, a giant stack of balloons, and a tree that's much skinnier than him (all used indoors). It doesn't work, and Bainbridge ambushes him while he's hiding and takes him captive.
- Neon Sign Hideout: Bainbridge's secret lab, which Vince struggles to find without Naboo's help, has a giant sign that says "Secret Lab" over the entrance.
- Not Used to Freedom: At first, the mutants are scared to leave their cell, but eventually Howard convinces them and they celebrate their freedom.
- Snake Charmer: When Vince interviews the cobra, the snake mentions that he used to like to be charmed, and Vince suggests they try a modern update. As a Brick Joke in The Tag, Vince turns the reptile house into a club and serves as a techno DJ while the cobra dances along.
- Technicolor Science: The Secret lab is full of flasks filled with glowing, multicolored liquids.
- Thank the Maker: The Mutants worship Dixon Bainbridge, who created them, as a God, until Howard and Vince point out that he imprisons them.
- Would Hurt a Child: Bob Fossil grabs a child and tosses him into the air after he question's Fossil's lame excuse for the absence of the "Gray leg-faced man".
