Bean misses a royal event that she was meant to take part on and comes home drunk again, where she told Elfo and Luci about a party she could never go to. She has a fight with Zog ans says that she needs a role to play in the castle, and he has the idea of making her an Amabassador in their visit to Dankmire, Oona's homeland.
When they got there, Bean shows a surprising amount of skill on dealing with her ambassadorial duties, being able to be polite and cover her father's rudeness. The royal family is taken to a long children's play about the origins of the Canal and the war between Dankmire and Dreamland. Impressed with her skill, Zog assigns her to give a speech during the banquet that night. Bean goes with Luci and Elfo to a restaurant to write her speech, but Luci gets her drunk by slipping shots in her soda.
Bean shows up drunk out of her mind to the banquet, making a scene and embarrassing herself. Zog tries to assign the speech to Derek, who is half Dankmirian, but he is unable to do it and Bean takes over, making an even worse scene, even flashing the Dankmirians and greatly offending the Dankmirian court, who chases the Dreamland Royal Family out. While trying to escape, Oona gets separated from the rest of the family when their boat breaks and is able to get to Dreamland safely, while the others run to the swamps, where the Dankmirians believe that they'll be killed by the Swamp Monster.
Off in the swamps, Derek and Zog are kidnapped by hillbillies while Bean is distracted stopping a fight between Elfo and Luci. The hillbillies attempt to fry Derek and Zog alive to make them food for the Swamp Monster. Bean gets there to save them, but is knocked out quickly. They're then tied up and offered to the monster, but Bean is able to use her ambassadorial skills to befriend the hillbillies and keeps them around enough for them to be eaten by the Swamp Monster. bean manages to get herself free and defeat the monster alone, saving her family and friends.
While they leave the swamp, Elfo and Luci make up, while Zog proudly praises Bean's skills. Zog allows Bean to go to the party she was never allowed while Zog and Derek go home. Derek mentions to still be freaked out about the giant skillet.
Tropes:
- "Ass" in Ambassador: Averted at first; Bean does try to be a good ambassador, and so far she's not too bad at diplomacy. But then Luci sabotages her by pouring a couple shots of super-strong Dankmirian schnapps into her soda. This results in a heavily drunken Bean embarrassing herself, her family, and her country during a state dinner. They offend their Dankmirian hosts enough to get chased out of their capital city.
- Berserk Button: The Dankmirian swamp-dwellers were considering letting Zog, Derek, Bean, Elfo, and Luci go thanks to Bean, but Zog calling them "hicks" makes them angry enough to go right back to murder.
- Brief Accent Imitation: Luci impersonating Zog.
- Bilingual Bonus:
- The dish served at the diplomatic dinner is called lamproies vivantes, french for "living lampreys". And it is the exact description of what it is.
- The french version of this episode managed to transmite the same feelings about this dish. For obvious reasons, namming the dish in french to make it sound fancy and tell a bilingual joke won't work with the french-speaking viewers. In this version, it is called lamproies frétillantes. "Frétillantes" ("frétillant" in masculine singular) is a precious word for "wagging", managing, for the french-speaking audience, at the same time to convey an impression of fancyness, and emphazing the fact the fishes are alive and will be difficult to eat.
- Call-Back: When Bean, Elfo and Luci are getting drunk, they pass the time doing immiations. Bean does Prince Guysbert, mocking him for getting killed by a chair.
- Chekhov's Gun: Dankmirian love of protocol, which requires any bowing to be met with a bow. Luci and Elfo use it to buy everyone time to escape.
- Chekhov's Gunman: The swamp-dwellers of Dankmire are first seen when the barge enters Dankmire, and initially seem like a one-off joke. Then they get mentioned in the play, which establishes they were forced to dig the canal, and show up when Zog and Bean have to flee.
- Comically Missing the Point: One of the Danmkire guard takes the ambassador declaring the Swamp Monster will "take care" of Bean and Zog literally, until he catches on.
- The Comically Serious: According to Queen Oona, she was her people's equivalent of a laugh riot, despite her never actually cracking anything close to a joke, not even in sarcasm.Oona: I was class clown. (Beat) Is joke. Or is?
- Description Cut: Zog tells Odval to give Bean a meaningless job to occupy her on the visit to Dankmire, and give her a sash into the bargain. Cut to Bean at the prow of the royal barge, with a large sash reading "ambassador".
