Characters / The Solve-It Squad Returns!

Characters from the Tin Can Brothers stage show The Solve-It Squad Returns! and its sequel, The Solve-It Squad: Back in Biz.

The Solve-It Squad

Scrags

Special Agent Benjamin "Scrags" Scragtowski

Played by: Joey Richter

"My name is Scrags, my attention span is short, I've got a high metabolism and a panic disorder!"

• Air Guitar: In a nod to his source material, when Scrags is chasing the Demonic Apostle through the Scooby-Dooby Doors he takes a moment to play some air guitar along with the background music, only to find himself playing back-to-back with the monster himself.
• Ass Kicking Pose: Assumes a karate stance when facing off against the Demonic Apostle — presumably in the 20 years since high school, Keith isn't the only one who knows martial arts anymore.
• A Boy and His X: The show starts as a classic boy and his dog story, until it ends the way all too many such stories do.
• Big Eater: He and Cluebert used to have this trait (just like their inspirations), often seeing their cases as just an opportunity to scope out new fast food joints and to raid the fridges of crime scenes. This becomes a much less funny trait after Cluebert's death.
  • Back in Biz reveals that he's gone Off the Wagon hard since the Solve-It Squad reformed.
• Blatant Lies: He angrily tells Chief O'Brien he refuses to take the case because it will bring him back in contact with his old friends from the Solve-It Squad, then takes the case while swearing this won't lead to the Solve-It Squad reuniting, then immediately shows up to talk to Keith as his first lead on the case. When Keith asks him if he's going to be deputized by the FBI, Scrags firmly says "Absolutely not" and says the other Squad members are only being asked to provide evidence as witnesses of the Demonic Apostle's first murder... after which the Squad pretty much are deputized, with Scrags making a big plan to canvass the site and search for clues and barking orders just like they're a detective team from the good old days.
  • When he angrily turns against the rest of the Solve-It Squad he yells at them for not growing up, saying "I've moved on! I've dealt with my demons!", which, given how very red-faced and upset he is, he obviously hasn't.
• Butt-Monkey: Keith is supposed to be the designated Butt-Monkey for the group, but Scrags' status as the group's No-Respect Guy puts him in this position a lot too. By the time of Back in Biz, when he's quit his job at the FBI to work with the Solve-It Squad full-time, the fact that he's still vainly trying to hold the others to some kind of professional standards and has nothing at all to back it up definitely makes him this.
  Esther: Isn't it beautiful? Democracy in action! We all got what we wanted! ...Except Scrags!
• By-the-Book Cop: Part of the drastic contrast between Special Agent Scragtowski and the old Scrags we knew and loved is that he's a stickler for Bureau protocol — which means when it comes to his relationship with the other three Squadsters, who are all, among other things, casual users of illegal drugs — he has a very difficult time adapting.
• Chaste Hero: It's very apparent there's no romance in his life and there hasn't been much of any for the past twenty years. The main reason for it seems to be that his grief over Cluebert precludes any relationships at all, but whether he has the capacity for romantic or sexual interest otherwise is somewhat debated by the fandom.
• The Comically Serious: In contrast to the rest of the Solve-It Squad and the wacky NPCs he's forced to interact with. It's especially comical because his grim By-the-Book Cop demeanor is so at odds with his voice still sounding like a goofy teenage boy, Inopportune Voice Cracking and all.
• Dark and Troubled Past: We don't know everything that happened between Cluebert's death and becoming a heroic FBI agent, but he describes it as hitting "rock bottom".
• Dead Sidekick: He was really more like Cluebert's sidekick, but his reaction to Cluebert's death is absolutely a classic example of this trope.
• Defective Detective: He's the Super Cop of his regional FBI office with the highest clearance rate of any agent, but he's apparently so obsessively devoted to his job and such a dour, humorless workaholic his boss tells him he's "bumming out the rest of the FBI".
• The Dividual: He was this with Cluebert, much like Shaggy and Scooby in the original show, with Cluebert literally being a Hand Puppet who was attached to him — which is why losing him was so horribly traumatizing.
• Excessive Mourning: People are generally insensitive over how badly wounded Scrags still is by Cluebert's death, given that it's been almost twenty years. This is partly due to a certain degree of confusion over whether to treat Cluebert like he's a dog or a person.
• Expy: Of Norville "Shaggy" Rogers, after being subjected to some major Character Derailment.
• Extreme Omnivore: Back in the day his Big Eater tendencies were so out of control he didn't even realize he was eating "propcorn" instead of real popcorn (which apparently were made with "chips", as in wood chips).
• FBI Agent: Scrags didn't just graduate from being a Kid Detective to a real cop, but to the highest level of law enforcement in the US government. In the ending, when everyone decides to officially reform the Solve-It Squad, Scrags decides to "pivot his career" and resign from the Bureau to become a private detective.
• Feeling Their Age: Twenty years of aging, and having to give up eating Dagwood Sandwiches cold turkey (so to speak) when he went on a strict diet, means that his attempt to resurrect his childhood "sandwich trick" is a humiliating failure.
• Formerly Fat: As the song says, he had a high metabolism when he was a teenager, which faded as he got older (and as his compulsive eating probably got a lot worse after Cluebert died), leading to him gaining a lot of weight that he ended up having to lose in a hurry once he contracted type-2 diabetes. All of this has just added to his Trauma Conga Line.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: He uses Shaggy's signature epithet "Zoinks!", but instead of an expression of excitement it's just a tired, defeated "Zoinks" after his fight with Gwen.
• Growing Up Sucks: None of the Squad had a good time with adulthood, but Scrags is very insistent that he's the only one who's actually grown up into a successful adult, and the process was clearly very unpleasant for him (and, much as he won't admit it, has left him with a hefty dose of self-pity).
• Hypocritical Humor: The Solve-It Squad: Back in Biz reveals that for all his sanctimony about Esther allowing their illicit addictions ruin their life, his relationship to food isn't any healthier — and even while he's attending a twelve-step program to try to get a handle on it his cravings for junk food are only getting worse and worse while his excuses for giving into it get weaker and weaker.
• I Reject Your Reality: His Only Sane Man veneer begins to crack when all three of the other Squad members instantly recognize the bloody knife he and Gwen found as a cheap prop knife that only superficially resembles the original Demonic Apostle's ritual dagger, and Esther points out how much likelier a Jack the Ripoff is than the original Apostle reappearing now — which Scrags furiously rejects, insisting that he just knows that they're on the trail of Cluebert's killer and will not hear otherwise.
• Inopportune Voice Cracking: In imitation of Casey Kasem's classic performance, his voice is constantly doing this, and belying any claims he makes to being a completely different, more mature man than he was as a teenager.
• It's Personal: It quickly becomes clear that Scrags' obsession with the Demonic Apostle isn't about justice so much as revenge, and he soon sets aside the law, Bureau protocol and a lot of his personal code of conduct — including his past decision to cut the other Squadmates out of his life — just for a chance to finally get closure over Cluebert.
• The Leader: He was merely The Lancer to Cluebert back in their teen years; he tries to take up the role of leader now, and logically should have it given he's an actual FBI agent, but the rest of the Squad consistently refuses to take his direction no matter what he does.
• Lead Police Detective: Although this is a subverted trope, because he immediately abandons working with his colleagues at the Bureau to hook up again with his ne'er-do-well childhood friends, who ignore his rank and give him no respect.
• Married to the Job: He apparently has no friends or relationships outside of his work, and even at his work he refuses to develop any personal friendships with any of his colleagues, thanks to being terrified of any kind of intimacy ever since the death of Cluebert.
  • He continues to act like this in Back in Biz, being the Workaholic member of the Squad who's uncomfortable having any downtime between cases and demanding the Squad investigate "mysteries" as trivial as why a donut company's machines are malfunctioning so that the "donut hole" pastries themselves have holes.
• Meaningful Name: His original inspiration, "Shaggy", was known for his long and unkempt hair; "Scrags" is "scraggly" (6'2" tall and skinny).
• My Greatest Failure: Cluebert's death. At first it's so much of a Trauma Button he refuses to take the reopened Case of the Demonic Apostle, which then flips around to him being obsessed with solving it.
• My Greatest Second Chance: Scrags starts out with a Freak Out reaction to the Demonic Apostle's sudden reappearance and all the old feelings it drags out of him, before going 180 degrees on it and becoming obsessed with taking him down as a way to redeem his ruined childhood and fix everything that went wrong with the Solve-It Squad's life since then.
• Nervous Wreck: He tries to keep it under control, as a hardened FBI agent, but he was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder as a child and you can see it starting to affect him every time one of the other Squadsters starts testing his patience.
• Never Gets Fat: He had this ability as a teenager, which then abandoned him.
• No Doubt the Years Have Changed Me: None of the other Squad members even recognizes Scrags when he first shows up at their doorstep, and Gwen even comments on it. Obviously his clothing and demeanor are very different from his youth, but it's implied that in-universe he's physically aged a lot as well (gaining and losing a lot of weight in a short time will do a number on your body).
• No-Respect Guy: Very much this for the Solve-It Squad. Keith, Gwen and Esther hilariously refuse to take the idea that they're involved in a criminal investigation under the orders of an FBI agent (who could, theoretically, arrest all of them and send them to prison for doing hard drugs right in front of him) at all seriously, partly because they can't think of him as anything but their goofy childhood friend.
• Not Distracted by the Sexy: Gwen clearly only flirts with him just to make Keith jealous and, possibly, to try to juice his reactions to get better footage for her TV show, but even so, he pretty much totally fails to react to it at all. This, plus the fact that he seems fairly obtuse about the fact that Gwen's main reason to come back to the Squad is to reconnect with Keith, has led a lot of fans to headcanon him as ace.
• The Not-Love Interest: It's partly Actor Shipping between Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez, but he and Esther fill this role for each other, as much of a Crack Ship as it might seem on the surface. He's far more genuinely concerned for Esther's welfare and willing to open up to them emotionally than to Keith or Gwen, and genuinely deeply respects their intelligence. He even says outright that when he was first Putting the Band Back Together he reassured himself that "If I have to hang out with these clowns again to avenge Cluebert's death, at least Esther will be there!", one of the few moments he openly compliments any of the others before the ending. He's about to make a heartfelt apology to them for abandoning them after Cluebert's death before Gwen interrupts their conversation to scream about Keith being abducted.
• Off the Wagon: As of Back in Biz he's gone right back to his old Big Eater ways, despite the inherent danger of doing this as a Type II diabetic still dependent on insulin.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: As an adult, everyone still calls him "Scrags" — including his boss at his job — even though he insists on being referred to as "Agent Scragtowski". His first name is never revealed at any point in the show, although a Freeze-Frame Bonus on his badge reveals his first name is "Benji". (Which was apparently itself a shortened version of his name, because in Back in Biz Gwen refers to him as "Benjamin".)
• Only Sane Man: He's the only member of the Solve-It Squad who seems to actually give a shit about finding Cluebert's killer or who considers the return of the Demonic Apostle to be a genuine threat to anyone's safety, with everyone else treating the mystery as a fun road trip. To be fair, this is justified — the original Demonic Apostle did horrifically kill Cluebert, but that was 20 years ago, and as Esther points out it's extremely likely that the current one is just a copycat acting out for attention. And Keith is particularly blithe and carefree about it because he is that copycat.
• Platonic Life-Partners: Was this with his "best friend" Cluebert, who is a dog (albeit a talking dog). It definitely seems that he's taken Cluebert's death as harshly as though it were the death of a spouse.
• Private Detective: Back in Biz reveals that after the ending of the original show, he followed through with his intention to quit the FBI and is now, like many progressives in the post-Black Lives Matter Movement world, harshly critical of the police as an institution.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: He's fond of going off on these against the other Solve-It Squad members about their many glaring flaws.
• Seriously Scruffy: Back when he was a teenager he had shaggy hair and a scruffy beard because he was a lazy goofball; now he looks about the same (because it's a stage show) but it's the result of him being too much of a workaholic to take care of himself.
• Signature Move: When he was a Big Eater as a kid he was able to create a Dagwood Sandwich almost instantly, as if by magic, by "shuffling the ingredients together like a deck of cards".
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: Changes dramatically from his baggy orange hoodie, jeans and backwards baseball cap as a teenager to his sober business suit as an adult FBI agent.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Back in Biz shows that hanging out with his old friends on the Solve-It Squad and giving up the FBI's disciplinary standards has him falling back into all kinds of unhealthy habits.
• Trauma Button: When Ricky the concierge mentions the hotel has a "No Pets" policy, Scrags visibly flinches, reflexively jerks his hand up as though the Cluebert hand puppet were still on it, and quietly says it won't be a problem.
• Vanilla Protagonist: Played with — part of the joke of this show is you'd think the Shaggy character would be the most colorful of the Kid Hero All Grown-Up characters, whereas Scrags has forced himself to become a straitlaced By-the-Book Cop struggling to deal with his former friends' immaturity and selfishness. There's a constant hilarious contrast between him being in an FBI uniform and playing Only Sane Man while still being a tall, gangly "puberty-voiced" Joey Richter character.
• Vengeance Denied: The real Demonic Apostle was killed by Keith, of all people — not even intentionally, but in a senseless accident — months ago. Scrags almost has a Heroic BSoD over this, until the realization that Keith put all this effort into trying to "fix" the situation by giving him a chance to stop the Apostle anyway means that he's better off retaining his connection to the friends he still has than obsessing over the one he lost.
• Vocal Dissonance: Scrags continuing to have the same squeaky, goofy voice he had as a teenager after he's become an adult FBI agent who's constantly trying to assert his authority and experience is a source of constant, hilarious frustration for him.
• Weight Woe: He refers to his past experience with junk food and weight gain as an "addiction", and when Keith happily ignores this and asks him if he wants any snacks from the gas station he takes a deep breath and glumly asks for just a pack of gum.

Keith

Keith Swanson

Played by: Gabe Greenspan

"I'm the man with the plan with the van! And a brown belt in karate!"

