In Tundra, Dixon Bainbridge has returned from the Arctic to tell everyone about his quest for the Egg of Man-Tumbi, a gem of immeasurable value that he was unable to acquire. Howard develops a beef with Bainbridge, and decides to go search for the egg himself.
In the Arctic, Vince stumbles upon the body of a frozen past adventurer. Fortunately, his last words are frozen in the ice, which reveal the secret of the location of the Egg of Man-Tumbi. Vince and Howard then get in a dispute, and Howard leaves Vince for dead. Fortunately, Vince makes friends with a polar bear and has a good time.
Howard eventually feels guilty and sets out to look for Vince, but stumbles upon the cave where the Egg is held. He is captured by a tribe of natives who worship the egg, along with an ice demon called Black Frost. Vince shows up to rescue him, and grabs the egg, but sets off the alarm system in the process, and both are captured and menaced by Black Frost. Eventually, Vince's polar bear friend shows up and rescues them both, and Howard and Vince return home with the Egg.
The Mighty Boosh episode Tundra contains these tropes:
- Arch-Enemy: In this episode, Howard develops a personal beef with Dixon Bainbridge, over their similar claims of mustache-have and adventurous prowess. Howard repeatedly makes fun of him, challenges him to a fight (which Howard immediately chickens out of), and travels to the arctic in an attempt to one-up him. This is mostly one-sided, as Bainbridge considers Howard his inferior.
- Bathos: The scenes with Black Frost are quite menacing and scary, until he starts shooting deadly frost out of his crotch.
- Battle Trophy: After defeating Black Frost, Vince takes his red cowboy boots.
- Bold Explorer: In this episode, Dixon Bainbridge travels the world searching for treasure in remote places while wearing various cliched explorer gear with the affect of a 19th century British colonialist.
- The Cavalry: Happens twice when Howard and Vince have been captured by the natives.
- Initially subverted when Dixon Bainbridge shows up in a grand entrance. He aims to waltz in and take the egg, but Black Frost paralyzes him before he can do anything.
- After that, Vince's polar bear friend shows up, disconnects the turntable that powers Black Frost's creepy Background Music, and tackles him, allowing Vince and Howard to escape with the egg.
- Dying Declaration of Love: As Vince and Howard are tied up and facing imminent execution by Black Frost, Howard tells Vince how much he loves him. Vince finds this funny and has to suppress his laughter.
- Eskimo Land: The Arctic is a featureless white landscape covered in ice and inhabited by polar bears and primitive natives that wear parkas and live in ice caves.
- The Faceless: The natives wear parkas that completely obscure their faces, giving them an alien appearance.
- It's All About Me: In the Arctic, Howard makes Vince do all the physical work while he broods and writes in his journal, takes credit for all Vince's discoveries, and then leaves him to die after his cell phone goes off.
- Latex Space Suit: Vince's Glam Rock ski suit, a form-fitting metallic red spandex jumpsuit that protects him from the cold and looks like something out of a David Bowie video.
- Left the Background Music On: As the Black Frost menaces Howard and Vince, the insistent, anxious techno music builds in the background, until it gets disrupted and it's revealed that a polar bear unplugged the turntables it was playing on. The disruption to the music incapacitates Black Frost.
- MacGuffin: The Egg of Man-Tumbi is an ostrich egg-sized sapphire that Howard, Bainbridge, and the natives all desperately want, and their competition for the egg drives the plot of the episode. The egg is revealed to be a fake at the end, which is revealed in a one-sentence blurb highlighting how unimportant it is.
- Running Gag:
- Vince keeps bringing up Gary Numan for no reason.
"See, he's a pop star, but he's also got a pilot's license."- Vince's cell phone keeps going off during important scenes.
- Slobs Versus Snobs: Howard's rivalry with Dixon Bainbridge has shades of this. Bainbridge is the posh, well-dressed, accomplished zoo owner, while Howard is his shabbily-dressed loser employee, and the quest to find the Egg of Man-Tumbi pits them against each other. Howard is of course the hero in the conflict.
- Spinning Paper: At the end of the episode, shots of newspaper headlines show that the Egg Howard and Vince found was a fake, and that later Bainbridge found the real one.
- Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: In a show that's mostly full of campy, silly villains, Black Frost is actually quite menacing and directly threatens the protagonists with death.