- Disorganized Outline Speech: With Bean completely wasted, Zog tries to get Derek to give a speech, despite him being a ditzy kid with no experience at this sort of thing. Derek tries, but he's incapable of making a coherent point.
- Epic Fail: Elfo's choice of impersonation is himself, which consists of him saying "I'm Elfo" and nothing more. It still takes Luci a lot of effort to work out who he's thinking of.
- Exact Words:
- Bean says Zog never let her see the wicker man get burnt. Never said anything about not going anyway.
- Bean says she'll take one more drink for the road, before picking up an entire keg.
- All visitors to Dankmire receive a warm welcome. "Warm" here referring to the temperature, not the infamously cold Dankmirian demeanour.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Dankmire seems to be a weird mishmash of cultures. Oona and other upper-class people seem to be pseudo-Slavic, the architecture in the capital city looks (vaguely) East Asian, and the rural swamps are inhabited by stereotypical rednecks.
- Fed to the Beast: The protagonists are threatened with being fed to a swamp monster. Thanks to Bean, they escape.
- Foreign Queasine: The bowls of live lampreys at the Dankmire state dinner. Of course, Zog and Bean have trouble with hiding their disgust.
- Frying Pan of Doom: The hillbillies manage to knock out Bean, Elfo, and Luci with one, which surprises them as much as anything. They also have a much larger skillet for frying people in. The whole experience gives Derek a phobia of that giant skillet.
- Fun with Homophones: The runner of the Hay Man, starting with Bean pointing it out by going "Hay Man", and everyone getting confused.Bean: What the hey, man, I'm talkin' about the Hay Man.
- Gargle Blaster: Dankmirian schnapps, one shot of which is enough to get a human drunk. Chazz brings two shots for Elfo and Luci, just because.
- Karmic Death: The hillbillies are Eaten Alive by the very swamp monster that they'd wanted to feed the main characters to.
- Kick the Dog: Bean threatens to rip off the head of Derek's teddy bear to stop him from telling anyone she's ditching a royal function. Then she rips off the bear's head anyway.
- Letting the Air out of the Band: Every time Luci gets the Dankmirian ambassador and his soldiers to bow, the chase music stops. Then they start moving again, and the music starts up, until Luci gets them to bow again.
- Not Helping Your Case: One of the hillbillies rants at the royal party at how they just assume the swamp-dwellers are a bunch of unsophisticiated idiots who "don't know nuthin'". Then the other one asks what they do know.
- Pass the Popcorn: Luci brings a large box all for himself to the children's play, and actually seems to be the only one looking forward to all sixteen acts.
- Prince and Pauper: Bean mentions that she once switched places with a pauper for a year, and her father didn't even notice what was wrong.
- Rule of Symbolism: This episode is the first to put a more negative light over Bean's drinking problem. Although it is also played for laugh and in-universe Luci does it for the lulz because he is a litteral demon, he put liqueur into Bean's soda to sabotage her speech, while she is trying to stay sober during the writting and her performance, because Luci is Bean's personal demon. Under pression and with only Elfo's help, Bean couldn’t have avoided drinking even though she was sincerely trying to avoid.
- Silly Reason for War: Dreamland and Dankmire went to war because Dreamland wanted them to build a canal, and then insisted Dankmire pay for it. It only ended when Zog married Oona.
- Slobs vs. Snobs: The filthy redneck-like Dankmirian lower class and the stuffy protocol-obsessed nobility.
- Slow Doors: The canal doors that guard the Dankmirian capital, through which Bean, Zog, Elfo and Luci try to escape. They don't make it in time and the closing doors break their boat in half, allowing Oona to sail to safety while Zog, Derek, Bean, Elfo, and Luci are trapped behind them.
- So Proud of You: Zog comes, in his own words, "dangerously close" to saying it to Bean at the end of the episode.
- Swamps Are Evil: When our protagonists flee into the swamps of Dankmire, they get kidnapped by a duo of evil rednecks who plan to feed them to a hideous man-eating monster.
- Take That!:
- The job of ambassador is summed up as a meaningless job given to rich idiots to make themselves feel better.
- When the Dankmirian ambassador states that the children's play is the kind where the actors come into the audience and interact with them, Luci laughs and says it's the only kind of play they have in Hell.
- You Shall Not Pass!: Elfo and Luci volunteer to hold off the angry Dankmirians while Bean and Zog run to the boat. To do this, they repeatedly bow, forcing the Dankmirians to temporarily pause and bow back since it's their custom.