• The Alcoholic: He has less of an Addled Addict problem than Esther, but he's still got his issues. He mentions "chugging a beer so fast you can't feel your face" to a bunch of kids in "Just Says No to Drugs!", and the Back in Biz shows him hungover in the back of the van and vomiting out the back door.
• The Alleged Car: Back in Biz reveals his prized van really isn't that great a mode of transportation. He's very proud of the fact that it can achieve a top speed of 55 mph, but only if it's going downhill.
• Authority in Name Only: He repeatedly calls himself The Leader of the Solve-It Squad, and the others kind of passively let him do it without ever actually treating him as such in any way. It's implied that he gets to do this because when they were kids he was the oldest one and they were dependent on him for transportation because his parents let him have a van; as adults, he's the only one who's been maintaining the Solve-It Squad website and brand name for twenty years while everyone else has abandoned it, leaving him the Squad's only "member" and leader by default.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other:
  • He angrily defends Gwen's honor when Scrags insults her, and valiantly pulls a Heroic Sacrifice when letting the monster grab him to protect her. (One that's somewhat subverted by him demanding she tell everyone about what a great person he is as he gets dragged away, and by Gwen pointing out that the monster seemed to be going after him and not her in the first place anyway.)
  • The above is even more subverted when it turns out Keith staged his kidnapping in the first place. But then, in a bit of a Bait-and-Switch, we find out what Keith's primary motive for pulling the Demonic Apostle caper was. He takes Gwen's hands in his as he announces that he did it... for Scrags, to give him the chance to get closure for Cluebert's death he was always denied.
• Berserk Button: Keith gets very angry when a random beachgoer fails to recognize the Solve-It Squad van and tries to order poké from him. (This is an Actor Allusion to Gabe Greenspan creating and starring in Pokémon: The Mew-sical, as well as an Incredibly Lame Pun.)
  • A much more serious one — both an Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other and Beware the Silly Ones moment — is when Scrags' "The Reason You Suck" Speech sends Gwen running out of the room in tears, and Keith turns on Scrags with utterly sincere murderous fury in his eyes and snaps "Don't you EVER talk like that to my girl again." Scrags' cutting statement that no one's going to fix Gwen's problems for her because "NO ONE CARES!" is Instantly Proven Wrong — Keith obviously does care, and even though he's pretty obviously incapable of pulling Gwen out of "rock bottom" he's going to try.
• Beware the Silly Ones: He may be a goofball, but don't disrespect Gwen in his presence. It turns out he's the true identity of the new Demonic Apostle, and the killer of the original one.
• Big Eater: Less so than Scrags and Cluebert used to be in their heyday, but his physique means he's continued to eat like a teenager into his 30s without suffering the consequences Scrags did. This comes across with the list of snacks he rattles off as suggestions at the gas station scene, and him surreptitiously stealing and eating the bologna from Scrags' failed "sandwich trick".
• The Big Guy: His actual role in the Solve-It Squad's Five-Man Band. In their heyday you can see that he's the Dumb Muscle who generally physically subdues the monster and then drags them off to be sent to jail when they're done with the Motive Rant.
• The Bully: Mildly so, including giving Scrags obnoxious nicknames and at one point a nut-tap as what he considers "male bonding".
• …But He Sounds Handsome: When describing the suspect who left the Solve-It Squad tank top behind at the gym, he blatantly describes himself in unflattering terms — someone who's obsessed with the Squad and who's not nearly as strong as he thinks he is.
• Butt-Monkey: When they were kids his role as The Big Guy meant he got more than his fair share of Amusing Injuries, which Cluebert and the others openly mocked him for (along with his general Dumb Muscle status). It's only gotten worse in the present day, with him apparently having gained almost no experience or education in the past 20 years, and with everyone finding some new personal failing of Keith to mock every few seconds.
• Casanova Wannabe: Gwen has her eye balefully fixed on him at the time, and he really does consider her his One True Love, but he still can't help himself from instantly putting the moves on Camille as soon as she reveals herself to be "young and hot". As soon as she proves herself the least bit receptive to his advances, he ends up exultantly crying out "I WILL HAVE HER!", although he quickly backtracks that he'd never actually cheat on Gwen when Esther confronts him. (Gwen's jealous anger over this, of course, is massively hypocritical.)
• Didn't Think This Through: He stages a Heroic Sacrifice to save Gwen from the Demonic Apostle, which he must know can't possibly stick for long given that the Demonic Apostle is inevitably going to get caught soon, and if Ricky is actually threatened with going to prison he's going to just tell everyone the truth. Even after he decides to dress up as the Apostle himself and let the Squad catch him, he's somehow still trying to play it off like letting his accomplice Ricky abduct him was a genuine Heroic Sacrifice.
• Dirty Coward: When Scrags raises the question of whether Keith is a hero or a coward after he's abducted, everyone immediately starts saying that obviously he is and always has been a coward.
• Disappeared Dad: We don't hear anything about this in detail, just that when Keith comes back to Mayberry to visit his mom for her birthday he doesn't mention his father being with her. It is true that the lack of a male role model growing up would stereotypically explain a lot of Keith's issues.
  • Back in Biz reveals that Keith's dad was in his life up to his teen years, at least, and that he was a typical Sports Dad who forced Keith to become a Jerk Jock rather than a Drama Club kid.
• Disneyland Dad: Keith acts a lot like one of these with Paris and Cam in "Takes a Chill Pill", although in an inversion of the usual trope it's because he's not their dad in any sense yet but is angling to replace Nicholas as Gwen's husband and become their stepfather.
• Distressed Dude: Subverting our expectations, it's Keith who gets picked up by the bad guy in a Bridal Carry and kidnapped in the final scene and Gwen who is determined to rescue him. Subverted since it was Keith himself stage-managing the whole scenario and he didn't want to put Gwen at risk.
• The Ditz: Keith is a classic "himbo". Back when he was on the Solve-It Squad he was an Idiot Hero; now he's just an idiot, and deeply longs for those Glory Days back.
• Dogged Nice Guy: Back in Biz reveals that Gwen did not, in fact, actually divorce her husband at the end of the play and Keith is stuck in this position with Gwen for the foreseeable future (although how "nice" he actually is is debatable).
• Drama Club: Back in Biz reveals young Keith was, in fact, an aspiring actor himself and ended up living vicariously through Gwen's theatrical exploits, because he had a Sports Dad worried about his masculinity who forced him to quit Drama Club and become a Jerk Jock instead. It turns out that this childhood repression has had a huge influence on his adult personality.
• The Driver: This is one of the only skills he brings to the table as a member of the team; when they were younger, he was the only one with a license and a vehicle, and as adults they seem to let him keep this job out of old habits (even though he's clearly not a great driver and the now-"vintage" van isn't a great set of wheels).
• Dumb Muscle: At least, his body is the only part of himself he's chosen to cultivate, although Esther points out he's not nearly as strong as he looks.
• Easily Forgiven: The rest of the Solve-It Squad ends up letting it go that he dragged everyone away from their lives and put everyone's safety at risk for his ridiculous hoax, because it turns out he was right that Putting the Band Back Together really was what they all needed. And Camille forgives him for shamelessly abusing her hospitality and using her hotel as a staging ground for his Evil Plan, almost destroying her livelihood in the process, because... he's just that handsome of a Magnificent Bastard.
• Expy: His van, which doesn't have a name in this universe, is an Expy of the Mystery Machine.
• The Face: The role on the team he shares with Gwen; Gwen is more dedicated to it and ended up making a career of it, but he picks up this job when it's someone attracted to men who needs charming, like the Mayberry Gardens Motel's young owner Camille Fitzgerald. (Unfortunately, him doing this triggers Gwen's — massively hypocritical — jealous streak.)
• Formerly Fit: Gabe Greenspan is, of course, quite fit in Real Life, but the script of Back in Biz repeatedly implies he's badly gone to seed since his teenage years, and the cartoon version of him in the Title Sequence storyboard has a pronounced pot belly.
• The Friends Who Never Hang: Gwen is pissed off at Keith for flirting with Camille, so when he breaks out the old Let's Split Up, Gang!, Gwen goes off with Scrags to make him jealous, forcing him to pair up with Esther for the first time ever. (In a nod to the jokes about how on Scooby-Doo Fred always paired with Daphne and Shaggy and Scooby paired with Velma.) Keith points this out, to which Esther replies they've been dreading and avoiding this moment for years.
• Glory Days: Keith has spent the past twenty years living in the past, trying to nurture the Solve-It Squad's Internet fandom that still remembers all the people they helped at children and squeeze them for every last penny he can on tacky merchandise.
  • This goes beyond sad to outright creepy when it turns out Keith has saved all of the other Squad members' clothes from when they were kids and has brought them along as though expecting them to actually put them on.
• The Heart: Most of the Squad would've thought Cluebert was this, which is why his death broke up the Squad, but surprisingly it turns out to be obnoxious Butt-Monkey Casanova Wannabe Dumb Muscle Keith. After all, as selfish and shallow as he may have been, he's the one who never gave up hope on the Squad coming back together and never stopped believing that the Squad mattered. And as reckless and criminal as his actions may have been, he's the one who moved heaven and earth to finally get his friends to reconcile.
• Hidden Depths: Keith comes off as a douchey macho Jerk Jock in his original portrayal, but Back in Biz reveals that his long-suppressed true passion is, in fact, the theatre, and that he has both encyclopedic knowledge and very strong opinions about the Broadway cultural scene. Hilariously, this doesn't actually make him come off as any less douchey or unlikable.
• Hopeless Suitor: They were, in fact, technically actually dating for most of their time together as kids, but Esther points out that Gwen has been "stringing him along" the whole time they've known each other — whether he was her boyfriend or she's married to another man she's had two kids with, he seems to believe she's his One True Love no matter what and she seems to accept this devotion while refusing to fully reciprocate.
• Hypocritical Humor: He complains about Cluebert's tendency to make Incredibly Lame Puns and other "forced" quips, but his attempts to do so are just as bad if not worse.
• I Reject Your Reality: Keith truly believes he's Gwen's One True Love even after she's married another man and had two children with him, clinging to the idea that because her second child has the middle initial K, it means she named her son after him and therefore still loves him. Esther calmly bursts his bubble and tells him the "K" is for "Kevin". (The hilarious thing is that, despite the unapologetically shoddy way she treats him, Gwen does still carry a torch for Keith and eventually comes back to him as her first love.)
• Incredibly Lame Pun: He has a tendency to make these, just like his nemesis Cluebert, only no one thinks his are adorable because they aren't coming from a talking dog. What's worse, when Gwen fails to respond to him mentioning "housekeeping" right after Scrags mentions a hotel he tries to explain it to her, and Esther makes a better one in response ("I don't know, Keith, it looks like she's... checked out") Keith gives them a blank "I don't get it". (Ironically, this is a Borrowed Catchphrase from the real Scooby-Doo.)
• Insane Troll Logic: The Opening Chorus shows him trying to imitate Esther's episode-ending chain of deductions, only for his Bat Deduction to fail horribly because it was totally detached from reality. (The only reason he thought Dr. Siebers the veterinarian had any connection to the museum case at all was that he happened to visit him to pick up his gecko's medicine while the case was going on.) The same applies to his Evil Plan as the Demonic Apostle, only because the overall thrust of the plan was coming from the right place — it did help the Squadmates realize what they liked about each other again just to have a mystery to solve — he miraculously succeeded anyway.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Keith's Jerk Jock personality was a mild case of this for Gabe Greenspan at first (since Gabe is a gym rat who hates sports and hates sports-fan culture even more), but then becomes massively this in Back in Biz when it turns out Keith has a hidden, shameful secret of being a wannabe Drama Club kid with a hugely repressed love for acting and the theatre that was beaten out of him by an abusive Sports Dad (Gabe, of course, is an actor in Real Life who's been passionate about it since he was a kid, being the son of a famous actor).
• Jerk Jock: We never hear about Keith actually playing sports, but it's implied that football is a big part of his life given his propensity for using it in metaphors (demanding a "replay on that last catch" when he's the one to catch the monster at the end of a case). (This is a major contrast with his actor, Gabe Greenspan, who's talked about how despite his appearance he hates sports and dreads hanging out with other gym rats who talk about nothing but. It's also a contrast with the original canon, where Fred generally wasn't a jock and the competitive athlete usually turned out to be Shaggy, who runs track.)
  • "The Solve-It Squad Cashes Out!" reveals that Keith's sport in high school was actually baseball (and he wasn't very good at it), and that he was forced into Jerk Jock culture by a stereotypical Sports Dad. He does get a lot better at "The Game" that the episode revolves around (a bizarrely convoluted version of beer pong).
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: As awful a person as he obviously is on every level, it turns out he's the one who cared about the Solve-It Squad as a group the most, and was willing to move heaven and earth to keep them together — and that as bizarre and offensive as his actions seem to be, he really did want Scrags to be able to move on from Cluebert's death and be happy.
• Karma Houdini: Keith has committed several quite serious crimes by the end of the play, even if he isn't the real "Demonic Apostle" and never intentionally killed anyone. Camille could press charges on him for trespassing, vandalism and assault, which almost ended up destroying her business; Scrags could go after him for intentionally wasting FBI resources; and, as Scrags lampshades, Keith has just openly confessed to vehicular manslaughter in front of everyone — while driving under the influence! — which depending on the jurisdiction could indeed get him life in prison. Nothing actually happens to him as a result — see Easily Forgiven — and his Evil Plan ends up getting him everything he wanted and leading to a Triumphant Reprise of the Theme Tune and an And the Adventure Continues ending.
  • Becomes a Running Gag in Back in Biz, where Keith is repeatedly threatened with arrest and prison time for serious crimes he's unambiguously guilty of but somehow wriggles out of it at the last minute.
• Kavorka Man: Zigzagged. Gabe Greenspan actually is very muscular and physically attractive, but Keith is so vain and obnoxious it makes everything attractive about him come off as douchey and fake. (It's a major funny moment when he ostentatiously pops his biceps rhythmically and everyone, even Gwen and the audience, finds it disgusting rather than hot.) And yet despite that women seem to fall for him anyway who should know better, including both Gwen and Camille forming an instant Love Triangle with him over the course of the show. (Gwen, at least, is obviously internally conflicted about this and ends up snapping at Keith "This is why we will never happen!" when he makes one too many idiotic remarks to her.)
• The Klutz: In classic cartoon Dumb Muscle style — he outright brags about how his apprehension of the Mummy in the Opening Chorus knocks over a whole bunch of suits of armor in the museum by doing "the domino thing!" That said, he performs well enough as the Demonic Apostle — he's caught in the end by Esther and Gwen's Trip Trap but at that point getting caught seemed to be intentional.
• Lazy Bum: A beach bum through and through. His "business", the Solve-It Squad Etsy merch store, is, as Scrags points out, a very low-effort one, where all he does is send in orders to big wholesalers he finds through Alibaba to put his branding on cheaply-made Chinese products. Most of what he does at his physical "storefront" (his van parked at the beach) is just getting high and sleeping. Part of why it's surprising he's the Apostle is that the Evil Plan, silly as it was, required so much effort.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: He's based on the Trope Namer, so of course as soon as Scrags is about to propose splitting up Keith interrupts him so he can say the immortal quote himself.
• Lives in a Van: Yup, and it seems to be his only possession of any value — and he's not even parking it legally (since his permit from the City of Venice Beach expired). An even better encapsulation of the Deconstructive Parody of Scooby-Doo than Shaggy becoming an FBI agent is Fred being a homeless beach bum who sleeps in the Mystery Machine.
  • Back in Biz reveals that he still lives in the van (despite having returned to the town where his mom lives, he's apparently not welcome to stay there permanently) and the Solve-It Squad clubhouse (a tiny treehouse with a rope ladder) is the closest thing he has to a permanent mailing address. (This still puts him one notch above Esther, who apparently loses their home halfway through the series and ends up living in the clubhouse itself.)
• Manchild: Both for better and worse, he's the Squad member who's changed the least by far since they were teenagers.
• Men Are Strong, Women Are Pretty: The archetype that he and Gwen fill to a T, and that Scrags and Esther utterly subvert (a commentary on the canon Fred/Daphne and Shaggy/Velma pairings). Also subverted when we find out from Esther that Keith looks muscular but isn't actually all that strong, with his bicep curl workout maxing out at 60 pounds.
• The Merch: Marketing as many different Solve-It Squad branded products as he can is Keith's job and sole source of income (and judging by how he lives, business isn't that great). And yet he's never even thought of an obvious marketing idea like Solve-It Squad magnifying glasses, until Scrags brought it up.
• Miles Gloriosus: Does a lot of boasting that he can never back up, and is oblivious to how pathetic it makes him look.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: He's obviously the most buff member of the Squad and he can rhythmically make his biceps pop at will, but according to Esther he's not actually very strong and maxes his bicep curls at 60 pounds. Sure enough, when he tries to dramatically rip the Solve-It Squad tank top in half, he spends several seconds making a "sound like a dying car engine" before giving up. (This is slightly Truth in Television, in that bodybuilding for muscle definition is different from training for practical skills and emphasizes different goals, but in Real Life it's basically impossible for someone to be as big as Keith and not have strength to match.) That said, this trope isn't taken to its maximum extent since Keith does serve as The Big Guy for the Squad well enough and it's his intelligence and agility that fail him more than his strength does.
• Muscle Beach Bum: Keith is pretty much this character, albeit with most of the aggression replaced with dumb, manic enthusiasm.
• No Name Given: Unlike the other members of the Squad, we do hear Keith's full name, Keith Swanson, mentioned onstage. However, unlike in Scooby-Doo his van that serves as the Solve-It Squad's Signature Team Transport doesn't have a name, possibly because there's no obvious Alliterative Name that would fit. (Hence his eagerness to change the team name to the "Puzzle Posse" so the van can be the "Posse Wagon".)
• Not Listening to Me, Are You?: Keith has a repeated problem with this when other people are talking to him about something important.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Even though there are tons of clues he's the Demonic Apostle, no one seriously suspected him of it before Esther gives The Summation because no one thought he'd have the mental wherewithal to follow through on an Evil Plan like that. Although the stupidity wasn't all that obfuscating — after getting the basic idea to fake a reappearance of the Demonic Apostle he didn't put that much effort into making it convincing, using a cheap prop knife, drawing the wrong number of points on the pentagram, and not really having much of an exit strategy for the plan other than assuming he'd get caught at some point.
  • What's especially Hilarious in Hindsight is that even though Keith seems to usually be a Bad Liar, and does in fact almost give himself away midway through the show when Esther jokes the Apostle must be a "copycat... or Keith!", his first scene with Scrags shows he's a surprisingly effective Manipulative Bastard — all of his apparent ignorance and obliviousness in that scene is Blatant Lies, all sold with a completely straight face, and Scrags picks up on none of it. The already-hilarious line "Cluebert was the nerdy girl, right?" becomes doubly so when you realize that Keith is intentionally fucking with Scrags and playing up his image as Dumb Muscle on purpose.
  • The same goes for his and Gwen's Almost Kiss in the honeymoon suite before stumbling into the secret passage not just being fate making a Butt-Monkey of him but something he obviously arranged in order to set up the end of the mystery — as was him changing Scrags' reservations to put him and Gwen in that room in the first place.
• Phrase Catcher: He's on the receiving end of many an exasperated, "Jesus, Keith" or "Keith, Jesus Christ!"
• The Plan: His intro in the Opening Chorus calls him "the man with the plan with the van!", which is Blatant Lies — when Esther directly challenges him to come up with a plan for doing something as simple as gathering clues in the gym he draws a complete blank. And then turns out to be true — he's the Big Bad Friend who had the Evil Plan all along. And then turns out to be false again, because as elaborate as the plan was it was also pretty haphazard and clumsy.
• Raging Stiffie: Gwen intentionally makes him pop one in her verse of the Opening Chorus, much to everyone's consternation and his humiliation. By the time his verse rolls around, he's proud of it and openly flaunting it while singing about how into Gwen he is, leading Cluebert to groan "Keith... Jesus Christ..."
• Rube Goldberg Device: Back in Biz reveals he's a Trap Master with a penchant for creating these.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: Gwen invokes this trope word-for-word when describing Keith's reaction to be dragged away by the Demonic Apostle.
• Shipper on Deck: Keith reacts with nothing but pure joy and excitement at the twist of Ricky proposing to Beth at the end of the show, while the rest of the Squad just stares at what's going on in confusion and vague disgust.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Back in Biz reveals he's not just this when it comes to presenting himself as The Leader of the Solve-It Squad, he has delusions of grandeur in most other aspects of his life as well, like thinking pouring money into a Kickstarter campaign makes him an actual "tech investor".
• Stoners Are Funny: He's a habitual indulger in "the ganja" and has a lot of the stereotypical characteristics thereof.
• Trap Master: Back in Biz imports this flanderized trait for him from the version of Fred in A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, revealing that of among all his Miles Gloriosus traits his aptitude both for creating and surviving traps is very real, thanks to being partially raised by his Great White Hunter Cool Uncle Wyatt.
• Unknown Rival: Keith has a tendency to develop toxic, one-sided resentments against other men he envies for their success — "The Solve-It Squad Cashes Out!" revolves around him developing a grudge against a charismatic tech CEO his age, and then, hilariously, this gets a Call-Back with him developing a similar grudge against a high school student in "The Solve-It Squad Just Says No to Drugs!" (Because the kid's parents encourage him in his love of the theatre in all the ways Keith wishes his parents had.)
• What Does She See in Him?: Scrags finds Keith's attractiveness to women so mystifying that he seems legitimately surprised and upset that Gwen still has a crush on him twenty years later and that reconnecting with him — as opposed to getting justice for Cluebert — is the main reason she agrees to rejoin the Squad.

