Jon Taffer heads to Council Bluffs, Iowa to help rescue the trailer park-themed bar O'Face. However, once he gets there, he finds himself in a mess that can only be described as one of the series's most iconic and infamous episodes. Many fans who watched it agreed this bar was worse than Amy's Baking Company.
The episode starts with Jon and his mixology expert Russell Davis pulling up to O'Face. Jon Taffer asks what the name means to better inform the audience why the name is so awful. Russell Davis uses the euphemism of "That peak of enjoyment that should only be enjoyed behind closed doors". Jon Taffer tells him he can be upfront and say it's an orgasm. They then proceed to mock the exterior which is just a double trailer. The inside immediately shows all the problems to the audience; the owner's wife - fittingly named Karen - has a bell she rings to get drinks while not doing anything to help. The bartender Dave, while he seems nice enough, is a painfully stupid bartender who turns flair bartending into "flare" bartending, holding fire next to open bottles, giving customers flaming drinks, and even performing a fire-breathing technique despite the low ceiling and nearby fans. The waitress Cerissa has a propensity to drink with customers, but compared to everyone else, she is at least trying to do her job. The bouncer Syck claims to be the eyes and ears of the operation, and, as we would later find out, the brains.
Two recon spies try the bar's O-Gasm shot, which turns out to be terrible. A customer later asks for the same shot, but, not wanting to overdrink, asks Cerissa what's in it. Since management refuses to tell her, Cerissa takes her to Matt, the owner, and asks him. Rather than estimate the alcohol content, he accuses the customer of trying to steal his recipe. Cerissa sticks up for her, and the manager, Amanda, takes her out back and assaults her. Jon exits his van to chew her out and demand the manager fire her - pointing out she's a lawsuit waiting to happen - threatening to not return if they don't follow through. After he leaves, guess who gets fired? Cerissa, after they claim she had it coming. Syck rightfully tells Cerissa they're blowing their only chance to save their business, but for the time being, he has to protect his job, which means he has to escort her off the premises.
The following morning, Jon comes into the bar and is not happy that they fired Cerissa instead of Amanda. Jon threatens to leave the rescue, as the owners failed to do what he asked, but Matt, with much reluctance, decides they have to fire Amanda. Karen isn't happy, but Amanda decides to save them both the trouble and quit. Although Jon returns and manages to bring back Cerissa, the incident has wasted valuable training time, and they are forced to go into the Stress Test cold. The results prove to be disastrous; drinks are not properly made and sent out on time, frozen pizzas are either burned or criticized for being poor in quality, and Karen shows a poor attitude when Jon has to tell her to work instead of sitting at the bar. The worst of these problems, though, is Dave breaking pint glasses in shakers, and they eventually run out. After the Stress Test ends, Jon and Russell make it clear that the staff must get their act together tomorrow and do whatever training they can get for what little time they have left.
Unfortunately, come the next day, Jon finds the staff goofing off instead of getting the bar ready for training and rightfully tells them off. He makes note that he will change the name from O'Face if they get to the remodel, but while Karen promises to keep the changes, neither Jon nor Syck believes her. Then, the staff talks behind Syck's back, believing him to be the real problem of the bar rather than themselves. Syck overhears them and calls them out for trying to throw him under the bus and wasting their one chance with Jon Taffer. A huge argument ensues between the staff in the office, wasting more time and further infuriating Jon and Russell. Eventually, Jon stops the argument and orders them to stop wasting time and train. They do training with Russell, but the latter puts them through a bar scenario in which they all fail, proving how much time was wasted due to the drama.
Meanwhile, Jon, having lost all faith in the rescue being successful, does a business background check of the bar to verify the criminal activity of O'Face. He manages to uncover police reports and news clippings of said incidents and a video that disgusted him. Going back into the bar, Jon shows the staff the video: it features a heated argument between Matt and Dave that results in the former slapping the latter in the face and trying to bribe Syck with a ten-dollar raise to throw Dave through a glass window. Seeing the video was the last straw for Jon, as he now sees Matt and Karen as horrible people who have no sense of running a bar in any way, and he decides to leave O'Face without rescuing the bar, a first in the series.
