Recap / The Powerpuff Girls (S3E5): "Getting Twiggy with It"/"Cop Out"

Original air date: 9/22/2000

Production code: PPG-305

Gettin' Twiggy With It: Mitch Mitchelson, the class bully, has to watch Twiggy for the weekend. The girls don’t trust him and decide to keep a close eye.

Cop Out: Mike Brickowski, the worst police officer in Townsville, is fired and blames the girls for it.

Gettin' Twiggy With It provides examples of:

• Aesop Amnesia: Subverted with Miss Keane. While her Idiot Ball moment of trusting Mitch to look after Twiggy may make seem as she didn't learn her lesson from that time with The Gangreen Gang, she at least apologizes to the girls when she realizes how stupid she was in trusting Mitch.
• An Aesop: Be kind to everybody, especially to animals. Also, take a task from school at home seriously and responsibly, and try and treat animals the right way
• Asshole Victim: Mitch when attacked by the mutated Twiggy. The girls actually help Twiggy rather than protect Mitch.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Twiggy falls into a vat of nuclear waste after being flushed, causing her to mutate into a monstrous giant and chase after Mitch.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: Mitch is the villain here, torturing Twiggy, an innocent hamster, relentlessly to the point where, following her accidental mutation, she ends up wanting to murder him.
• Big "NO!": The girls scream one in unison when Mitch flushes Twiggy down the toilet.
• Blatant Lies:
  • While pleading with the girls to let him keep Twiggy, Mitch tries to claim that he never had any pets... completely ignoring the snake we saw earlier.
  • When the girls confront Mitch for flushing Twiggy down the toilet, Mitch weakly claims it was an accident. Since he taped Twiggy to the rocket that would fall into the toilet in the first place and quite clearly pulled the handle down on purpose, laughing all the while, this doesn't fool the girls in the slightest.
• The Cameo: Speed Buggy cameo’s in this episode as a remote controlled toy car.
• Crocodile Tears: Mitch is very good at these, and keeps pretending he’s sorry and will take good care of Twiggy every time the girls interrupt his torture.
• The Dog Bites Back: Once mutated by a barrel of toxic waste, Twiggy wastes no time rampaging after Mitch. After all the mistreatment Mitch put that poor hamster through, it's no wonder.
• Everyone Has Standards: Buttercup is usually Birds of a Feather with Mitch, given their troublemaking tendencies. But even she doesn't approve of his torture of Twiggy, saying outright she doesn't trust him with the class hamster.
• Fun with Flushing: Mitch ends up flushing Twiggy down the toilet after the rocket she was taped to falls into it, and he enjoys it very much.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Once again, Ms. Keane let Mitch take care of Twiggy for the weekend and told the girls that it's not like Mitch is going to harm Twiggy, which the girls strongly disagree with. In the end, at least she apologizes to the girls for not trusting their judgment, unlike that other time.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Mitch tortures Twiggy to the point that, when his actions result in her getting mutated by toxic waste, she tries to kill him outright. The girls are initially fully prepared to stand back and let Twiggy do so, explicitly telling Mitch that he's the real monster.
• Hypocritical Humor: When Mitch lies about Twiggy getting hurt being an accident, Blossom retorts by saying that he is the accident. This may seem savage, but then you remember how the girls were born.
• Idiot Ball: Ms. Keane firmly holds it in this episode, since she insists on letting Mitch take Twiggy home for the weekend despite the fact that he already proved in class how cruel he is to the poor hamster, and that all other kids volunteered to take Twiggy. Fortunately, she discovers the truth in the end and apologizes to the girls for not believing them.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Despite usually being the lesser type of jerk, Mitch is at his worst here. Any time it looks like he'll actually show Twiggy any kindness, he turns it around to hurt her instead.
• Kick the Dog: Mitch commits several of these, with Twiggy as his frequent victim.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Mitch gets a really good punishment for the way he treated Twiggy when she gets mutated into a giant and is chased by her, and the girls even help Twiggy get him. When he begs for mercy, both are placed in a giant hamster wheel and she runs to catch him nonstop.
• Nuclear Mutant: After getting flushed down the toilet, Twiggy ends up in a barrel of nuclear waste and mutates into a giant monster.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: The girls are all so disgusted with Mitch for his torture of Twiggy that, when his actions lead to her being mutated by nuclear waste, they're fully prepared to let Twiggy eat Mitch, going so far as to catch him and try to personally throw him to her. When Mitch begs them for mercy, however, they opt instead to place him in a giant hamster wheel and have Twiggy chase him in an endless cycle.
• Properly Paranoid: The Girls think Mitch is a terrible choice to take care of Twiggy from the start. Boy, were they right given how awfully Mitch treated Twiggy.
• Raised by Grandparents: The only person shown at Mitch's home is his grandmother. His parents aren't even mentioned.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Mitch, the local bully, has a snake as a pet.
• Shout-Out: Mitch has a remote control Speed Buggy that he used to torment Twiggy.
• Wrong Side of the Tracks: While riding a bicycle from school to home, Mitch crosses a set of tracks and the other side has a trailer park.
• You Monster!: Towards the end, the Powerpuff Girls lampshade that the mutated Twiggy isn't the real monster, but Mitch himself for abusing the poor hamster.