Gwen

Gwendolyn Barrywood

Played by: Ashley Clements

"Gwen is my name, I'm danger-prone, I guess! Part starlet, part harlot, part damsel in distress!"

• Artist Disillusionment: Her episode of Back in Biz mentions her lashing out against her fans in a private group chat and, in particular, expressing her disdain for Fan Fiction; the Fan Disillusionment backlash from this ends up costing her a lucrative TV gig.
• Attention Whore: She and Keith are a good match because they both have their moments of this especially since that was one of Keith's motives for setting up this whole mystery in the first place, but she takes the cake. Everything she does, as Scrags says in his "The Reason You Suck" Speech, is out of a fear of "becoming irrelevant".
• Awful Wedded Life: The instant she thinks she's got the chance for a career resurrection by rejoining the Solve-It Squad she begins making plans to leave the kids with a nanny long-term and divorce Nicholas. The ending implies she goes through with it.
• Bad "Bad Acting": We don't get to see any of her actual acting, but if it was as melodramatic as she is when she's doing acting exercises with Scrags, it's no wonder her career didn't go anywhere after ICU.
• Camera Fiend: She insists on photographing or filming everything that happens around her with her phone; she says her priority is preserving fond memories for the future, like a doting Team Mom, but obviously she's just looking for content to share with her followers. (Content that, it turns out, she's hoping to leverage into a pitch for a TV show to revive her career.)
• Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality: There's a lot of meta humor coming from the fact that she talks about the Case of the Demonic Apostle as though it were an episode of her TV show, to the point of giving Scrags acting exercises so he looks and sounds cooler while investigating the crime, to the detriment of actually investigating the crime. This behavior makes a lot more sense later on when it turns out the reason she's filming everything everyone is doing is to create a Solve-It Squad TV show — although it still reveals massively Skewed Priorities since there's still a real masked killer running around the hotel, who does indeed end up attacking her and forcing Keith to pull a Heroic Sacrifice to save her. Luckily for her, the whole thing really was staged — and it turns out Keith of all people is a lot better at staging than she is.
• Chekhov's Skill: Her love of acting once served her well going undercover for the Solve-It Squad's cases, but Scrags snaps at her when they're paired up that most of what she's learned in her life as an actress is totally irrelevant to solving a mystery that takes place in Real Life. The very next thing that happens is her showing up Scrags because her time on movie sets lets her immediately tell a cheap prop knife apart from a real one.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: She won't admit it but she's this for Keith all over — wildly hypocritically, since she's cheating on her husband and father of her children to be with him at all, but the Green-Eyed Monster comes out really hard when he sees her flirting with Camille.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: She solves the case of the Witch in the Wings by seeing Harold Pendergast's bulge in his crotch while in the witch costume and concluding "Witches don't have penises!" (This line, which implies she thinks "witches" are a One-Gender Race, was retconned in the off-Broadway staging to "Ghouls don't have penises!", implying she thinks all "ghouls" have Barbie Doll Anatomy for some reason, to avoid the transphobic implications of the original joke.)
• The Coroner: Gwen is extremely bitter that she got this role on her old show ICU: Internal Crimes Unit — even though many actors would be very happy to have the steady salary and benefits that comes with such a job, her only concern was that "nobody remembers the doctor!" and her career didn't go anywhere afterwards.
• Creator Backlash: She wasn't the creator of the Solve-It Squad and she doesn't hate the Squad itself, but at the beginning she's come to despise the fandom around it for boxing her into a role she doesn't feel suited for as a "detective". She warms up to it again once she has the rest of the Squad with her to take up the slack and let her get back to being The Face while Esther and Scrags do the work.
  • It's also mentioned that she's gotten the brunt of the Squad's Loony Fans (logically enough, as the hot girl) and she's filed fourteen restraining orders against stalkers in the past year alone, which pretty much justifies her negative attitude.
• Damsel in Distress: Namedrops this trope in her verse of the Theme Tune Roll Call, probably thanks to so many of her missions involving getting close to a possible suspect while undercover. Subverted in the show itself — the Demonic Apostle does end up attacking her, but the one who ends up in distress and needing to be rescued (while he Screams Like a Little Girl) is Keith. She does end up grabbed by the monster in the ensuing Scooby-Dooby Doors Chase Scene, but only briefly, and she and Esther are the ones who ultimately set up the Trip Trap that catches him. And reveals that he is Keith, which is why the Apostle never directly laid hands on her — Keith would hardly let Ricky, his accomplice, actually put her in harm's way, even if he staged a confrontation for the sake of making a fake Heroic Sacrifice to impress her.
• Devoted to You: She isn't able to completely tame Keith's Casanova Wannabe ways, but he is absolutely and totally hung up on her; even his character introduction in the Theme Tune Roll Call mentions her (in the same way that Scrags' mentions Cluebert).
• Expy: Of Daphne Blake, specifically of the version of Daphne who's a famous TV celebrity starting from Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island.
• The Face: Shared this role with Keith on the Squad, although since the majority of the bad guys were men she had to put her flirtation and infiltration skills to work a lot more than he did (as was the case in the original franchise), to the point where she ended up making a career of it as an actress.
• Fetishized Abuser: Gwen was like this to Keith the whole time they were dating in high school, is still like this while ambiguously flirting with him in Returns, and then in Back in Biz is shamelessly stringing him along with no intention of actually getting with him (which is being a bastard both to him and to her hapless husband Nicholas). This stings extra hard once Back in Biz reveals what a long-suffering devoted husband Nicholas has been to her, making her quite the Ungrateful Bastard.
• Fiery Redhead: She very much has the quick temper and passionate energy of a stereotypical redhead character, including her inspiration Daphne Blake.
• Fille Fatale: Gwen was prone to some Troubling Unchildlike Behavior when she was a teen, with the implication that when she "went undercover" it was often in a role where she pretended she was over 18 only to reveal her true age as part of The Summation. She delivers the line "Also, I'm fifteen, you sicko!" with its accompanying slap to Harold Pendergast with relish in the opening, while cheerfully ignoring Keith's confusion and distress that she's totally unabashed talking about checking out people's crotch bulges to see if they have penises.
• First Guy Wins: She's never really gotten over Keith since the Squad broke up and is still reduced to girlish giggles at the thought of seeing him again. Even though she yells "This is why we will never happen!" at his Incredibly Lame Pun (proposing the van be named the "Posse Wagon") in the ending, it seems likely they end up back together at the end, even if her fundamental lack of respect for Keith means she's also likely to keep serially cheating on him.
  • Averted in Back in Biz, which throws Keith right back in the Dogged Nice Guy role because for the purposes of an ongoing animated series Status Quo Is God.
• Former Child Star: All of the Solve-It Squad are former child celebrities, but Gwen is the only one who thought of herself as an actress (and on occasion actually worked as an actress) during that time, and went into showbiz as a profession after the Squad broke up, carrying all the baggage that comes from growing up in the spotlight with her.
• The Ghost: Her husband, Nicholas Sardarov, and their two sons, the younger of whom is named Yuri Kevin Sardarov (a Shout-Out to Yuri Sardarov, a classmate of the Tin Can Brothers who became an actor on Chicago Fire). The only interaction we get with them is a Newhart Phone Call with Nicholas at the beginning. Finally averted as of Back in Biz by having him played by Special Guest and fan favorite Robert Manion.
• Gold Digger: She's implied to be this, having married a wealthy venture capitalist whom she has little affection for, openly insults as a "mindless trashbag" and instantly begins making plans to divorce once Keith comes back into her life.
• It's All About Me: To a far more overt degree than her fellow Squadmates; she ends up revealing that she never had any serious interest in finding Cluebert's killer for its own sake at all, not even as a favor to Scrags, and all she actually wanted to do was gather footage for a Solve-It Squad TV series to revive her dying career. She even has the gall to tell Scrags — whose life was almost destroyed by Cluebert's death — "if only you understood real loss," in reference to her acting career stalling after ICU got canceled.
• Henpecked Husband: The opening of her first scene as an adult has her snapping orders into the phone as though to a manager or agent or other employee, only for the punchline to turn out that "Nicholas" is her husband who's at home with the kids.
• Hypocrite: The usual joke of being a self-help author writing a book about "living your best life" who is, herself, deeply frustrated and unhappy with how her life has gone.
• The Infiltration: Keith, as the nominal "leader" of the Solve-It Squad, loved to "assign" Gwen to going undercover to help solve cases... which was pretty clearly just her manipulating him into letting her run off to flirt with other guys while honing her acting skills. (And it's implied she got to indulge her acting bug on multiple levels by taking a role where she posed as an actress, like the Case of the Witch in the Wings.)
• Long Hair Is Feminine: Her hair is in a quirky side ponytail as a teenager, and worn down in a more sober hairstyle as a mom in her 30s, but either way her hair is an obvious contrast to Esther's.
• Manipulative Bastard: One of the things Scrags calls her out for in his "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
• Meaningful Name: Her surname, "Barrywood", might be a slight allusion to notoriously troubled Former Child Star Drew Barrymore. Ashley Clements thought her first name was "Gwyneth" as a reference to Gwyneth Paltrow but Word of God from Corey Lubowich is it's "Gwendolyn".
• Newhart Phone Call: Her first scene as an adult is her angrily berating someone on the phone about her failing book sales, with the surprise reveal that the person she's yelling at and belittling isn't an employee but her husband. (A joke repeated with Team Starkid's Black Friday.)
• No Name Given: Her last name is never spoken onstage, but a Freeze-Frame Bonus of her book cover shows that it's "Barrywood". It can be seen much more clearly in a press photo from the off-Broadway staging. (This confirms that she never took the last name of her husband, Sardarov.)
  • This is subjected to a Retcon in The Solve-It Squad: Back in Biz, where it's revealed her husband Nicholas' name is Barrywood; assuming this means she took his name, it leaves it ambiguous what her maiden name was.
• Non-Indicative Name: Whoever named Gwen's show ICU apparently didn't know or care that that's already a real acronym for "intensive care unit". The irony is that her show sounds like it should be a Medical Drama, which would've made her role as "the doctor" the lead rather than a forgettable supporting character.
• The Nose Knows: Both Cluebert and Esther were alluded to as having this ability, which makes sense for different reasons (Cluebert being a dog and Esther being a Sherlock Scan genius), but at the beginning of "The Solve-It Squad to the (Dog) Rescue!" Scrags upbraids Gwen, of all people, for not being able to identify a brand of cologne by scent (to which she angrily replies that supermarket brands all smell like bleach).
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Word of God clarified that "Gwen" is in fact a nickname and short for "Gwendolyn".
• Pair the Dumb Ones: She herself isn't actually all that stupid, just ignorant about most Real Life concerns outside of acting, but only someone as shallow as her could realistically end up with someone as actually dumb as Keith. Even then, he's frequently too much for her to take, which is one reason she was constantly cheating on him.
• Parental Abandonment: Out of a sense of basic decency she starts yelling at Keith when he insults her children, but then instantly folds. It's implied she goes ahead with her plan to leave them in the care of nannies while she goes back to gallivanting around with the Solve-It Squad.
  Keith: What, you mean — you mean you're just going back to your husband and your shitty piece of shit kids?
  Gwen: Hey, I love my kids!
  Keith: No you don't! You would've never agreed to see me if you loved your kids! (beat)
  Gwen: Okay, my kids suck!
  Keith: (under his breath) Yeah!
• Parental Neglect: Back in Biz reveals she didn't actually abandon her kids, but she's continued to be a highly neglectful parent to them, letting her husband and the nanny do almost all the heavy lifting of childcare, for which her daughter Paris palpably resents her.
• Phoneaholic Teenager: They didn't have smartphones when she actually was a teenager, but nowadays she's glued to her iPhone and constantly checking and updating social media the way only a teenager does — or a social media influencer who never really grew up.
  • This leads to a Hoist by Her Own Petard moment where she rhetorically asks, "I mean, do I even have any availability for the rest of the summer?" to try to play hard-to-get only for Siri to unexpectedly activate and helpfully answer, "You have no upcoming events."
• Pink Means Feminine: Gwen rocks a purple top and magenta skirt in her teenage years; as an adult mom she's dressed in a toned-down but still-feminine ensemble with a black shirt, red slacks and a long pink jacket. Note that she's usually paired with Keith, who typically wears a blue shirt and jeans.
• Police Procedural: The show Gwen was on for several years was called ICU: Internal Crimes Unit.
  • This is retconned in Back in Biz, where instead the show legitimately was a hybrid Police Procedural and Medical Drama, Officer Dr. Cop, MD.
• The Prima Donna: Oh hell yes. It's especially obnoxious because she's very much a Small Name, Big Ego who has never actually held the rank of a prima donna in any show she's been part of but strongly feels that being one is her due.
• Reality Show: It turns out that the only reason she agreed to come back to the Solve-It Squad was in hopes of creating one of these so she can be on TV again. (Which is funny, given that we're basically watching that show right now.) The ending implies that she gets her wish, or that at least the rest of the Squad agrees to let her try and make her pitch (after all, they can't fund themselves just on Keith's merch website).
• Really Gets Around: Esther mercilessly rattles off a long, long list of past characters from past cases Gwen cheated on Keith with (emotionally, if not necessarily physically), including but not limited to "the creepy actor from the Case of the Witch In the Wings" (Harold Pendergast, whom we saw in the Opening Chorus), "the lonely fry-cook from the Case of the Fast-Food Ghoul", and "the hunky lifeguard from the Case of the Swim-Meet Swamp Thing." There's some extra Squick/Fridge Horror here in that Gwen was a teenager when this was going on and several of these characters would have, like Harold Pendergast, been adults.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Scrags lets the rest of the Squad know he's had the last straw with them when, after yelling at Keith for being a Lazy Bum and Esther for being an Addled Addict, both of which they casually accept, he furiously turns on Gwen and calls her the worst one of all, in a blistering speech that sends her running out of the room in tears.
• Skewed Priorities: Gwen's reaction to Scrags angrily telling her he needs her to be a friend, not a celebrity, is to joyfully exclaim "You think I'm a celebrity?!"
• Southern Belle: Gwen was apparently born in Georgia and moved to Mayberry (which, wherever the hell it is, is implied to be in the Midwest and not the South). Her Southern accent resurfaces once she starts getting warm and maternal with the Squad — "I guess there's a little Georgia peach left in me!" — although, in hindsight, this was probably her being manipulative to try to get them to open up and let her film them.
  • The accent, of course, is a reference to Lizzie Bennet doing an impression of her mother in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and not-coincidentally shows up when Gwen is doing her best to act like a mom.
• Team Mom: Gwen tries to adopt this persona the way Scrags has become a Team Dad, telling the Squad to pose together for a "family picture" and reminisce about the good old days together, although once her ulterior motives are revealed it turns out she's an unethical Stage Mom.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Gwen is very much the Girly Girl in contrast to Esther, in the tradition of Daphne and Velma from Scooby-Doo; it comes across even more strongly here because Adult Esther is far more of a tomboy than Velma ever was (including openly being a Butch Lesbian who never wears skirts or makeup).
• Typecasting: Gwen only became famous in the first place because of her association with the Solve-It Squad, and has been typecast in the "detective genre" since — to the point where she was only able to sell her first self-help book by giving it the gimmicky title Solving the Mystery of You, and is strongly resisting retitling her new book from Get a Life! to Get a Clue! Ironically, when she gets the chance to actually rejoin the Solve-It Squad and become a detective for real again, she jumps at it — partly because it's her chance to have a leading role again for once.
• Underage Casting: Gwen passed herself off as an adult when she was fifteen to take the lead role in a community theatre performance in order to solve the Case of the Witch in the Wings, snaring Harold Pendergast's heart and making him an unknowing creeper in the process; it's implied this wasn't the first or only time.
• Undercover Model: An actress, not a model, but this was Gwen's role in the Case of the Witch in the Wings, and presumably several others.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Keith, Nicholas and a bunch of other lovestruck men bend over backwards to try to please her and the most emotion she can muster over is mild irritation.
• White-Dwarf Starlet: She was a series regular on a crime drama, ICU: Internal Crimes Unit, but rather than one of the more glamorous lead roles played The Coroner, which meant she didn't get any exciting new projects once the show ended. Now she's embarked on a new career as a self-help author, which doesn't seem to be going well (there's literally nobody at the signing for her latest book but Scrags).
• Womanchild: The Fun with Subtitles when she starts freaking out about the possibility of reconnecting with Keith describes her as "giggling like a teenage girl".