Episode tropes:
- The Alcoholic: About 90% of the staff are focused on partying and drinking rather than running the bar. Karen is the worst of them all due to having a bell by her seat at the bar that she rang whenever she wanted a shot. And she did it a lot.
- Beyond Redemption: While Jon had very little respect for O'Face, he still spent most of the episode trying to fix the bar. But when he sees a video of Matt assaulting Dave and then trying to bribe Syck to throw Dave through a window, it's clear that he realizes that these people cannot be helped and that he needs to leave before they drag down his reputation as low as their own.
- Brutal Honesty: "Your bar isn't what's wrong. Your character is what's wrong."
- Downer Ending: Jon refuses to rescue O'Face after the multiple atrocities he saw, and, as revealed in a quick return to the bar in the next season, Syck gets fired by Matt for agreeing with Jon's assessments.
- Epic Fail: This is one of the worst staff episodes in Bar Rescue, as barely anything productive was done. And it wasn't Jon's fault that it happened. Besides Syck and Cerissa, every staff member was just that bad.
- The Amanda situation should have been resolved by firing her after the brawl, but Karen fired Cerissa instead because she liked the former better. Jon, who gave Matt and Karen a threat to leave if Amanda was still around, made good on his word, and they reluctantly agreed to fire her just to bring back Jon. All of this wasted time and Jon was forced to do the Stress Test with zero training.
- The Stress Test was the pinnacle of this failure, as drinks failed to be made in a timely manner, frozen pizzas were being burned (and those that did make it to tables were criticized for their poor quality), and Dave kept breaking mixing glasses.
- On top of all this, there was no proper training at all because the staff had no drive or responsibility to prep their items or set up for training. Instead, they wasted time in the back by either goofing off or bickering. So much time was wasted that it led to Russell putting them through a wringer of a training situation where everyone failed.
- Establishing Character Moment: Jon doesn't even make it into the building on the first day, because he has to break up a fight between the manager, Amanda, and one of the employees, Cerissa. He gives them an ultimatum then and there: either Amanda leaves, or he does. They perfectly demonstrate how much they're willing to change for the better - that is, not at all - by instead choosing to fire Cerissa because she's supposedly been "asking for" the beating she received.
- Henpecked Husband: Matt claims Karen has his balls in a jar in her purse. While he is shown to be the worst of the two, he shows true to this claim, as he's entirely subservient to her the whole episode.
- Hypocrite: Karen claims the name O'Face is not offensive, but when Taffer dares her to put her money where her mouth is and show him what O'Face means, she finds it too embarrassing to do.
- Implausible Deniability: Karen insists they're not the type of people Taffer says they are despite him showing them a video of Matt bribing Syck to throw a worker through a glass window. He rightfully has none of it.
- Incompetence, Inc.: The majority of the staff belong nowhere near a bar, let alone running one. Matt is aggressive, has hit his employees, verbally assaults a customer for asking how much alcohol is in his drinks, and tries to bribe a bouncer to throw an employee through a window, and that's not even getting into his actions outside the show. Karen forces the bartenders to serve her more drinks than a bartender can legally serve a customer and promises to undo all of Taffer's changes. Amanda assaults Cerissa, nearly resulting in a lawsuit. A bartender performs a fire-breathing trick in a room with a low ceiling and right by a ceiling fan nonetheless. Besides Syck and Cerissa, everyone else just didn't take their job seriously.
- It Is Beyond Saving: After seeing a video of Matt trying to bribe Syck to throw Dave through a window, Jon realizes that O'Face is fundamentally broken and his efforts will be wasted, and he decides to leave before his reputation becomes tainted through Guilt by Association.