Cop Out provides examples of:

• Abandoned Warehouse: Mike Brickowski sets up a trap for the girls in a warehouse. However, it’s not abandoned but rather being used to store confiscated weapons and other items from criminals.
• Acid Pool: How Mike Brickowski tries to dispose of the Powerpuff Girls. It fails since acid can’t harm them.
• Artistic License – Law Enforcement: When police officers are fired, they're not allowed to keep their guns, because not only are they property of the police department, but there's a serious risk that the ex-cop could use the gun to commit crimes. To be fair, it's clearly Played for Laughs, as chief takes his sunglasses, something that would probably be a more suitable souvenir then a gun.
• Appliance Defenestration: Mike Brickowski angrily throws his TV out the window after being fired and seeing a news cast that praises the Powerpuff Girls.
  Brickowski: Startin' tomorrow, you girls ain't gonna be on the air no more!
• Black Comedy: Da Chief makes Brickowski turn in his badge, his sunglasses and his doughnut. When he tries to hand in his gun, he's told to keep it "as a souvenir."
• Bland-Name Product: Among the restaurants that Brickowski gets his donuts from are Windy's and Donut King.
• Continuity Nod: When investigating the warehouse, the girls bring up memories about their birthday adventure, and Bubbles sings the first line of "Love makes the world go round".
• Death Glare: When Brickowski is called to the Chief's office, believing he is getting the promotion he thinks he deserves, his fellow officers give him angry looks for his lack of effort to do police work, especially for sleeping during the robbery.
• Diligent Hero, Slothful Villain: Mike is the Slothful Villain to every other cop in Townsville. Mike was a lazy cop who did nothing but sleep on the job and eat donuts, while the rest of the cops actually did their duties protecting the citizens and stopping crimes.
• Dirty Cop: Brickowski sees himself as a "good cop gone bad" during his arrest. Blossom corrects him, saying that he was a "bad cop gone worse".
• Donut Mess with a Cop: Downplayed. Despite many police officers appearing on screen in this episode, this trope is only applied to Mike Brickowski, and purely to show how incompetent he is as a cop. The Chief also has a moment when taking Brickowski's donut while firing him.
• Fantastic Aesop: Played with. A straightforward read of the episode's moral is that the existence of superheroes does not make police officers obsolete. Taken less literally, the episode offers the twofold lesson that you shouldn't blame other people for your own failures, and that even one police officer not doing their job properly reflects poorly on all of them.
• Fat and Skinny: Officers Brickowski and Perez have this respective dynamic.
• Fat Bastard: Mike Brickowski, oh so much. His primary hobby is hitting every donut shop in town, and is rarely seen without one in his hand.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: If a viewer looks closely at Brickowski's apartment, they might notice that a lot of his stuff still has price tags on it, suggesting that Brickowski is a thief in addition to being incompetent. Or it could mean that he didn't bother taking the price tags off, thus reinforcing his laziness.
  • His TV is labeled as evidence, with the clear instructions "Do Not Remove" on it, implying that he stole at least that.
• Irony: Mike Brickowski was absolutely useless as a police officer due to his lazy habits, yet he was able to come up with and enact an amazingly clever plan to trap and dispose of the girls. While the plan ultimately failed (due to the Powerpuffs' immunity to acid), had he put the same amount of effort into his career as a cop that he did in carrying out his evil plan, he likely wouldn't have been put out of a job to begin with, and probably would have even become highly ranked and respected in the department. This could also fall under the Brilliant, but Lazy trope as well, with extra heavy emphasis on the "lazy" part.
• Knockout Gas: Mike Brickowski uses some against the girls.
• Lazy Bum: With how he just eats doughnuts and sleeps all day, it's safe to assume Mike hasn't done a day of police work in his life.
• Never My Fault: Mike Brickowski never admits that his own laziness is the reason he got fired, and blames the Powerpuff Girls for everything.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Played for laughs. The girls do get lowered into the acid, much to their distress, only to have extremely minor damage to their hair and clothes when pulled out.
  Blossom: What do you know? I guess acid can't hurt us.
• Police Are Useless: Mike Brickowski definitely is, never raising a finger to fight crime and gladly letting his co-workers or the Powerpuff Girls do all the work. Averted with the other police officers though, which are for once portrayed in a positive light, and the girls even admit that they still need the police to back them up.
• Psychological Projection: Brickowski is completely delusional about his own performance, even believing he's due for a promotion despite doing no actual police work. When he's fired, he blames the Powerpuff Girls for stealing work from him. When he sees evidence of his own uselessness with his own eyes, he blames the news report for making him look bad despite it just being an accurate portrayal of him sleeping on the job.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: The Chief, who finally fires Brickowski after he sleeps through a robbery, and later plays a critical part in saving the girls when Brickowski goes rogue. His only non-reasonable action is allowing Brickowski to keep his gun "as a souvenir", though this was played more for a throwaway-joke than anything else.
• Revenge Myopia: The Powerpuff Girls picking up his slack is the only reason Brickowski can goof off as much as he does, and yet when his laziness finally gets him fired, he decides it's their fault for "taking work from good cops."
• Tall Poppy Syndrome: Brickowski didn't like the girls under the idea that they were taking work away from the cops, so instead of actually proving that the cops were just as necessary to the city as the girls were and actually did his job as he was supposed to, he was too lazy to attempt that feat, and instead comes up with the brilliant solution to just dispose of the competition.
• Turn in Your Badge: Mike Brickowski is told this by Da Chief. He proceeds to turn in his badge, then his sunglasses. When Brickowski tries to hand in his gun, Da Chief refuses, telling him to keep it as a souvenir, and asks him to give him the donut he's holding instead.

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