Esther

Esther Backpack-Blueglasses

Played by: Lauren Lopez

"Esther's my name, and I was born with the brains! From my bifocals down to my Mary Janes, ooh, ooh... I'm severely nearsighted!"

• Absent-Minded Professor: Esther has shades of this, especially when it comes to their Drama-Preserving Handicap of not taking much care with their vision aids even though they’re totally physically dependent on them. It's a bit of evidence for the theory their Ambiguous Disorder is some kind of ADHD.
• Achilles' Heel: Back in the day, they shared Velma Dinkley's famous one — they’re utterly helpless without their glasses and yet seem to carelessly misplace them at least once an episode. (Truth in Television, for those who consider them an example of a character with ADHD.) Since then they’ve added another one — their crippling addiction to various illicit substances — on purpose, because they think they can't handle daily life without a Power Limiter.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Mildly so, in the off-Broadway staging; Esther's costume is changed to a tank top from a baggy T-shirt, which among other things lets us see that Lauren Lopez's arms are a lot more toned than you'd expect from someone with Esther's lifestyle.
• Addled Addict: Esther did this to themselves intentionally, in order to try to stop their "neurons firing" by any means necessary. Their opening scene has a hilarious visual of them chugging a whole can of alcohol out of the fridge first thing in the morning, followed by snorting a line of powder the whole length of the stage, and being about to shoot up an IV before Scrags interrupts them. (Their next line reveals what the substances are — a "cocktail of methamphetamine, diamorphine (heroin), and Wild Turkey".) ^note Note that in a bit of a Genius Bonus, this is a paradoxical combination of uppers and downers — combining amphetamines and heroin is called a "speedball" in street slang — and in Real Life is designed to try to give you the sense of euphoria or relief from heroin while the meth keeps you upright and counteracts the heroin's tendency to knock you out. It makes sense with Esther's argument that their drug habit is self-medication that's actually designed to enable them to lead a normal life and hold down a regular job, even if it's very much something not to emulate.
  • What's worse, when Scrags expresses dismay at finding them in this state, they tell him they haven’t "been sober since my junior year of high school" — they started developing they recreational drug regimen when they were still a minor.
  • The rest of the show keeps on throwing in new names for drugs they’re taking, like "horse tranquilizers", Ambien, and 15,000 milligrams of diazepam (Valium). They’ve also got a bong and a supply of weed as well as cocaine that Keith and Gwen happily dip into.
• The Alcoholic: Esther is on much harder drugs, but they still wash all the pills and powders down with a heaping helping of good ol' booze. (This is absolutely a Don't Try This at Home situation, especially combining alcohol with downers like Valium or Ambien.) When the Solve-It Squad are hanging out at the hotel restaurant and Ricky brings four beers, Scrags thanks Esther for buying a round for the table only to be told "These are all for me," and for them to then keep on ordering beers four bottles at a time, until by the end of the scene, they’re surrounded by at least twenty empties. (A bit of a Call-Back to The Trail to Oregon! where Lauren Lopez as the Son slowly collects and drinks everyone's Mike's Hard Lemonades until he's also comically surrounded by a pile of bottles.)
• Ambiguous Disorder: They are clearly neurodivergent in some sense, and severely so; their vivid description of "mental overload" while trying to perform basic tasks has been compared a lot to ADHD, though it could be any number of things.
• Ambiguously Jewish: A ton of fans have headcanoned the original Velma Dinkley as Jewish over the years, "Esther" is a stereotypically Jewish name, and Lauren Lopez is Jewish in Real Life.
• AM/FM Characterization: We learn everything we need to know about Adult Esther in the scene where they roll out of bed and start listlessly preparing for their drug-fueled day while "Ants Marching" by the Dave Matthews Band plays on their stereo. It not only establishes their musical tastes were firmly established as a former kid from The '90s, but also establishes them as a proud Basement-Dweller and The Stoner, thanks to the stereotypes about the Dave Matthews Band that now only kids from The '90s remember.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: If they do have ADHD, they’re a much more grounded depiction of this than this trope usually is. They describe themselves to Scrags as having no control over compulsively noticing things about their environment and drawing a massive web of inferences about them at all times even when they’re trying not to, but luckily they generally don't feel compelled to talk about it out loud, except when they’re doing it to Scrags to prove a point. (The drugs probably help a lot with this, and when Scrags replaces them with placebos, they do find themselves suddenly launching into a Motor Mouth summation of the whole mystery.)
• The Baby of the Bunch: Esther is implied to be younger than the other Solve-It Squad members by a few years, since they react with a shocked "Wow, cool!" to the idea of Keith having an erection and are said to be a "middle-schooler" while Gwen is fifteen and Keith has a van. The way they talk about having been an addict since their "junior year of high school" implies Scrags wasn't in any position to have heard about it at that point, probably having already left for college.
• Badass Armfold: Young Esther strikes this pose multiple times while smugly giving The Summation to Clyde Buchanan during the Opening Chorus. When we see Adult Esther doing this pose again in the present day, it's the standoffish, closed-off version rather than the badass confident one.
• Blessed with Suck: Esther very, very strongly believes that their Sherlock Scan is actually this, and has done their best to neutralize it with drugs and live an ordinary life as though they didn't have it. Scrags, on the other hand, who's devoted his life to helping people by solving mysteries and can't help but envy how something that's so much hard work for him is effortless for them, considers them Cursed with Awesome.
• Blind Without 'Em: They’re severely nearsighted, as the Opening Chorus says, and is very careless when it comes to losing their glasses. In the present day, they’ve tried to address this by replacing them with contact lenses, only to apparently regularly fall asleep with them on and let them dry out (which is even worse) and to thoughtlessly come on a big road trip without any backups. When Scrags gives them their old glasses as a replacement, the fact that the prescription is twenty years out of date means that they still see the whole world as a "colorful blur" and the people around them as "beige blobs".
• Boots of Toughness: A big symbol of their shift from Young Esther to Adult Esther is switching from the Mary Janes mentioned in the song to Doc Martens.
• Boyish Short Hair: Compared to Gwen, and compared to Lauren Lopez's real hair.
• Brainy Brunette: Like their original inspiration Velma, they’re conspicuously dark-haired and conspicuously smarter than everyone else they meet. (Note that Lauren Lopez is a natural brunette, but wears a bob wig for this show that's several shades darker than her real hair color.)
• Breakout Character: Esther is by far the most popular character in the show, with the change from being a Velma Expy to being the most creative of the four backstories, and with their Black Comedy Addled Addict status being both hilarious and leading to a surprisingly raw emotional performance when Esther talks about how they ended up so broken. Being Retconned as non-binary gave them even more of an LGBT Fanbase invoked, of which they already had a large amount.
• Butch Lesbian: Esther is dressed in baggy, shapeless clothes that give the impression of not having been washed much in their lifetime. Esther tells Scrags that they have a "girlfriend... with a boyfriend". It's not clear whether this is a Polyamory situation and Esther is Ambiguously Bi (since it comes after them bragging about having "a home... with a refrigerator", like it's a bonus) or it's a Black Comedy joke about Esther being a Butt-Monkey who's only actually their girlfriend's side-piece. (Back in Biz reveals Esther is a poly Depraved Bisexual and almost certainly meant the former.)
• Child Hater: Esther reacts extremely negatively to Doinky calling them and Scrags his "Mommy and Daddy" in "To the (Dog) Rescue", pointing out they had their tubes tied when they were 20. They show a similar extreme lack of interest in Gwen's actual kids in "Takes a Chill Pill".
• Child Prodigy: Alone of the Solve-It Squad, they actually did have all the skills needed to be an expert police detective before they even hit puberty. Their childhood was when they peaked — not because they regressed to normal intelligence as they got older, but because they kept getting smarter until the flood of information their brain was feeding them made it impossible to function.
• Commitment Issues: This is a defining feature of Esther's personality (as it is for Lauren Lopez's slightly similar character Emma Perkins from the Hatchetfield series). Back in Biz reveals they even use the language of an undercover intelligence operative to talk about why they never sleep with the same person twice if they can help it, becaues it "establishes a pattern".
• Cop Hater: They have a lot of reasons to dislike law enforcement, which is a source of tension between them and Scrags the FBI agent. Back in Biz elaborates on this being both because of their own criminal past and their political objections to Police Brutality.
• Dark and Troubled Past: They apparently got up to a lot of adventures in the twenty years after the Squad disbanded as kids, which make their teammates' various traumas seem like a wholesome walk in the park. "The Solve-It Squad Just Says No to Drugs!" reveals that they were a high-ranking member of the Russian mob responsible for countless murders.
• Deadpan Snarker: They seem to see this as their new job in the Squad now that they’ve retired from actually using their intelligence to solve mysteries, much to Scrags' disappointment.
• Depraved Bisexual: Despite previously having presented as a stereotypical Butch Lesbian, Back in Biz reveals they are in fact this archetype — although they have mildly misandrist tendencies, gender isn't really a factor in their taste in sex partners, and their sex life very much revolves around shallow pleasure with no concern for love (and no moral qualms about shacking up with evil criminals).
• Despair Event Horizon: The final conversation Esther and Scrags have before the climax of the show is this reveal — Esther's drug addiction isn't just because they can't handle their unique neurological condition, it's because Cluebert's death traumatized them just as badly as it did Scrags, and when the Squad broke up and Scrags, specifically, abandoned them to their own devices, they felt like they’d lost everything and Stopped Caring.
• Erudite Stoner: Ironically, it's Esther (the Velma Expy) who acts like this relative to Scrags (the Shaggy Expy), thanks to Scrags having gone straight since high school and Esther going entirely the opposite direction. (Of course, weed is only the beginning when it comes to the drugs they’re on.)
• Foil: For Gwen in pretty much every respect, but most notably how Gwen is desperate for online and media attention and Esther wants nothing more but to bury their past and go completely Off the Grid.
• Forgettable Character: Gwen and Keith both treat Esther as forgettable — Keith doesn't even remember their last name — which is extra hilariously shitty of them because Esther is The Smart Guy who actually solves all the mysteries. Scrags, fortunately, averts this and considers Esther the most valuable member of the Squad.
• The Friends Who Never Hang: Esther tells Keith to his face that they’ve been avoiding being paired up with him after a Let's Split Up, Gang! for years. They don’t seem to like Gwen much either and don’t show much enthusiasm for Gwen pairing the two of them up as a "Girl Power" duo. Indeed, we get a surprising bit of backstory that when the Solve-It Squad started out as a Beauty, Brains, and Brawn trio of just Gwen, Esther and Keith, it was Esther who invited Scrags and Cluebert to join the team — possibly just so they could have someone they liked better to hang out with.
• The Gadfly: Openly takes on this role whenever tensions start running high among the other Solve-It Squad members, including obviously taking some pleasure in giving Keith a "The Reason You Suck" Speech explaining to him how Gwen's been leading him on for twenty years. After Scrags blows up at Gwen and sends her Running Away to Cry, he turns on Esther asking "Are you happy now?!" only to get a drunken "Hell yeah!"
• Gadget Watches: Young Esther has some kind of special calculator watch on their wrist that they fiddle with whenever they’re thinking about something — including as a terrified nervous tic when the Solve-It Squad come upon Cluebert's corpse. By the time we catch up with Adult Esther, they’ve ditched it, presumably to buy drugs (and because anything it did most people can now do with a regular smartphone.)
• Genius Burnout: Oh yeah. They’re like every exaggerated stereotype of "failed gifted kids" rolled into one.
• Genius Slob: Esther, in spades, even though this is only a trait that developed after their genius burned out and sent them down the Addled Addict path. Even the way they sit down is a slovenly manspread, in direct contrast to Gwen sitting with legs primly crossed right next to them.
• Good Feels Good: A variant on this trope — after Esther finds themselves Going Cold Turkey because Scrags stole their drugs, they find that the "braingasm" they get from their drug-free brain having a real mystery to solve for the first time in ages puts any drug-induced euphoria to shame, and they grudgingly agree with Scrags that it'd be better both for them and the world to be chasing that high — with the rest of the Squad's support — instead.
• Gosh Darn It to Heck!: They use both Velma's original "Jinkies!" and a Borrowed Catchphrase "Jeepers!" from Daphne as minced oaths, though this trait is zig-zagged with them — in the present day, they tell Scrags "You scared the sugar out of me!" instead of "You scared the shit out of me", but have no problem dropping a Cluster F-Bomb in other contexts. (At one point sarcastically correcting themselves from "Those shitlicking asshole feds" to "Those fucking feds" out of respect for Scrags' work.)
• Head-Tiltingly Kinky: "The Solve-It Squad Just Says No to Drugs!" gives us this hilarious revelation about Esther's sexual history.
• He's Back!: The moment they start "jinking all over the place" as their sobriety kicks in at the ending and they solve the entire mystery in a matter of seconds, proving true what they said about being able to put even their teenage self to shame with their adult brain at full power.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: Esther runs into the logical problem with their genius plan to dull their intelligence with drugs and alcohol — it makes their intelligence too dull to stop a non-genius like Scrags from sabotaging that very plan. Once they’re well and truly drunk on their 20-pack of beers, Scrags has no problem going right under their nose to steal their drug stash and replace the pills with placebos.
• Hollywood Hacking: Either they’ve gained enough respect as a Kid Detective in middle school to have institutions just go ahead and pull bank and medical records for them during an investigation, or more likely they were obtaining them illegally via this. Having Hollywood Hacking abilities would also explain how they’ve been so successful at going Off the Grid and no one's busted them for their drug violations before Scrags finds them.
  • "The Solve-It Squad Cashes Out!" reveals that, yes, this very much is one of Esther's skills, to the extent that they're able to casually subvert the cybersecurity of a major tech company within minutes and give themselves a loyal army of combat drones that serves as their ace in the hole for the rest of the episode.
• Hollywood Homely: A rare example of this for Lauren Lopez; Esther's flat, nasal voice, their unflattering baggy clothes, and their makeupless face are all meant to make them a foil to Gwen and to be superficially unappealing. Fans find them the most appealing character in the show anyway.
• Homeless Hero: "The Solve-It Squad Cashes Out!" reveals that the convoluted Trauma Conga Line of Esther's life has caused them to recently lose whatever housing situation they were eking out in Mayberry, reducing them to sleeping on the floor of the Solve-It Squad treehouse and using the wastebasket as a toilet. (This isn't a new situation for them; their memories in "The Solve-It Squad Just Says No to Drugs!" reveals they were homeless when they first got their job as the "Costco sample lady" and were secretly sleeping in the store, and it's strongly implied their "hideout" in The Solve-It Squad Returns! wasn't a legitimate residence.)
• I Just Want to Be Normal: When Scrags meets them at the beginning, they’re insistent that they want no more of the adventuring Kid Detective life, and that their greatest achievement was dulling their brain with narcotics enough that they can hold down a 9-to-5 job as the "sample lady at Costco".
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: "The Solve-It Squad Just Says No to Drugs!" takes us inside Esther's drug-addled, shattered psyche, representing it as a surreal landscape a la Inside Out where a whole population of various personae (that all look exactly like the real Esther) struggle to keep the machinery of Esther's mind operational.
• Keet: Young Esther was this, with their childish outfit, their chirpy high-pitched voice and their unshakable confidence and enthusiasm for solving crimes. Adult Esther is a major contrast.
• Kavorka Man: Esther is deliberately played so that most people would find them a mousy, creepy and easily overlooked weirdo with nothing sexually interesting about them, and that's how people treat them in the original play. It turns out their Cool Teacher Mr. Farmer has been nursing a crush on them since they were in high school, and that brutal Russian mob kingpin Dimitri Orlov and his glamorous trophy wife Annika are so sexually addicted to them they're willing to lay waste to the town of Mayberry to get her back.
• Lazy Bum: Esther's apartment is a pigsty and they’re working a menial makework job to pay the bills, they spend most of their time slouched in their seat or literally passed out on the floor, and they openly refuse to put more than a tiny fraction of the effort Scrags knows they’re capable of into solving the mystery. Scrags is openly aghast when they reveal they didn't even bring a notebook to write down clues with, at which point they snap at him that he's not their teacher and they’re not a kid in school. (Later, when the drugs wear off, it turns out they never needed a notebook, and once their mind is working at full capacity, their memory is photographic.)
• Line-of-Sight Name: Keith guessing Esther's last name was improvised every night, by Gabe Greenspan just naming random objects he saw in the front row of the audience, followed by the punchline of Esther muttering "Lucky guess". The "canon" last name from the YouTube performance, "Esther Backpack-Blueglasses", is fortunately something we can headcanon as him remembering objects they were associated with as a kid in-universe. (Esther is never seen carrying a backpack, but their glasses do have blue plastic rims.)
• Medicate the Medium: Esther's abilities aren't actually supernatural, but their mind is enough of an unrealistic overclocked supercomputer that this trope might as well be in play.
• Medication Tampering: Few doctors would be okay with using the term "medication", but Scrags replacing Esther's drug stash with placebos is a positively-intentioned version of this trope, essentially forcing Esther to go cold turkey without realizing it.
• Morning Routine: Esther's version of this, set to "Ants Marching" by the Dave Matthews Band, is a hilarious combination of Lauren Lopez's excellent work with pantomime and pure Black Comedy — showing us Esther rolling off of their filthy mattress surrounded by pill bottles first thing in the morning and listlessly chugging a whole can of Wild Turkey in one gulp, wiping their mouth and snorting a line of crystal meth that takes up the whole length of the stage, and happily preparing to shoot up their first 8-ball of heroin for the day before Scrags interrupts them.
• Motor Mouth: Whenever their brain is working at full speed, as though their spoken words can barely keep up with their thoughts.
• My Skull Runneth Over: Esther gives a very vivid monologue about how torturous their existence is and how their particular version of Super-Intelligence is Blessed with Suck and makes it impossible for them to accomplish simple tasks and live a normal life, because they can't at all control the flow of thoughts that starts spewing through their mind in response to any random unpredictable trigger. A lot of the fandom who've suffered in the past from untreated ADHD — or other disorders that involve lack of executive function due to "overload", like anxiety or PTSD — have latched onto this monologue as Truth in Television.
• Noodle Incident: "The Solve-It Squad Just Says No to Drugs!" reveals Esther's convoluted backstory is absolutely littered with these, almost none of which they've deigned to share with the rest of the Solve-It Squad. They have a long Rolodex of friends, acquaintances and contacts the Squad has never met, and they've apparently lived all over the world.
• Non-Action Snarker: A female (later retconned to non-binary) variant of this trope, that fits The Smart Guy role better than The Heart. They may be a smug know-it-all, but Esther was also always a tiny person who wasn't terribly physically capable — even before invoking their Achilles' Heel of losing their glasses or contacts — and in the present day, their hacking cough during the Chase Scene shows their years of smoking various substances haven't done much for their athleticism.
• The Not-Love Interest: In direct contrast to Keith and Gwen, there isn't any overt physical sexual tension between Scrags and Esther, and the two of them being together initially just seems like Pair the Spares, but they do get some moments of raw emotional vulnerability with each other, with Scrags revealing Esther was the one who initially invited him and Cluebert to join the Squad and his one consoling thought about Putting the Band Back Together was "at least Esther will be there" — and Esther, for their part, revealing that it was Scrags abandoning them that sent them into their downward spiral. A lot of fans either ship them as a slow-burn unlikely-romance or as platonic True Companions.
• Not-So-Badass Longcoat: Esther's beat-up, baggy raincoat that they clearly mostly use to smuggle drugs from place to place.
• Off the Grid: Scrags has to use all of the FBI resources available to him to eventually track her down — both because they want nothing more than to completely forget their past with the Solve-It Squad and because in their new life, they’re in pretty deep with the drug trade. Even when they agrees to rejoin the Solve-It Squad, they avoid having her face in any of Gwen's photos because they’re "trying to stay off the cloud". The way Scrags delicately refers to their "little hideout" and the way he just walks in without having to knock or be buzzed in implies their little "apartment" may not even be a legitimate residence, as opposed to them sleeping rough in a room in an abandoned building where they’re stealing electricity and water.
  • Back in Biz shows us a little more of the extent of this — Esther apparently keeps all their money in Bitcoin rather than keeping a bank account, for instance — and eventually reveals just how much Esther has to fear from the law — they're not just involved in the drug trade, they were once the right-hand enforcer and lover of a notorious kingpin from The Mafiya.
• Off the Wagon: Back in Biz reveals that after the wholesome ending of Returns saying they were going on the wagon, they went back off it almost immediately (just on a different cocktail of drugs that enables them to solve a case without collapsing).
• Overly Long Name: Part of the Line-of-Sight Name joke above is that Keith makes Esther's name too long — as though realizing the first word he picked doesn't sound like a name at all and hoping adding other words to it will fix it — only, of course, for it to turn out it really was their name after all. Possibly their mom's name was "Backpack" and their dad's name was "Blueglasses".
• Pair the Smart Ones: Scrags and Esther are obviously the two smarter members of the Squad, which is why many fans ship them; as far as what happens onstage, Scrags was pretty clearly looking forward to hanging out with Esther over the other two, whose intelligence he deeply admires and respects, and is clearly disappointed and pissed off they’re now an Addled Addict who won't give him the time of day. The big reveal that this is because they’ve actually been nursing the pain from his abandonment for twenty years seems to wound him deeply, before the duo are interrupted by the final Chase Scene.
• Properly Paranoid: The huge cocktail of illegal substances they’re on probably gives them a fair dose of irrational paranoia, but their worries about what might happen to them should they get caught with that many illegal drugs on them are probably justified. (And Scrags, as a federal agent, just deciding to use his discretion to ignore all of it is probably Artistic License – Law.)
• Sherlock Scan: Esther's powers are a direct reference to Sherlock, with their initial demonstration to Scrags being a classic example of this trope: Just at first glance, they can identify the district of Dhaka, Bangladesh where his FBI jacket was made in a sweatshop, and from there all they need to do is note certain things about the sizing and wear on the jacket to start drawing a detailed picture of Scrags' professional and personal life (his recent massive weight loss, his alienation from the rest of his department, his ongoing insecurities from high school, etc.) The fact that they need to self-medicate to deal with how their abilities affect their life is probably directly inspired by Sherlock's addiction problems.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: They give a blistering "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Scrags after Scrags gives one to the rest of the Squad, telling him that the "one lesson he should've learned from Cluebert's death" is that "the universe is chaos", and revealing that their current state wasn't totally forced on them by their unique neurological condition, but that Cluebert's death meant they Stopped Caring. The effect of the speech has a surprising effect on Scrags — not convincing him to adopt Esther's Straw Nihilist worldview, but making him realize he wasn't the only one hurt by Cluebert's death, and his turning his back on the rest of the Squad when they needed him most is why they're all so fucked up today.
• The Smart Guy: Of the Five-Man Band, although exaggerated to such a degree that, as they say, they could’ve solved all of their mysteries by themselves in a matter of seconds if not for their crippling physical weaknesses. Scrags considers them the most important former member of the Solve-It Squad to recruit when Putting the Band Back Together, which is why he saves them for last (along with them being the hardest to track down).
• Smurfing: They say, "Where the jink are my jinking glasses?!" as a teenager, and as an adult describe their "braingasm" when they’re returning to sobriety as "I'm jinkin' all over the place!"
• The Sociopath: Along with their other Ambiguous Disorders, Back in Biz cranks their Lack of Empathy and unconcern for laws and morality up to eleven, revealing that they were in fact a high-ranking criminal in The Mafiya at some point during their Dark and Troubled Past, and that they're capable of watching a man plunge to his death right in front of her without any particular reaction. (To be fair, they've just taken a potent designer drug at the time, and he was just sexually harassing them.)
• Spiking the Camera: Esther in particular does this very noticeably when giving The Summation at the beginning, and at the climax of the show does it again, giving their whole Motor Mouth monologue about the solution to the mystery directly out toward the audience (which in theory means they’re just talking directly to the wall of the hotel).
• Straw Nihilist: Esther turns out to be this, having given up on the idea of solving mysteries because "the universe is chaos" and believing it's better to remain ignorant and just live a life of whatever simple, mindless pleasures you can find.
• Stronger with Age: Unlike many gifted kids, Esther's powers didn't actually peak as a child — it seemed like they did, but what actually happened was their ability to glean deductive insights from minor clues grew and grew until they couldn't walk down the street or hold a simple conversation without being overwhelmed. They tell Scrags that if they tried to solve the Case of the Hairless Werewolf today — their crowning achievement as a child, which they wrapped up in less than a day — they could do it in "two seconds".
• Stunned Silence: When Scrags sees Esther and their apartment, he starts to say "You look..." and is unable to finish the sentence.
• Super-Senses: Like a typical exaggeration of the Sherlock Scan trope, Esther carries a portable crime lab everywhere with them inside their brain and five-foot-tall body — among other things they can determine what species a bloodstain came from just from its smell and taste. (Something that would've been Cluebert's specialty before he passed away, that they now have to compensate for.)
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Esther does not vibe with Gwen's Girly Girl femininity at all; they’re far more tomboyish than the original Velma was (who was, after all, still a product of The '60s), and as an adult, never wear skirts, put on makeup or even brush (or possibly even wash) their hair.
• Trash of the Titans: There's only a few scattered objects (Esther's duffel bag and a few vials of pills) to give this impression, but this plus Esther sprawled out on a bench like it's a mattress on the floor plus Lauren Lopez's excellent work with pantomime plus Scrags' facial expression when he sees the place all combine to give the impression that Esther's pad is a truly horrifying disaster area.
• Willfully Weak: Unlike many examples of the "genius addict" trope, their drug addiction serving as a Power Limiter isn't the result of them drowning their sorrows over some other tragedy — it's entirely intentional and a direct result of them finding their Super-Intelligence highly painful and seeing it as ruining their life.