- Know When to Fold Them: After seeing the video and letting out a brutal speech to Matt and Karen, Jon decides to cut his losses and leave without rescuing the bar, saying he will not risk his reputation on them.
- Lazy Bum: Karen would rather sit at the bar and drink than work. She was very pissy when Jon had to tell her to work during the Stress Test.
- Minion with an F in Evil: One of the bartenders Dave is one of the irresponsible employees of O'Face, but not at the same level as Matt, Karen, and Amanda. He's just a guy who has poor skills and reckless use of fire, but he does not share the same malice as the trio. It's best shown when he is shown the video of Matt slapping him, and he admits to Jon he did not like that moment. He also comes off pretty sympathetically in the argument before Jon gives up on them where he is visibly shaken and says he's never been talked to this way in his life.
- Nothing Personal: When escorting Cerissa off the premises, Syck assures Cerissa he's on her side 100% and Amanda should be the one who gets fired, but it is his job to remove her under the owner's orders, and if he doesn't, he could be fired too.
- Only Sane Employee: Two of the more competent employees of O'Face were Syck (who did his job and was the only one that was behind Jon for the criticisms he had towards Matt and Karen), and Cerissa (who did her job better than the bartenders and did ask legitimate questions for the customer's benefit). At one point, Jon called Syck the only trustable person out of the staff. Naturally, the rest of the bar blamed them for their problems, firing Cerissa partway through the episode because she "had it coming" after Amanda picked a fight with her, and letting Syck go after the episode because he sided with Taffer over them.
- Out of Focus: Karen's daughter — and Matt's stepdaughter — Vanessa gets almost no focus in the episode.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: After finding the video of Matt slapping Dave during an argument, Jon lets one out to the owners on how incapable they are of running a bar and letting their reputation sink because of poor practices.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Jon had walked out on owners before when he felt they needed a wake-up call so they could realize the gravity of their situation. O'Face is the first bar he has completely given up on, with the behavior of Matt and Karen being so atrocious that he simply could not wager his reputation on them.
- Sociopathic Soldier: Matt was in the Air Force, and he is an absolute disgrace to it.
- Strictly Formula: Completely stomped flat. O'Face's staff and owners are so hostile and unwilling to change that Jon isn't even able to get in a minute of training — he doesn't even get inside the building on the first day because he has to break up a fight between two employees — and eventually just abandons the bar out of disgust for how the employees act.
- Stupid Evil: Evil in the sense of... well, everything you just read, and stupid in how at most one or two of them seem to even notice a problem without it being pointed out to them, who are promptly punished for it.
- Time-Passes Montage: When the staff has a massive argument in the back room instead of training, the scene cuts to multiple shots of the day going by without any training done. It also includes Jon and Russell looking irritated at how much time is wasted.
- Tranquil Fury: By the end of the episode, Jon and Russell are so fed up with the staff that their attitudes are this. Russell expresses this by putting the staff through the wringer in a "training" that makes everyone look like fools. Jon expresses his in "The Reason You Suck" Speech above (although he does let his voice get higher when screaming at Matt for the face slap he saw).
- Wacky Parent, Serious Child: Matt and Karen, to put it lightly, are immoral, self-centered, and just flat-out iniquitous. While Vanessa is Out of Focus, she is shown consoling Cerissa after the fight and telling Karen to her face that she has no faith in her keeping Taffer's changes, implying she turned out well.
- Wham Episode: Jon meets a bar that is so completely hostile and unwilling to change that, for the first time, he outright refuses to save them and leaves O'Face to its fate.
- Wham Line: "Either you throw him through a window or I'm going to." Just hearing this makes it clear this bar isn't just a terrible bar but completely beyond hope of fixing.
- Wham Shot:
- The infamous slap Matt gave to Dave in the video Jon found. Even Jon lampshades how just watching it alone changes this from a bar owner with no responsibility to a person who had no right to slap an employee.
- After Amanda is fired, Jon is shown in the car, revealing he was watching the whole time.
