"If you figure that out, you'll be halfway to 'I-don't-give-a-damn'."
A Plot: Karen tries to solve the mystery of how "Grad '68" got spray painted on the town water tower. Davis expresses his intense disinterest of the case. Eventually, Karen discovers it was a joint effort by Brent, Hank, Emma, and Davis.
B Plot: Lacey changes the signs on the bathrooms to the old Roman symbols for male and female, causing people to use the wrong bathroom because nobody in town but her knows what they mean. This causes a ruckus as the men discover how much nicer and cleaner the women's room is. Brent struggles to keep the peace.
C Plot: Lacey decides that she should try writing for The Howler. Unfortunately, she is lacking in the writing talent department and is constantly rejected, despite finding out that pretty much everyone else in town has written for the paper at some point.
Tropes Referenced:
- Analogy Backfire:
- Davis explains that secrets are like rocks, where if you turn them over you just find bugs and dirt. Karen turns that on its head and says sometimes you turn over that rock and find a spare key that you had lost.
- When Hank complains about having to go back to the men's room, Lacey compares it to Paradise Lost. Wanda responds "You're comparing Heaven to a gas station washroom?". Subverted when Davis later uses the same comparison but gets praised for it by Fitzy.
- Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: In Emma's recalling of the Grad '68 events, she claims Oscar didn't find out about the spray painting because she easily distracted him with a Rubik's cube. Oscar vehemently denies this, arguing there's no way he'd be distracted so easily. Yet he is immediately duped by Emma again in the present day, this time by a spoon she says is dirty.
- Buffy Speak: Lacey falls into it when trying to prove herself.Lacey: Please! This is the Dog River Howler, not the... good... writing... thingy.
- Character Filibuster:Karen: So Brent graduated in '86...
Oscar: And I got dragged to the graduation! Why the hell do I have to go?! Wow, my son graduated! Big deal! He did what he was supposed to do. Plus, I had to buy him a special hat with a tassel and he never even wore it again!
Karen: Right, I—
Oscar: And you had to sit there and listen to some guy yammer on and on, and they got you there, and there's nothing you can do, just going on and on...
Karen: [facepalm] - Description Cut: Happens a couple times to Brent, who follows with the line "Hmm, seems to contradict the last thing I just said".
- Disorganized Outline Speech: Lacey's phone call to The Howler:Lacey: Hello, uh, this is Lacey Burrows, and I’d like to write to you… uh, for you. I think I can do it, and I’d like a chance to show you that I can clearly organize my thoughts in person. Uh, oh… what I mean is… I can organize my thoughts, and I can do it in person. Or not in person… which would be good, because then I can write it. Okay thanks. Bye.
- Double Meaning: Lacey wants to advertise "Wings Wednesdays". Wanda tells her that she should specify that she means chicken wings, but Lacey thinks there's no way anyone could mistake it for something else. Wanda says that people could think it's referring to the TV show Wings, which doesn't actually happen in the episode, but people do think it's referring to the band Wings, or the Detroit Red Wings.
- Exact Words: Brent promises to make the men's bathroom just as clean as the women's. However, it's so disgusting that he can't stand to be in it for more than two seconds to clean it. So he just makes the women's bathroom dirtier instead.Brent: I made them the same! Why should the women's room be so special?! I'm a feminist.
- Foreshadowing: When Karen starts taking an interest in "Grad '68", Davis remarks that it's not worth caring about a 15 year old incident. Karen points out that 1968 would be closer to 35 years prior and brushes off the mistake as Davis being bad at math, but this actually alludes to Davis's involvement in the incident and the fact that it was supposed to read "Grad '89", which would have been 15 years prior.
- Holy Burns Evil: Referenced when Brent describes the female symbol as "a fat guy fighting vampires", because of the cross.
- Incredibly Lame Fun: Davis really enjoys stopping and directing traffic.
- Motion Parallax: The "at the top of the water tower" background is produced by a motion parallax layer between the tower proper and the scenery behind it. It's a tad uncoordinated with the zoom, though.
- Pac Man Fever: Lacey's computer plays a very archaic 8-bit sound effect to show that she was playing a game while writing her letter to the newspaper.
- Shout-Out:
- See Double Meaning above.
- As a double shout out, the TV show Wings is referred to as "the Dharma & Greg of its day".
- Karen specifically states that the water tower case is similar to the Agatha Christie book Murder on the Orient Express, as they both have the Everybody Did It ending.Hank: [angrily] Well, I guess I don't have to finish reading that one!
- Cold Squad, a Canadian police crime-drama about a team of Vancouver police officers in charge of investigating and solving "cold" cases gets a shout out, as Cold Squad star, Julie Stewart, plays "Paint Store Clerk," and says to Karen, "Cold case? Who cares?"
- See Double Meaning above.
- The Summation: Karen does this at the end, whilst explaining how she figured out how "Grad '68" got on the water tower. It's parodied, of course, because it's an entirely inconsequential act of decades-old vandalism, and in spite of the fact that Everybody Did It, Karen is ultimately the only person in Dog River who actually cares.
- Title Drop
- Wastebasketball: Karen complains about how "guys can't aim" after mistakenly using the men's bathroom. Wanda is grossed out, before Karen clarifies that she was talking about all the crumpled up paper towels she saw on the floor around the garbage can.
- "Which Restroom?" Dilemma: Lacey replaces the "Men" and "Women" signs on the bathrooms with the male and female symbols, but nobody else knows what they mean, causing this trope. Later, Brent puts the old signs back, but puts them on the wrong bathrooms because he didn't know what the symbols meant either, and never bothered to memorize which bathroom was which.
- Wondrous Ladies Room: Played realistically. The ladies room has nothing fantastical about it, it's just kept a lot cleaner than the men's.