Cluebert

Cluebert

Played by: Joey Richter

"Cluebert, you're the tie that binds us all as one! (You make it so much fun!) Cluebert, we love —"

• Big Eater: Shares this trait along with Scrags, and seems to have been an unhealthy enabler of this behavior in him.
• Big Friendly Dog: We finally get to see the "real" Cluebert in the opening sequence of Back in Biz, and he's one of these (looking more like a St. Bernard than the original Scooby-Doo's Great Dane).
• The Bully: As real as Keith's many flaws are, it seems that Keith mostly became the Butt-Monkey of the group after Cluebert joined and decided to pick on him for them all the time.
• Credits Gag: The curtain call has a gag where Cluebert shows up again on Brian Rosenthal's arm rather than Joey's and solemnly gives a separate bow after everyone else, as though he's the star of the show.
• Cute Little Fangs: A major feature of his character design.
• Dead Animal Warning: The Demonic Apostle gleefully shows Cluebert's dismembered corpse to the Solve-It Squad at the end of the Opening Chorus while cackling his Evil Laugh. It's revealed he's not a real demonic cultist at all, and killing Cluebert was an act of desperation to get the Squad off the case.
• Deadpan Snarker: Part of his job on the Solve-It Squad was to deliver the last zinger after a bad guy gets caught, like when the Fish Monster is revealed to be restaurateur Melanie Butler and his reaction is "I knew when we met her, something was... fishy!" (That's about the level of quality you can expect.)
• The Dividual: He and Scrags were inseparable best friends (thanks to the fact that he's literally a puppet on Scrags' left hand), to the extent that his death left Scrags incapable of functioning.
• Expy: Of Scooby-Doo, although fans who sympathize with Keith argue he's also one for Scrappy-Doo.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: He's not only murdered, but chopped up into pieces and scattered around a pentagram drawn with his blood and viscera and left for the Solve-It Squad to find by his cackling masked killer. No wonder those kids grew up to have issues.
• First-Episode Twist: His death is the basic premise of the show, and is explicitly revealed in most synopses of the show online, but many people who go in cold still find it a surprise.
• Funny Animal: What he is, obviously, with the same issue as in Scooby-Doo that the question of whether supernatural or paranormal events actually happen in this universe is a matter of much discussion but no one seems to notice or care about there being a talking dog.
• Genius Bonus: Only longtime Scooby-Doo fans will probably recognize that "Cluebert" is a reference to Scooby-Doo's full first name, "Scoobert" (which was established by A Pup Named Scooby-Doo).
• Hand Puppet: Is portrayed by one of these on Scrags' left hand, as well as a (dismembered) full-bodied plush doll for his death scene. One of the weird Breaking the Fourth Wall moments of the show is this fact actually getting acknowledged in-universe, with Scrags involuntarily lifting and clenching his left fist as though Cluebert were still on it as a PTSD trigger when reminded of Cluebert's death.
• The Heart: Everyone saw him as this for the Solve-It Squad, the "glue of our gloop", as Scrags ineloquently says, except Keith. The ending makes the case that Keith really was The Heart all along.
• Indirect Kiss: A Funny Background Event during Gwen's verse of the Opening Chorus is Cluebert feeding Scrags popcorn from this mouth. (Which, of course, is also just Scrags eating with his left hand.)
• Kick the Dog: Killed by the Demonic Apostle as a deliberately cruel act to establish him as a Not-So-Harmless Villain. The Reveal in the ending is that all of the demonic animal-sacrifice stuff was an act, and the whole point of killing Cluebert was just to intimidate the Solve-It Squad and try to scare them off the case.
• The Leader: Ends up both being the Mascot and de facto leader of the Solve-It Squad, much to the anger of its actual nominal (human) leader, Keith.
• Meaningful Name: "Cluebert" for a talking dog who becomes famous as a detective. Oddly, it may be a Non-Indicative Name since we're told he wasn't an original member of the Solve-It Squad and Esther only invited him and Scrags to join some time after it was founded (although for all we know he might've been solving mysteries on his own long before then).
• Phrase Catcher: Nearly everything Cluebert says and does gets the rest of the Squad adoringly cooing "Cluebert!", a deliberate contrast with "Jesus Christ, Keith".
• Posthumous Character: He dies at the end of the Opening Chorus, and the show proper is about the human characters seeking to solve and avenge his murder.
• Sacrificial Lamb: Literally killed as an animal sacrifice, and a sign of a shocking Genre Shift from a Kid Detective cartoony comedy to a gritty adult drama.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: As with Shaggy and Scooby in the original franchise. Keith is deeply insecure about how the mystery-solving team he founded gets taken over by the talking dog Esther invited onto it, and Scrags is just as insecure about how he was only originally part of the team because he's technically Cluebert's owner and comes packaged with him.
• Stock Sound Effects: During the scene where Keith involuntarily pops a boner, Cluebert's reaction is the stock sound effect of the original "Scooby-Doo laugh" (recorded by Don Messick for Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!).
• Team Pet: Technically he's owned by Scrags and therefore just came along with Scrags when he joined the Solve-It Squad, but quickly graduated to not only being a full-fledged member of the team but its nominal leader.
• Toxic Friend Influence: A mild example of this to Scrags; he encourages and joins in with Scrags' eating binges and helps him hide this behavior from the other Squadmates, all of which is initially Played for Laughs, just as it was in canon, only for it to turn out this behavior persisted into adulthood for Scrags after Cluebert's death and caused him to develop adult-onset diabetes.
• Tuft of Head Fur: He has a tuft of darker brown hair on his head as though it were human hair.
• Unpopular Popular Character: The whole point of Cluebert's character is that in-universe he was "beloved by all, no matter what", for everyone he knows but Keith. But all we actually see him do onstage is make Incredibly Lame Puns everyone thinks are hilarious because they come from a cute animal, and gratuitously picking on and bullying Keith. The creators have openly said that Cluebert is intended to be an "asshole", and a lot of fans say he reminds them more of Scrappy-Doo than Scooby.
• We Were Your Team: Cluebert's death twenty years ago was the end of the Solve-It Squad (even though he was, technically, only the Team Pet). Very much Truth in Television for the Scooby-Doo franchise, which has never even tried to do a show without the title character. That said, we get a hint of a subversion when Scrags reveals the Solve-It Squad already existed with just Keith, Gwen and Esther before Esther invited him and Cluebert to join. The ending reveals that Keith always hated Cluebert and never thought he was as necessary to the team as he was cracked up to be, and that he finally gets his wish when the Solve-It Squad agrees to reunite as a team without him, even though Scrags insists they keep the same name to honor his memory.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Part of the conflict of the show, where Scrags seems to be the only one who really takes Cluebert's death seriously as the murder of a person, while everyone else sees his death as only the death of a beloved pet (and yet the FBI still has an open file on it for some reason).

