"Mother, I'll go first."
"Plus, maybe it's okay that mom will never see it. Because it's awful."
—Tina, about their presentation
The old family camcorder breaks down, forcing the Belcher kids to describe an exaggerated version of their Mother's Day pageant to a sick Linda. Louise regales Linda with the wild west story of "The Town With No Moms", Gene tells the mythology-influenced story of the creation of the first mother, and Tina whips up a crazy crossover between Freaky Friday and Aliens.
Tropes, Lies, and Videotape:
- Bittersweet Ending: Louise's story. She saves the town's mothers and helps Rudy defeat Meanie McQueen, but dies tragically in the process.
- Blatant Lies: The kids' retelling of their performances is blatantly blown up in quality and production. Linda isn't totally fooled, but she appreciates the effort anyway. At one point, she questions how they paid for everything, and the kids claim they fired a gym teacher and had a bake sale to pay for it.
- Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: During Louise's play.Louise: I told you, I was out on business!
Rudy: You were in jail!
Louise: In jail on business! - Cast Incest: In-universe; Gene's former love interest Courtney plays his mother in the play. And while they're not love interests, Louise and Rudy have had noticeable Ship Tease in the series, and they also play a mother-son duo.
- "Freaky Friday" Flip: Tina's telling of Aliens takes a sudden turn when Sigourney (what Tina calls Ripley) switches minds with the Xenomorph queen because of "scientific anomalies".
- Genre Shift: Tina's story starts of with the plot of Aliens, then suddenly turns into a body switching comedy.
- The Hero Dies: Louise's character dies at the end of her story.
- Huddle Shot: Bob and the kids do a brief one when they decide to exaggerate the kids' performances.
- Illness Blanket: Linda sits on the couch covered in a blanket.
- I Surrender, Suckers: In Louise's story, Meanie McQueen feigns surrender to launch a final rubber band at Louise. Rudy manages to chase her off, but she mortally wounds Louise in the process.
- Impending Doom P.O.V.: Invoked when Linda complains that Bob always breathes into the microphone whenever he uses the camcorder, and Gene adds "It's like there's always a monster just off screen."
- Missing the Good Stuff: Bob fails to record the kids' performances because of his old camcorder. First he misses Louise's because he needed to rewind the tape. Then the battery dies out when Gene comes on stage and he has to find an outlet. Finally, he is set to record Tina when the camcorder throws up a generic error message and stops working entirely.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: Gene's play has a bananafalo, half banana, half buffalo.
- Momma's Boy: Despite not being biologically related, Zeke seems to have a close relationship with his stepmother Cheryl.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Meanie McQueen isn't an angel, that's for sure.
- Not So Above It All: Bob usually points out the absurdities in the kids' stories, but here he completely hypes the plays up because he's terrified of angering Linda after failing to record them.
- Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title: It's a reference to sex, lies, and videotape.
- Railing Kill: In Louise's version of the story, Millie falls over the railing of the saloon after getting "shot". Linda questions if that was even safe to act out, but Louise insists she's fine and had been practicing for the stunt for the last 6 weeks.
- Sadly Mythtaken: Gene claims his play was based on mythology, but it's clear he's just making stuff up. When asked which mythology it's based on, Gene says it's a mix of Greek, Roman, Pokémon and Tex-Mex.
- School Play: The school assembly is every bit as lame as one would expect. The kids' retelling becomes absurdly elaborate and gets a massive boost in quality, which is Lampshaded often, such as when Tina points out that it's probably a good thing Bob's camcorder crapped out.
- Shout-Out: Gene asks if Bob's old camcorder is the flux capacitor. Tina asks what it transforms into.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Gene tells how he was playing in sync with the other players.
- Swapped Roles: Normally Bob questions the outlandish elements of the kids' stories while Linda gets into them. Here, however, Bob hypes up the kids' stories since he wants to avoid aggravating Linda for his failure to record the Mother's Day plays, while Linda is the one questioning the more outlandish elements since they were supposedly performed in real life on Wagstaff's frankly-lacking budget.
- Two Decades Behind: Bob is still using a '90s era camcorder, while the kids point out that there are more convenient devices available for recording video and further proceed to mock its bulkiness in comparision to something like a smartphone by having all 3 of them pretend to struggle to lift it off the table at the same time. The camcorder proves to be completely unreliable when Bob tries to record the kids' performances.
- Whole-Plot Reference: Tina's story starts out as Aliens, but halfway through it turns into a "Freaky Friday" Flip.