Everyone Else (introduced in Returns)

In General

Played by: Brian Rosenthal

• Descended Creator: Brian Rosenthal co-wrote this show with the knowledge that he would be playing "Everyone Else" and has joked about how the gag with the "one-man show" scene is something he wrote without really considering how difficult it would be to pull off as an actor.
• Hyperspace Wardrobe: Brian is able to give this impression in earlier scenes by cleverly layering clothes on top of each other. In his famous scene toward the end of the show where he has to have a conversation among all the hotel employees, he instead hilariously keeps yanking new wigs and hats out of random hiding places in his clothes and shoving them back as fast as he can in order to keep the conversation going.
• Limited Wardrobe: His bottom layer of clothing is a blue shirt and brown pants, that most of the characters end up wearing (if there isn't time to layer something on top).
• Only Six Faces: Among the other reasons it was necessary to have Brian play multiple roles in this show, it was also a sly joke about the somewhat simplistic art style of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! that made most of the characters' faces identical, requiring somewhat over-the-top Wig, Dress, Accent-style design on the rest of the character to make them distinguishable.
• Prop Recycling: There's a lot of it, but most notable is how the same long platinum-blonde wig is used to play Melanie Butler (the Fish Monster in the Opening Chorus), Camille Fitzgerald the owner of the hotel, Stefani the hotel maid (who has it pinned up under her French maid hat to differentiate herself from Camille), and the Beach Bum in Keith's scene (who is a male character and who has the wig tucked under his hat).
  • Professor Baxtresser (the true identity of the Mummy in the Opening Chorus) also wears the same wire-rimmed glasses as Ricky the Concierge, which are different from the glasses Brian wears as Chief O'Brien. Possibly a hint that Ricky is another one of the masked villains.
• The Runt at the End: There's one character outside the Solve-It Squad who isn't played by Brian, Chief O'Brien's secretary played by Lauren Lopez (because it was too early to deploy the joke with Brian rapidly switching roles).
• Surfer Dude: The one of Brian's characters not listed below is a hipster/beach bum in Keith's introductory scene who talks in surfer speak and inadvertently harshly insults Keith by not recognizing him and thinking the famous Solve-It Squad van is a food truck.
• Wig, Dress, Accent: It varies from role to role, but most of the characters Brian plays are — like characters in an improv game — people whose identity needs to be immediately established by giving them a thick accent and a goofy accessory so they can be instantly recognized in future scenes. It ends up being a major challenge of Brian's skills — and ability to not break — to have to play several of them in the same scene as each other.

The Villains

Clyde Buchanan, Harold Pendergast, Melanie Butler, and Professor Baxtresser

"And I'd have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you meddlesome hooligans!

• Actually Pretty Funny: Melanie Butler actually laughs along with Cluebert's quip that he always found her "fishy", right before Keith unceremoniously shoves her offstage.
• Catchphrase Interruptus: Keith is so humiliated by having misidentified the Mummy as Dr. Siebers that when Professor Baxtresser tries to give the "And I'd have gotten away with it..." line Keith interrupts him and shoves him offstage, saying "No one cares, bro".
• City of Adventure: As opposed to the typical Scooby-Doo plot involving Mystery, Inc. Walking the Earth to different Adventure Towns in their Signature Team Transport the Mystery Machine, most of the Solve-It Squad's adventures took place in their hometown of Mayberry, which seems to have an unusually high percentage of petty criminals trying to profit from a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax despite living in the same place as a team of Kid Detectives who specialize in stopping them. This is logical enough for a setting where they're all underage and still in school, like A Pup Named Scooby-Doo and Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated.
• Conspicuous Trenchcoat: Clyde Buchanan wears one as the Werewolf that makes him look extra seedy and suspicious. (It's a side effect of Brian having to wear Clyde's outfit over the other villains' costumes, making it look extra baggy and concealing.)
• Creepy Crossdresser: Harold Pendergast as the Witch, including the squicky detail that Gwen caught him by somehow seeing a noticeable bulge under his billowing robes, which ties into him still being something of a Sissy Villain after being unmasked. (The Stereotype and harm associated with this joke led the TCBs to change this to him being dressed as a "Ghoul" in later stagings.)
• Dirty Old Man: Gwen gives Harold Pendergast a very satisfying slap in the face for being one of these when they were acting in a play together, although to be slightly fair to him he didn't seem to know she was underage before the unmasking.
• Dramatic Unmask: The Opening Chorus has all the Solve-It Squad members do this to one of the villains and get their turn at giving The Summation of how they figured out it was them (except Keith, who brutally fails to do this and identifies the wrong guy).
• Establishing Character Moment: The villains let you know who they are within a single line of dialogue and a Wig, Dress, Accent.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": In classic cartoony Infodump fashion, the Dramatic Unmask comes with the whole Solve-It Squad Speaking In Unison and identifying them not just by full name but full job title, for the benefit of viewers who weren't paying close attention, all in a shocked and aghast tone of voice:
  • "Clyde Buchanan, the town travel agent?!"
  • "Harold Pendergast, famous community theatre actor?!"
  • "Melanie Butler, celebrity chef and restaurateur?!"
  • "Doctor Sie--... sigh, Professor Baxtresser from the museum."
• Fake-Hair Drama: Clyde Buchanan's alopecia is a trait he admits he's "very insecure" about, leading him to keep his signature toupee on even when also wearing a werewolf mask as part of a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax, which is the mistake that gets him caught.
• Genius Bonus: Tartuffe is an appropriate show to name-drop in a Motive Rant about a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax, considering that the show's subtitle is "The Impostor".
• Harmless Villain: Their rubber masks all look ridiculous, none of them actually seriously harm anyone, and they all instantly fold and confess everything when caught. They make a pretty harsh contrast with the Demonic Apostle.
• It's Personal: In a riff on Shaggy and Scooby's motivations in the original franchise, Scrags and Cluebert took the Fish Monster case personally since it was threatening to shut down Aunt Lyla's Famous Fish & Chips Stand, "our fourth favorite lunch spot".
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Mayberry's community theatre scene doesn't seem all that great, if its most famous leading man is as ignorant about theatre as Harold Pendergast — who is introduced quoting Lady Macbeth while holding a skull in the famous pose from Hamlet, and who mispronounces Tartuffe as "Tartuffé".
• Large Ham: Harold Pendergast.
• Monster Mash: As is traditional for Scooby-Doo, all of the villains are pretending to be classic "Halloween monsters" — Clyde Buchanan was a Werewolf, Harold Pendergast was a Wicked Witch (or a "Ghoul" in the revised script), Melanie Butler was a Fish Monster a la the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Professor Baxtresser was a Mummy.
• Motive Rant: They all feel the need to waive their Fifth Amendment rights and start ranting about how and why they committed the crime as soon as they get caught.
• Only in It for the Money: This ends up being the motivation of all of them — Clyde Buchanan's plan isn't spelled out but involved driving tourists away from the Mayberry Gardens YMCA to boost his travel agency business, Harold Pendergast was covering up his theft of antique costumes that were far more valuable than the theatre realized thanks to having real diamonds sewn into them, Melanie Butler was trying to shut down Aunt Lyla's Famous Fish & Chips Stand so she could build one of her seafood buffets over it, and Professor Baxtresser was pretending to be a resurrected Mummy from the history wing of the museum to distract people from the valuable tools disappearing from the museum's science center.
• Pretentious Pronunciation: Harold Pendergast reveals what a Know-Nothing Know-It-All he is by pronouncing Tartuffe as "Tartuffé", which is bizarre considering he's not only supposed to be a famous actor well-versed in the theatre but he's mispronouncing the name of the show his theatre is about to perform next spring. A more toned-down and realistic example is Very British Upper-Class Twit Melanie Butler pronouncing "buffet" as a fully French word, with a long U ("boofay").
• "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: Naturally, not a single one of them was ever a truly supernatural monster.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Our very first indication this is an adult show and not an actual children's cartoon is Clyde Buchanan angrily calling Esther "you little shit".
• The Smurfette Principle: The only one of the villains in the Opening Chorus to turn out to be a woman is the Fish Monster, played by Melanie Butler (i.e. Brian in a long blonde wig), who ironically was not the monster presenting itself as a woman (the Witch played by Harold Pendergast).
• Take Our Word for It: Obviously all of the disguises worn by the villains must be more elaborate than the rubber masks we see onstage. (We're even specifically told the Witch was wearing billowing robes, rather than the tiny cape Brian wears when we see her.) This is played with with the Mummy, where all we see is Keith "unwrapping" the Mummy off stage left by pulling a seemingly endless linen bandage hand-over-hand until he finally reveals the last bit of the bandage stuck in the coat of a completely normal-looking Professor Baxtresser.
• Tuckerization: The joke with "Dr. Siebers" and "Professor Baxtresser" is a reference to TalkFine, the musical duo consisting of Clark Baxtresser and Pierce Siebers that's worked with Tin Can Brothers and Team Starkid for years.
• The Un-Twist: Unlike the other cases, pretty much everyone has already figured the Mummy must be Professor Baxtresser from the museum before he gets caught. Keith insists they're jumping to conclusions and the real answer is the non-obvious suspect, Dr. Siebers the veterinarian. They're right and he's wrong.
• Upper-Class Twit: Harold Pendergast and Melanie Butler, although with Harold it seems to be an affectation whereas Melanie actually is wealthy and famous. This ties into Melanie actually being played as a Fake Brit while Brian gives Harold a horrible "trans-Atlantic" accent.
• You Meddling Kids: They all riff on this famous phrase but never actually say it accurately; Clyde Buchanan says "you meddlesome hooligans", Harold Pendergast says "you nosy nitwits", Melanie Butler says "you foolish brats", and Professor Baxtresser gets shoved offstage before he can finish the sentence.

The Demonic Apostle

The Demonic Apostle

"MWA-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"

• Bait-and-Switch: Shows up as the first truly disturbed, evil villain who breaks the pattern of the Solve-It Squad only facing lame "Scooby-Doo" Hoax villains Only in It for the Money. Then it turns out he wasn't — he really was just another asshole Only in It for the Money and predictably, his cartoonish Hollywood Satanism was just him getting carried away and taking the hoax too far.
• Blade Enthusiast: The original Demonic Apostle was very fond of his expensive, authentic ritual sacrificial dagger he used to kill Cluebert. The fact that the current Apostle's knife turns out to be a chintzy mass-produced mail-order prop incapable of actually stabbing anybody is our first major sign that it may be a Jack the Ripoff.
• Big Bad Friend: The primary current Demonic Apostle turns out to be Keith, of all people, engineering this case just to have an excuse for Putting the Band Back Together. Also applies to the original Apostle, who in "Scooby-Doo" Hoax tradition turned out to be someone close to the original victim — the Apostle was the hotel owner's brother, terrorizing the grounds so he could scoop up the land for a cheap price.
• Collective Identity: There are three people who've donned the mask of the Demonic Apostle: The original, who was the brother of the owner of the Mayberry Gardens Motel and Spa and just trying to pull a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax, Keith, who took up the Apostle's legacy after accidentally killing the first one, and Ricky the concierge, whom Keith hired as an accomplice so the Apostle could stay active while he was with the Squad.
• Cool Mask: His shiny metallic green fright mask is a great deal more intimidating than the rubber masks worn by the previous villains.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: One of his signature shticks is drawing Geometric Magic patterns onto walls in blood from his victims. Esther spends some time trying to figure out if there's any significance to the current Demonic Apostle switching from drawing a five-pointed to a six-pointed star on the walls, and muses that it could just be that he's a sloppy copycat killer without any of the original's sense of authenticity when it comes to Hollywood Satanism.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Doesn't just kill the Solve-It Squad's adorable Team Pet but chops him into pieces in order to deliberately terrify and traumatize them.
• Drone of Dread: His initial appearance in the first scene is accompanied with this sound effect, which does a lot to make his Evil Laugh more unsettling than it would be on its own.
• Even Evil Has Standards: As much as the Demonic Apostle evokes the image of a Hollywood Satanism-style Serial Killer from a movie, it's worth pointing out he's still never actually killed a human being. (Whether killing Cluebert counts as "murder" is left up in the air by most characters, including Scrags' superiors at the FBI.) It turns out that for the original Apostle even killing Cluebert was a My God, What Have I Done? moment, and his disappearance after Cluebert's death was due to a pang of conscience making him give up his plan rather than anything more sinister.
• Evil Laugh: He has a signature one, which is after all still just Brian Rosenthal hamming it up but does come across as a lot more intimidating when he's holding Cluebert's dismembered corpse.
• Faked Kidnapping: Keith has Ricky the concierge dress up as the Apostle to kidnap him so he can give the Case of the Demonic Apostle a rousing traditional climax. Notably he makes himself the damsel-in-distress in this scenario rather than Gwen, so he can put on the robes himself and pull off the Apostle's Offscreen Teleportation tricks, and because he actually cares about Gwen and doesn't seem to trust Ricky with manhandling her.
• Hollywood Satanism: Indulges shamelessly in this trope, making a ritual animal sacrifice of Cluebert and painting a bloody pentagram on the walls with his remains, spreading rumors that he's terrorizing the town of Mayberry as part of a campaign to grant himself supernatural powers by summoning demons. This all turns out to just be another "Scooby-Doo" Hoax where the original Apostle was leaning on Hollywood tropes to scare his brother into selling his hotel business, and just got carried away and took it too far. And the current Apostle is just doing an even cheesier Jack the Ripoff of the original's shtick.
• Idiosyncratic Wipes: In the YouTube version of the show his first appearance is heralded by a terrifying glitchy extreme close-up superimposition of his mask over the entire screen.
• Inside Job: The Solve-It Squad decides pretty quickly that the Demonic Apostle must be someone familiar with the Mayberry Gardens hotel, probably a member of the staff, in order to be able to spend so much time haunting the halls without being caught. This is reinforced by the reveal of the hotel's Secret Underground Passage that explains his ability to disappear and reappear at will. It turns out that the original Demonic Apostle knew the grounds so well because he was the brother of the hotel's then-owner. The current Demonic Apostle is a joint project between Ricky the concierge, the most senior member of the staff with the most knowledge of the grounds, and Keith, who's just basing his shtick on the original Demonic Apostle's Deathbed Confession.
• Jack the Ripoff: The inconsistencies between the latest appearances of the Demonic Apostle and his original reign of terror 20 years ago leads Esther to posit this isn't Cluebert's killer at all but some kind of copycat — a suggestion Scrags angrily dismisses out of hand. Esther is, as usual, right.
• Kick the Dog: Well, bloodily murder and dismember the dog, for no obvious reason than For the Evulz and to propitiate evil entities. Turns out it was an intentional moment of crossing the line in order to try to scare the Solve-It Squad off the case.
• Kill and Replace: A particularly twisted Insane Troll Logic example — Keith's whole motivation for becoming the Demonic Apostle was the fact that he killed the original Demonic Apostle by accident, and realized this Kill Steal would prevent Scrags from ever getting the closure over Cluebert's death he wanted and came up with this bizarre scheme to try to make it up to him.
• Knight of Cerebus: The Case of the Demonic Apostle ended the original incarnation of the Solve-It Squad and sent them spiralling from being a cutesy Kid Detective team into a crew of messed-up, traumatized adults dealing with gritty adult problems.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: People whisper that his longevity, his ability to go this long without getting caught and his strange abilities like Offscreen Teleportation might be because his sacrifices to malignant entities actually did grant him magic powers. This is bullshit, of course, and all of these are explained simply by the hotel having a Secret Underground Passage and the Apostle being more than one person.
• Only in It for the Money: Despite supposedly being a villain designed to break this pattern, the Demonic Apostle turns out to just be another money-driven petty criminal like all the rest — the original Apostle having carried out his reign of terror just to try to steal his brother's business, and Ricky the concierge only agreeing to play the Apostle because Keith was paying him off with enough money to buy an engagement ring for Beth. The only Demonic Apostle who had non-monetary motivations was Keith, a good guy who was posing as the Apostle out of a twisted form of altruism.
• Prop Recycling: The robe and hood (both sets of them) worn by the Demonic Apostle is recycled from the robes and hoods worn by the cultists in the opening of the Tin Can Brothers' first short film, Flop Stoppers.
• Retired Monster: It turns out the reason the original Demonic Apostle disappeared after killing Cluebert was that he himself got freaked out by how far he took his scheme and ended up giving up on his evil plan after that. Keith hitting him with his van was a total coincidence that he mistook for long-delayed vengeance, leading to his Deathbed Confession.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The Solve-It Squad's revenge against the original Demonic Apostle for killing Cluebert happened completely by accident — what the Apostle thought was long-delayed vengeance was just a random DUI.
• Subverted Trope: Even as horrific a crime as torturing an animal to death is more likely, in Real Life, to just be some asshole taking a prank way too far than it is to be a sign of a genuine Satanic conspiracy or someone who will actually go all the way to being a Serial Killer of human beings.
• Take Our Word for It: The show does let us see the original death of Cluebert in all its bloody, visceral glory, but the new Demonic Apostle's copycat bloody pentagram (well, hexagram) is conveniently painted on the invisible fourth wall of the hotel's sauna.
• That One Case: The Case of the Demonic Apostle is the case that broke up the Solve-It Squad, and the one that still haunts Scrags 20 years later, well into his career as a heroic FBI agent.
• Two Dun It: The explanation for the Apostle's Offscreen Teleportation abilities during the Scooby-Dooby Doors chase sequence turns not to be that his grotesque animal sacrifices have actually granted him magic powers, but that he's actually two people.
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: The Demonic Apostle is a hugely exaggerated version of this trope, taking a cutesy low-stakes children's cartoon into R-rated territory with the graphic death and dismemberment of beloved Team Pet Cluebert.
• The Voiceless: Never actually speaks onstage, instead only making his raspy noises and his Evil Laugh, so as to disguise his identity. Which is a bit of funny fourth-wall humor since whoever he is, his voice would sound like Brian Rosenthal. Which is then subverted by the ending.
• Walking Spoiler: The Apostle's true identity is the spoiler the whole whodunit plot of this show revolves around.

Chief O'Brien

Chief O'Brien

"You're kind of bumming out the rest of the FBI."

• Adaptation Dye-Job: The off-Broadway production added a ginger wig to Chief O'Brien's costume just to round out the Oireland stereotype.
• Artistic License, Government: The FBI hasn't used the title "chief" as a rank in decades; the term for the leader of an FBI regional field office is a "special-agent-in-charge (SAC)".
• Big Eater: It slowly transpires that despite his Blatant Lies on the topic he's actually taken all four of the corner pieces from Mulligan's retirement sheet-cake for himself. (This is something that Scrags, whom we find out has put himself on a strict diet to control his adult-onset diabetes, doesn't really appreciate being shoved in his face.)
• Expy: To a certain extent he's this specifically for Chief O'Hara from Batman (1966) (as paid homage to in Team Starkid's Holy Musical B@man!).
• Officer O'Hara: Somehow this 21st-century FBI leader has the goofy immigrant accent and laid-back demeanor of a stereotypical Irish local cop from a 1950s sitcom.
• Pointy-Haired Boss: Scrags is extremely frustrated with how Chief O'Brien seems more interested in "team-building activities", i.e. stuffing his face with cake from office parties, than actually doing the work to solve cases — although O'Brien reasonably points out that socializing and building bonds with your coworkers is an important part of the job for most people and Scrags' single-minded workaholism is deeply unhealthy and unsustainable.
• Speaks in Shout-Outs: It turns out all of Chief O'Brien's meandering personal anecdotes he uses to try to cheer Scrags up are just him quoting the plots of movies about dogs, and he's making a game out of making them more outlandish as he goes (culminating in him trying to pass off Air Bud as something that really happened).

Gas Station Attendant

Gas Station Attendant

"JIIIIIIIIIIZZ!"

• Bait-and-Switch: Despite his rough-hewn mannerisms and lower-class accent, is highly fastidious about cleanliness and hospitality when it comes to staying at hotels, and turns out to be a gay man with a boyfriend.
• Breakout Character: Has a pretty big tongue-in-cheek fandom, including coming up surprisingly high in the tournament bracket of Solve-It Squad characters Brian Rosenthal made online (a #2 seed next to Esther's #1). A big part of this is people calling him a "gay icon" along with his unseen partner Andrew just because his being gay is so unexpected.
• Creepy Gas-Station Attendant: The whole joke of this character is a Bait-and-Switch where he seems like this stereotype, only to turn out to simply be warning the Solve-It Squad about the poor quality of the Mayberry Gardens hotel.
• The Ghost: His partner (both business and romantic) Andrew, who shows up as a Continuity Nod (played by Jon Matteson) in Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye.
• Large Ham: "JIIIIIIIZZZ!" is one of the most memorable laugh lines of any Tin Can Brothers show.
• Shared Universe: Artemis and Paul from Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye show up at this same gas station and meet this guy's partner Andrew, creating the beginnings of a "Tin Can Brothers Cinematic Universe" (although if this is canon it constitutes a Retcon that Mayberry is in central California, near Connor Creek, rather than in "Middle America" as the original script states).
• Straight Gay: Played for Laughs — as soon as we find out he's gay we find out he's a lot more appreciative of the finer things in life than we'd been let to believe.

The Mayberry Gardens Motel and Spa

Marvin the Valet, Cole the Bellhop, Ricky the Concierge, Stefani the Maid, Camille Fitzgerald the Owner, and Beth

"The witching hour is almost upon us, and we must take care of our guests."

• Beneath Notice: Scrags is incensed that he has to be the one to tell Esther — they of the near-superhuman Sherlock Scan — to actually pay attention to the staff as suspects instead of simply ignoring them in her drug-addled state.
• Betty and Veronica: In theory, Ricky's girlfriend Beth is his Betty (and even has a similar name to "Betty") and exotic Italian maid Stefani is his Veronica. However, the fact that Stefani barely speaks any English at all makes any relationship between her and Ricky dubious. It turns out this was just Cole making up gossip to keep himself out of trouble.
• Big Damn Kiss: Ricky and Beth's post-Wacky Marriage Proposal kiss in the ending. Brian Rosenthal manages to give one to himself, by pulling off Beth's wig and putting on Ricky's glasses while still holding the wig, then making out with the imaginary face still under it.
• British Stuffiness: Ricky, an inexplicable Fake Brit in a Middle American setting, who seems to look down his nose at all the other staff members and the guests.
• Cliché Storm: All of the staff members are instantly characterized as a Stock Character of one kind or another, in true Hanna-Barbera animation tradition.
• Closed Circle: Unlike a more typical establishment, the Mayberry Gardens is apparently isolated enough that all of its remaining staff members live in on-site accommodations rather than going home at the end of their shift — thus conveniently making all of them suspects for the Demonic Apostle's late-night attacks.
• Coy, Girlish Flirt Pose: Camille does this pretty shamelessly around Keith.
• Deconstructed Trope: In a bit of a riff on how overconfident whodunit stories like these are about their chains of logic, Cole's bold certainty that the mono outbreak proves Ricky was cheating on Beth is just false — it's pretty easy for a disease like mono to spread among coworkers in close quarters without the need for any kissing and sex, despite mono's nickname as "the kissing disease".
• The Ditz: Cole is a male example. To a lesser extent, Camille, though she only really acts this way around Keith.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Part of Camille's flirtation with Keith is taking the ring he wears as a pendant around his neck and coyly sticking her finger through it.
• Dumb Blonde: Camille has shades of this, with a certain degree of flightiness and her naive, starstruck crush on Keith.
• Easily Forgiven: Camille's sense of betrayal that her childhood hero was willing to almost destroy her business and ruin her livelihood for selfish reasons doesn't actually seem to reduce her attraction to Keith at all, since it just intensifies her view of him as some kind of Magnificent Bastard.
• Economy Cast: The Mayberry Gardens apparently has exactly one person doing each job title at the hotel. Not that far-fetched, since an "economy staff" of this kind may be Truth in Television for a struggling small business, like a hotel that barely has any guests. In particular, Ricky the concierge is stuck doing jobs that would be below his pay grade at a properly staffed hotel, like personally serving as the waiter and bartender at the hotel's restaurant, which may contribute to his general bad attitude and willingness to take a bribe from Keith to sabotage the business.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Played for Laughs. None of the Solve-It Squad particularly seem to care if the hotel's business will recover, if Ricky will get fired or go to prison, etc. after the mystery is solved. Keith seems happy to end on the high note of Ricky and Beth getting married.
• Ethnic Menial Labor: Stefani the maid is an Italian immigrant (and apparently the only housekeeping staff the hotel employs), who seems to have a very shaky grasp of English and doesn't get that by cleaning up a crime scene she's destroying evidence.
• Fangirl: Camille has been one for the Solve-It Squad and their "leader" Keith since her childhood, when the Squad "helped her father out of a pickle" (in the Case of the People-Eating Pickle).
  • Part of the joke here is that, despite Esther having always been the one to do most of the actual solving of the Solve-It Squad's cases, Solve-It Squad fangirl Camille doesn't even recognize Esther or know their name. True, Esther has been deliberately trying to stay Off the Grid and forgotten for the past twenty years, but it's still obviously part of why Esther finds Camille so irritating.
• Gossipy Hens: Cole the bellhop is this trope to a T, despite being male. It does come off as him constantly throwing his coworkers under the bus to protect himself, but it's a clearly ingrained enough aspect of his personality that Esther dismisses the possibility he's the Demonic Apostle because he'd never, ever be able to keep it secret.
• Grumpy Old Man: Marvin.
• Hair-Contrast Duo: The purported Love Triangle Ricky the concierge is caught in is between Stefani, an Italian immigrant with straight blonde hair, and his girlfriend Beth, an all-American Girl Next Door with curly black hair.
• Hell Hotel: The Mayberry Gardens Motel and Spa is a classic one, complete with Stock Sound Effects like an extremely creaky door that seems to take an extremely long time to open. Of course, most of its decay can be attributed to the Demonic Apostle attacks driving their customers away and starving the business of revenue. Although the fact that the hotel always had a secret passage leading to the honeymoon suite indicates the original owner may have been up to something shady even before his brother tried to scam him out of the property.
• Implied Death Threat: All of the hotel staff members seem prone to doing this to the Solve-It Squad, complete with Dramatic Thunder — even seemingly friendly hotel owner Camille Fitzgerald makes an ominous statement about "having to take care of our guests" while they're offstage. This is, of course, a classic Running Gag in a whodunit spoof. Most of the staff were just innocently putting their foot in their mouths, although Ricky the concierge actually was Keith's accomplice and may have been acting sinister on purpose under Keith's orders.
• Incurable Cough of Death: As if all the other sinister goings-on weren't bad enough, there's a mysterious illness spreading through the hotel staff giving them an ominous hacking cough. Subverted — there is no supernatural curse on the hotel and the mysterious illness really is just mono.
• Jerkass: Cole the bellhop, who shamelessly talks shit about the other employees to the guests and the guests to the other employees, and who carelessly coughs directly in Scrags' face right after telling him he was sick with a "nasty virus" (which hits a lot harder for those watching during the COVID-19 Pandemic). The fact that he tried to frame Ricky the concierge as a cheater to his girlfriend and destroy his relationship with her makes him the most unsympathetic member of the hotel staff, even knowing the fact that Ricky is Keith's accomplice as the Demonic Apostle.
• Large Ham: All of the staff members' performances are hilariously over-the-top, but Ricky's ominous description of his encounter with the Demonic Apostle especially so. It's on purpose, since he is one of the people posing as the Apostle and Keith paid him to make the Apostle sound as scary as he could. But he turns out to be even hammier when he reveals his real motivations and proposes to Beth — a romantic encounter that ends with him shouting "Away!" as he and Beth run offstage.
• Love Makes You Evil: A hilariously petty example — the reason Ricky helped Keith with his plan to pose as the Demonic Apostle and sabotage his place of employment is so he could get the money for Beth's engagement ring.
• Love Triangle: Cole the bellhop claims Ricky the concierge is caught in a juicy one with his girlfriend Beth and his coworker Stefani. He's lying.
• No Name Given: Only the owner of the hotel is important enough to be given a full name, Camille Fitzgerald. Everyone else is just identified by their first name and job title.
• No-Tell Motel: It seems that the Mayberry Gardens was once a full-fledged hotel and spa, and has now been downgraded to a mere motel thanks to hitting serious financial troubles and being badly short-staffed. It's now faded from its former glories to being the kind of place where you can't really be confident your room has been cleaned of all the... fluids the previous guests may have left there.
• Only in It for the Money: This has always been a staple motive for Solve-It Squad villains, but while Camille Fitzgerald herself might be able to benefit financially from the hotel going under via insurance fraud, it's hard to see how this could benefit any of the employees, all of whom are hurting due to their hours and tips being reduced — leading the Squad to start looking for an It's Personal motivation. It turns out Ricky's motive was money — he was being directly bribed by Keith.
• Pink Means Feminine: Camille sets herself up as Gwen's romantic rival and Foil by matching Gwen's stylish pink coat with a dusky rose-print jacket.
• Prop Recycling: Stefani and Camille wear the same blonde wig, with Stefani's hair being pinned up under her maid's cap and Camille's being loose, although in their big scene when they're onstage "together" Stefani loses the blonde hair, with the maid's cap by itself as Stefani's accessory and the wig as Camille's.
• Quirky Household: The Mayberry Gardens staff certainly qualifies, only intensified by the fact that they're all the same actor.
• Red Herring: Every member of the staff has some suspicion thrown on them at some point in the story. Esther's summation rattles through each of the staff members' possible motive, means and opportunity for committing the crime only to dismiss them one by one. They eventually figure out Ricky was the guilty one, albeit only as Keith's accomplice, by the simple deduction of seeing that Ricky still has the Demonic Apostle's hood sticking out of his pocket.
• Screaming Woman: Camille does this a couple times, including screaming and leaping into Keith's arms at one point just because Esther startles her.
• Service Sector Stereotypes: Part of the joke is the collision of different service sector stereotypes at the Mayberry Gardens, with Camille and Ricky thinking of the motel as a much posher establishment than it actually seems to be (indicating it actually used to be posher and then fell on hard times). Ricky's snobbishness is Foreshadowing the frustrations that led to his Face–Heel Turn.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: Camille hilariously does this to Keith at the climax when he's revealed as the mastermind. Even more hilariously, Beth slaps Ricky when she first thinks he's cheating on her, only to kiss him passionately when it turns out his nefarious deeds were all out of love for her. The way Brian acts out slapping and kissing himself in these two scenes has to be seen to be believed.
• Spell My Name With An S: It's not clear whether the maid's name is spelled "Stephanie" or "Stefani". The captions say "Stephanie", but they're fan-created and don't reflect the official script from the Tin Can Brothers, and the fact that she appears to be an Italian immigrant makes "Stefani" more likely.
• Spin-Offspring: If the Retroactive Legacy of the "original series" of The Solve-It Squad actually existed, Camille would be this — her connection to the Squad is explained as her being the daughter of the main character of the Case of the People-Eating Pickle.
• Unexplained Accent: It's not hugely improbable that a hotel somewhere in small-town "Middle America" could have a bellhop from the South, a concierge from the UK and a maid from Italy, but it is pretty obvious the main reason Cole, Ricky and Stefani have accents is to make it easier to tell them apart from all the other characters.
• Wacky Marriage Proposal: The twist of Ricky's motive for helping Keith with the Demonic Apostle plot — it was all to save up money so he could give his girlfriend Beth a proper engagement ring and wedding, turning the big final confrontation scene into a romantic happily-ever-after between two Bit Characters.
• Wig, Dress, Accent: To a much greater extent than the other side characters, since Brian ends up having to change rapidly from one to the other. The hotel Dress Code is a red vest over blue pants, which Marvin, Cole and Ricky all start out wearing — only distinguished from each other by Marvin and Cole's hats and Ricky's glasses — and in the big confrontation scene all the characters are wearing the same clothes (since Brian has to change from one to the other in seconds) and are only distinguished by a single accessory.
• You Meddling Kids: Ricky the concierge calls the Solve-It Squad "meddlesome kids". Foreshadowing for the fact that he's Keith's accomplice and one of the villains who gets revealed at the end of the show.
• Young and in Charge: Camille is unusually young for someone in her position, as lampshaded by Keith. ("The owner? But you're young and hot!") Possibly because the previous owner of the hotel was willing to dump it at a low price.

Everyone Else (introduced in Back in Biz)

The Solve-It Squad to the (Dog) Rescue!

Doinky

Doinky

Played by: Joey Richter

• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The final straw that makes Scrags decide he can't keep him is that he's a 9/11 Conspiracy Theorist.
• Behavioral Conditioning: The one bit of dog training he's actually absorbed is a particular hand gesture that makes him stop what he's doing and begin licking his genitals. This does, in fact, end up playing a major role in the plot.
• Contrasting Replacement Character: He is an awful pet in all the ways Cluebert was a ridiculously awesome one, with the only thing they have in common being that they're both dogs who can somehow talk.
• Creepy High-Pitched Voice: His wheezy, labored breathing makes it almost impossible to listen to him talk without feeling simultaneously irritated and guilty.
• Gonk: Is a hilariously crudely made puppet in contrast to the original Cluebert one.
• Hand Puppet: Like his predecessor Cluebert, he's just a puppet (in this case, an intentionally sloppy and badly-made one) that Joey Richter wears on his left hand, including a Breaking the Fourth Wall gag where Scrags holds up his bare fist and suddenly realizes Doinky has wandered off.
• Imprinting: He thinks Esther and Scrags are literally his mother and father, much to Esther's disgust.
• The Millstone: Every time it looks like he might be helping the Squad solve the mystery he somehow fucks things up worse than before.
• Replacement Goldfish: Scrags' hilariously futile attempt to get one of these for Cluebert leads him saddled with the worst imaginable dog in the world.
• The Scrappy: Intentionally so, and an homage to the Trope Namer. Deliberately designed to be the most unlikable possible replacement for Cluebert (who already kind of was The Scrappy in the way he was an Unpopular Popular Character out-of-universe).
• Talking Animal: Apparently in the Solve-It Squad universe this is just a particular kind of dog you can ask for at the dog shelter.
• Toilet Humor: One of Doinky's many, many shortcomings as a pet is he apparently isn't housetrained, and is possibly too incontinent to be housetrained.
• Tuckerization: Invented in homage to a dog Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez fostered in Real Life that had a hilariously pathetic, wheezy voice.

Rhoda

Rhoda

Played by: Jiavani Linayao

• Animal Lover: She starts off with a lecture that animals, in her opinion, have more of a soul than most humans... although it turns out she's a hypocrite about this with no scruples about hoarding and selling exotic animals on the Black Market.
• Biblical Motifs: Says she grew up Catholic and of all the characters in the Bible idolized Noah most, calling her animal shelter "Rhoda's Ark."
• Captain Obvious Reveal: The culprit who stole the tiger is the one person we met at the beginning of the episode already established to be in the business of selling animals.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Her weird, meandering stories and her odd behavior match the surreality of her home-run animal shelter.
• Raised by Wolves: Rhoda blames a lot of her eccentricity on the fact that she fell out of her stroller as a baby and ended up being raised by a family of squirrels in an old oak tree for three days before her parents found her, which apparently makes her more comfortable among animals than humans.

Uncle Wyatt

Uncle Wyatt

Played by: Brian Rosenthal

• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: He's Keith's embarrassing uncle (Keith's parents are still offscreen) but otherwise fits this trope to a tee, bringing up Keith's childhood Embarrassing Nickname ("Kiki") and talking about his heartbreak over losing Gwen right in front of her.
• Cool Uncle: Keith sees him as this, although apparently his mother saw him as the Creepy Uncle and banned him from talking to Keith after he tried to take Keith on a trip to poach elephants.
• Evil Poacher: Doesn't have much compunction about killing animals illegally, but even so he's never actually gotten the chance to kill a big cat (and gives us Foreshadowing that some people would pay a lot for the chance to hunt a lion or tiger).
• Expert Consultant: A Lampshade Hanging on a common Police Procedural trope. Keith and Gwen waste the afternoon physically visiting him at his house — dodging traps and giving Keith extra character development and backstory along the way — only to find out he can't actually tell them anything about the tranquilizer dart they couldn't have learned just by going online.
• Great White Hunter: Has a trophy room filled with relics of exotic, endangered animals he spent his life killing for sport.
• The Most Dangerous Game: Makes ominous comments about not having stopped at killing animals back in his glory days.
• Red Herring: In a hilarious bit of realistic twist, he has no connection at all to the case Keith and Gwen are working and he doesn't actually give them any background information they couldn't have found by just doing research online, and the interlude at his house is just a "Shaggy Dog" Story to give more characterization to Keith.
• Sink or Swim Mentor: Taught Keith everything he knows about surviving deadly traps, by putting him in deadly traps since he was a child.
• Trap Master: Is this along with a Crazy Survivalist; casually remarks that his deadly home defenses have taken out their fair share of Amazon delivery guys.

The Solve-It Squad Takes a Chill Pill!

Nicholas

Nicholas Barrywood

Played by: Robert Manion

• The Ace: He's wealthy, handsome, highly intelligent, extremely skilled at his job and tirelessly devoted to Gwen... which is why she's apparently bored with the marriage and beginning to take him for granted.
• Beleaguered Assistant: As both Gwen's husband and her talent agent Nick is this to her, although, realistically, he seems to have an equally beleaguered assistant (Monica) to delegate to.
• Disposable Fiancé: Keith thought Nicholas was going to be the Disposable Husband in this story back at the ending of Returns but he's proven surprisingly difficult to dispose of.
• Henpecked Husband: She doesn't do a lot of direct pecking, as opposed to just neglecting him and making his job harder, but Gwen definitely treats him bafflingly shoddily considering the pedestal he puts her on.
• I Just Want My Beloved to Be Happy: When Nicholas thinks Gwen's divorced him he doesn't even bother to call her to reconsider or call a lawyer and try to fight back — his immediate response is to throw all his energy into willingly removing himself from her life while still trying to protect her career as much as possible before collapsing into Manly Tears hoping she'll be happy with her new beau.
• Manly Tears: Robert Manion was cast as Nicholas because of his hilarious ability to just straddle the line between Manly Tears and Inelegant Blubbering. It'd be easy to call Nicholas' undignified sobbing pathetic if the show didn't keep rubbing in that he has very good reason to be this upset (his Ungrateful Bastard wife dumping him out of the blue followed by the news his children have been kidnapped).
• Significant Double Casting: Apparently Paris' looks almost entirely take after her father.
• Smooth-Talking Talent Agent: The rare completely positively portrayed version of this trope. In what's either a Retcon from his origin where it said he had a wealthy venture capitalist career in Returns or a sign of him having changed jobs to support his wife's career, he's apparently an incredibly tenacious, knowledgeable and charming advocate on Gwen's behalf, providing all the people skills that Gwen shockingly lacks.
• What Does She See in Him?: Other than the fact that she's a hot redhead it's very difficult to see why Nicholas puts up with being married to Gwen.

Paris

Paris Barrywood

Played by: Robert Manion

• Author Appeal: Robert Manion had a huge crush on Wednesday Addams as a child and jumped at the opportunity to play this role.
• Bratty Teenage Daughter: And how.
• Creepy Monotone: Intentionally cultivates one.
• Cross-Cast Role: Played with aplomb by Robert Manion. (Who previously had a discussion with his fans on Twitter about how to play such a role so it's funny for its own sake rather than coming off as the transphobic Creepy Crossdresser trope.)
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Her look, with an incongruous giant bow in her hair like "a goth Jojo Siwa." Word of God is it's dyed.
• From the Mouths of Babes: Somehow baits Scrags into a serious discussion of the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality even though she's eleven and Scrags was just trying to keep her occupied.
• Goth: Pretty much an Expy of Christina Ricci from The Addams Family.
• I See Dead People: Something she seems to be saying just to freak Scrags out, only to have it eerily confirmed a Beat later.
• Hates Their Parent: Her opinion of her mother Gwen is clearly... not high. (Which is why it's so hilariously futile for Keith to try to get in Gwen's good graces by sucking up to Paris.)
• Meaningful Name: Turns out she's named "Paris" because her parents conceived her on their honeymoon. Her brother's name has the same theme but with a less romantic story.
• Significant Double Casting: Word of God is she has Nicholas' face and Gwen's natural red hair — which she dyes black, both as part of her Goth persona and because she hates Gwen.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: She's obviously a lot smarter than Keith and her interactions with him seem to be rooted in a sadistic urge to watch him make a fool of himself.

Cam

Camry Barrywood

Played by: Brian Rosenthal

• Bratty Half-Pint: Like his sister, he's also an extremely tropey "brat" character.
• Meaningful Name: The Reveal that his name is "Camry" and he, like Paris, is named for the location where he was conceived implies he was a Surprise Pregnancy after Gwen and Nicholas spontaneously did in the car one time without birth control.
• Potty Emergency: As is classic tradition for a Babysitting Episode featuring a Bratty Half-Pint, Cam spends a lot of time demanding that Keith find a bathroom for him to use, in a near-constant series of bathroom "emergencies".
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Unlike Paris' Troubling Unchildlike Behavior his defining trait seems to be extremely typical childlike behavior.

The Solve-It Squad Cashes Out!

Tucker

Tucker Bossman

Played by: Darren Criss

• Actor Allusion: Tucker's whole persona is obviously some Self-Deprecation about Darren Criss being the most famous and successful of the actors from Team Starkid.
• Affably Evil: Never loses his breezy, cheerful faux-friendliness and generosity until the very end of the story.
• Always Someone Better: Keith is obsessed with how much more successful Tucker is than him despite them being the same age, and spends the episode trying to find a way to take him down in order to assuage his own insecurities. This seems to be a love/hate relationship partly based on a Broken Pedestal. (See Disproportionate Retribution.)
• Arbitrarily Large Bank Account: He's a harsh Take That! at the excesses of Silicon Valley, doing stuff like casually buying a new car as part of his daily routine just so he's always driving a fresh one.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: He tells the Squad he has "ADHD and a packed sched", which is why he can't take time out for a meeting and instead spends the day doing a Walk and Talk through his various activities. Possibly just a way to blow them off, but possibly may have truth to it, hence his idiotic moment of giving Esther all the info they need to hack his system.
• Card-Carrying Villain: His company is named Corporate Jerks, LLC (with their new gaming divison named Corporate Jocks).
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Tucker is every inch a Take That! at the modern techbro version of this stereotype.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Keith starts off having nothing but love and respect for the work of Tucker Bossman at Corporate Jerks, LLC until they humiliate him over the mix-up over his Kickstarter backer rewards, which was a situation that was completely his fault. But his quest to take them down turns out to be justified in the end because they were up to something shady after all. (It's in the name.)
• Drone Deployer: The Corporate Jerks campus is crawling with hovering servant drones (that also serve as Surveillance Drones) that wait on Tucker hand and foot. Unfortunately for him, Esther's Hollywood Hacking skills quickly turn them against him.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: He seems to be really bad at making up names (another Take That! at Silicon Valley branding), often just naming things with lazy brutal honesty (his company is Corporate Jerks, the new game he's invented is just The Game).
• Freudian Excuse: Keith gives him a blistering "The Reason You Suck" Speech about how all his issues stem from childhood trauma that was apparently accurate enough to bring him to tears.
• His Name Really Is "Barkeep": Apparently his last name really is "Bossman".
• Hypocrite: He is constantly trying to play up what a humble, regular guy he is who doesn't put himself above anyone else — in a way maximally calculated to put himself above everyone else. Literally takes the spotlight at his exercise class to give a speech about how he doesn't want to be in the spotlight.
  • Exaggerated with him portraying himself as environmentally conscious by throwing away his Tesla after one day to buy a fresh one but insisting that the old one be recycled to "combat global warming".
• Is This Thing Still On?: In a classic Scooby-Doo ending moment, he's Hoist by His Own Petard of Sinister Surveillance when Esther uses a drone to broadcast his Evil Gloating to all his customers at the Game launch party.
• Karma Houdini: As the script darkly jokes is Truth in Television, he was clever enough to make sure none of his sinister and manipulative activities were actually illegal, which means that after the Squad exposes him nothing happens and he comes out with a tarnished reputation but all his money and power intact.
• New-Age Retro Hippie: His day of busy corporate executive responsibilities includes a Brand X version of SoulCycle and a meditation class with "Guru Babi Chad".
• New Media Are Evil: He's one giant Take That! at everything wrong with the tech industry of today, especially the manipulative and deceptive way tech companies make their money by turning customers' data into the product.
• Sinister Surveillance: In a Take That! at Google, Amazon, Apple, etc., he's built a wide array of products that all the cool kids these days have integrated into their daily lives, that harvests every single bit of data they can for him to casually use to his own advantage at will.
• Smug Snake: He doesn't really even try to hide his contempt for his customers (or the entire rest of the human race) because he thinks he's above consequences. Unfortunately he turns out to be right.
• Stealing the Credit: Has apparently built up a fake reputation as a Rich Genius for years by doing this whenever possible, and intends to use his Sinister Surveillance technology to continue doing it on a national scale.
• Totally Radical: Uses a lot of made-up slang as part of his Affably Evil approachable-regular-guy act.
• Unknown Rival: Tucker doesn't even know Keith exists until the events of this episode while Keith has been obsessing over him for months.

The Solve-It Squad Just Says No to Drugs!

Mr. Farmer

Wayne Farmer

Played by: Brian Rosenthal

• Abhorrent Admirer: Esther is not pleased to find out his offering them drugs was a ploy to get into their pants, although in hindsight it's kind of a Captain Obvious Reveal.
• Addled Addict: Not to Esther's degree, but he's both The Alcoholic and The Stoner, while on the clock as a public school teacher.
• The Aggressive Drug Dealer: To his middle school students.
• AM/FM Characterization: The script doesn't call for actually playing any songs, but the stage directions describe him as a "Parrothead" as a shorthand way to tell us everything we need to know about him.
• Asshole Victim: He may not have done anything deserving of the death penalty, but there's not a ton of reason to feel bad for him when he has his Surprisingly Sudden splat on the pavement.
• Cool Teacher: Parodied. He seems to see himself as one, but he's actually an Apathetic Teacher bordering on Evil Teacher.
• Corruption of a Minor: Well, he thinks of it as a genuine budding Teacher/Student Romance (and it's been twenty years now since Esther was in middle school), but Esther's reaction to his advances indicates he's never been above this.
• Everyone Has Standards: Even he's kind of shocked when Esther just grabs a pill off him and swallows it without even asking what it's called.
• Hypocritical Humor: He was apparently originally an Ethics teacher.
• I Was Young and Needed the Money: His sordid Dark and Troubled Past includes having done some porn films for money when he was younger that he was "canceled" for. (Which he tries to play off as Gen Z kids today being Culture Police but implies there was something bad in those videos.)
• Mushroom Samba: Dies in the throes of one.
• Phony Degree: Part of the joke about what a Sucky School Mayberry Middle School is is that Mr. Farmer apparently only has a junior college degree.

Principal Turner

Principal Page Turner

Played by: Joanna Sotomura

• Endearingly Dorky: An extremely beloved character as soon as she appeared, especially combining her ingenue earnestness with her hilariously self-centered stark terror at what will happen to her reputation if news of what's been going on at the school gets out.
• The Ingenue: She's adorably innocent and excitable and doesn't at all seem to have the backbone or attitude you'd need to be a public school principal. Her impression of what she thinks someone smoking a joint looks like has to be seen to be believed.
• Nervous Wreck: The stage directions indicate her forced cheerfulness is obviously masking a full-blown panic attack at the fiasco unfolding at the school thanks to the Solve-It Squad's presence.
• Punny Name: "Page Turner", like the lovable teacher from a cutesy after-school special. Her current position implies she may be in a realistic situation of such a character being promoted above their level of competence.
• Putting the "Pal" in Principal: Her philosophy of leadership, which is really being put to the test with the school having to deal with issues like the sudden violent death of a teacher.

Dina

Dina Hutcherson

Played by: Joanna Sotomura

• Contrived Coincidence: Esther grabbing a random paper from Mr. Farmer's desk to find someone to pin his drug ties on ended up connecting them to an actual drug dealer by accident.
• Obnoxious Entitled Housewife: Pretty much just this stereotype... except for her involvement with The Mafiya.
• Shout-Out: Dina's double life as a housewife and a drug dealer turns out to make her one to Weeds.
• Stage Mom: As she says, the entire family has hitched their wagon to Vince's rising star.
• Tattooed Crook: Dina's connection to the Orlov syndicate is revealed by her accidentally showing the eagle-with-a-boner symbol tattooed on her arm.

Vince

Vince Hutcherson

Played by: Brian Rosenthal

• Crossdresser: Seems to have a fixation on roles that let him do this, such as playing Angel in RENT or doing a "Gender Flip Cabaret" where he sings "Defying Gravity" as Elphaba from Wicked.
• Drama Club: The very picture of a self-involved, narcissistic young aspiring actor. Some harsh Self-Deprecation from the Tin Can Brothers.
• The Prima Donna: The middle-school-play version.
• The Scapegoat: His and his mom's involvement in the case is completely fabricated by Esther just to get the Squad off the trail of the Orlov cartel... and just gets them back on it again anyway.
• Serious Business: He's twelve or thirteen years old and has already adopted the opinions and mannerisms of a snobby, gatekeeping Broadway fanatic.
• Spoiled Brat: Has a toxic codependent relationship with his Stage Mom where he gets everything he wants in return for his devotion to a career that revolves around feeding his own ego.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: A lot of the jokes about him involve him acting in plays that have way too mature content for a child his age, like RENT.

The Orlovs

Dimitri and Annika Orlov

Played by: Brian Rosenthal (Dimitri) and Joanna Sotomura (Annika)

• The Caligula: They've gone to a lot of effort and bloodshed in this episode just to repair their ailing sex life.
• The Dividual: Dimitri is the actual boss, but he doesn't seem to do anything without Annika by his side. Especially in this current operation, which involves intimate matters regarding their marriage.
• Famous-Named Foreigner: It's not a terribly uncommon name, but it is slightly distracting that there's a Dmitry Orlov who plays hockey for the Washington Capitals and another whose book Reinventing Collapse went viral during the 2009 financial collapse.
• Head-Tiltingly Kinky: Their relationship involves a lot of BDSM and drugs.
• Hot Consort: Annika is implied to be one to Dimitri, with a massive age gap between them and with her being a stereotypical blonde bombshell, although she's enough of an equal partner in his business to not be a true Trophy Wife.
• The Mafiya: The Orlov crime syndicate takes every Russian mob stereotype up to eleven.
• One True Threesome: In-universe, the Orlovs see the two of them and Esther as this.
• Scarpia Ultimatum: The whole plot of the episode ends up with them kidnapping the rest of the Squad to put Esther in one of these.
• Stalker with a Crush: On Esther. The actual reason they're in Mayberry.
• Torture Technician: Torturing their enemies and their own failed subordinates is their favorite pastime... that doesn't involve sex with Esther.
• You Have Failed Me: They are not forgiving of past associates who've turned on them or even ones who've peacefully tried to leave. Esther thinks they're going to end up on their list of victims, until it turns out their incredible sexual compatibility with them means they have different intentions toward them.