Recap / DuckTales (2017) S1E7 "The Infernal Internship of Mark Beaks!"

The boys' hero has talons of clay.

Huey competes with Dewey for a coveted internship with Duckburg's newest tech billionaire, Mark Beaks, while Scrooge and Glomgold team up to take this new competitor down.

---

This episode contains examples of:

• An Aesop: Don’t be like Beaks and fake your way into success. Work long and hard for your fortune, like Uncle Scrooge.
• Affably Evil:
  • Mark Beaks. He's an expert at manipulating social media for his own selfish ends, but he just comes off so earnest about 99% of the time. The only things that shake his affability are his 2:15 coffee being one minute early and when Falcon Graves is about to destroy his last backup phone, meaning he won't be able to trend constantly for a while.
  • Falcon Graves, the corporate saboteur who can singlehandedly shrug off the security detail protecting Mark Beaks, is fairly courteous in explaining his goal and intentions. He is quite short-tempered, though, repeatedly destroying Mark's phones and shouting at him when he doesn't take him directly to Project Tah-Dah.
• And Call Him "George": While the shark is obviously suffering in its too-small tank, Glomgold's affectionate cooing suggests he's not doing this out of malice.
• Arc Words: "Fake it till you make it" mentioned by Dewey a couple of times, invoked by Mark Beaks at the end, and then discussed by Dewey to Huey in a pep-talk.
• Bad Boss: Mark Beaks is just as bad a boss as Glomgold but better at putting an affable front, at least to Huey and Dewey. He puts trampolines at his work and cultivates a chummy work culture, but at the end of the day his idea is to encourage competition rather than teamwork, exploit and abuse interns by absurd and whimsical standards, and then dispose of them without rewarding them.
  • The motivational poster in the computer lab is of Beaks giving a thumbs up as he says "remember... you're replaceable!"
• The Bad Guy Wins: Mark Beaks succeeds in breaking the $1 billion mark thanks to his scheme.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: The shark in the small tank that Glomgold proudly displays is visibly in pain and struggling against the glass on account of his great size compared to the tank.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: In between his sharp suit, his combat prowess, his no-nonsense personality and his unusually blunt and direct approach to corporate espionage, there's a distinct James Bond vibe to Falcon Graves.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Beaks aspires to be a member of the Duckburg Billionaires’ Club. He wishes to be in a group with Scrooge, a hardened dysfunctional adventurer and Glomgold, a billionaire just as petty as himself. Glomgold lampshades that Beaks is getting every sign of trouble that goes with being in the Club.
• Benevolent Boss: Subverted with Mark Beaks. Under the surface Mellow Fellow attitude, the vibrant social media presence and tech-friendly buzzwords, and the "zany" workplace environment with trampolines and slides, he’s ultimately just as ruthless, exploitative and corrupt as the robber barons like Flintheart Glomgold are. And while Glomgold might be a Bad Boss, he is at least willing to be honest (in private at least) about what a scoundrel he is deep down.
• Black Comedy: Mark Beaks tweeting "YOLO" as he falls off a building (though the audience knows he'll have a soft landing, he doesn't at the time.)
• Black Comedy Animal Cruelty: The shark is clearly suffering in that tiny tank, but the sheer Refuge in Audacity, including Glomgold's affectionate behavior towards the shark, makes the entire scene hilarious.
• Bland-Name Product: Mark Beaks's company is called Waddle, a tech company with a name that sounds similar to Apple or Google. A lot of Waddle's company policies, like the trampolines outside and mandatory dance breaks, are taken from similar non-traditional policies of similar companies.
• Briefcase Full of Money: One was used as a weapon against Falcon Graves, when the knockback from the money rushing out of it catches Falcon in the face, sending him over the ledge. (Turns out it was one of Glomgold's, and Dewey had grabbed it, citing the Billionaires' Club need for better security.)
• Broken Pedestal: Huey looked up to Mark Beaks but he's disappointed when he turns out to be a scam-artist with a mean streak.
• Card-Carrying Villain:
  • Glomgold presents himself in an overly diabolical manner. Beside the slide show he prepared to present his Evil Plan for defeating Mark Beaks, he prepared a second set of slides that shows how he's going to stab Scrooge in the back afterwards.
  • Falcon Graves straight-up tells in the face of Mark Beaks that he's a corporate saboteur wanting to steal Project Tah-Dah, instead of trying to get it from him in some clever and manipulative way.
• Complexity Addiction: Glomgold's plan to kill Mark Beaks involves inviting him to a yacht party by making him think him and Scrooge will be attending, have him find solace in the buffet when he realizes they aren't there, steer the boat into an active volcano while he's distracted with the buffet, have him jump into a shark-infested swimming pool due to the heat, and finally get him to jump into the lava out of fear of the sharks. And then things get complicated!
  • And all that was only part of his true plan to to betray Scrooge during the execution of the other plan, eventually manipulating him into position to be beheaded by a suit of armour.
  Scrooge: (noting an empty pizza box) Did you sleep here last night?
  Glomgold: (while setting up the projector) Don't be ridiculous. Who can sleep when you're plotting against a nemesis?
• Control Freak: For all his surface-level laid-back nonchalance, it's very heavily implied that Mark Beaks is actually one of these. Particularly, when Dewey brings his 2:15 coffee at 2:14 he starts ranting about order.
• Crapsaccharine World: Waddle and other tech companies like it are painted as this. Chummy and fun work environment with a lot of goofy stuff, but underneath it is the same cutthroat ethics of the old robber barons that Beaks makes fun of. If nothing else, the likes of Glomgold are at least honest about their villainy.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Any time a guard tries to stop Falcon Graves, or even questions his motives, he gets defeated in an off-camera battle.
• Deconstruction: Mark Beaks and Waddle are this for Benevolent Boss and laid back culture associated with tech companies. The episode shows that underneath the surface of the cool tech, free swag, and "zany" office features, Beaks and the company are just as cutthroat and unethical as the more old fashioned big corporations that they reject and make fun of and only care about the bottom line.
• Death Glare: Scrooge and Glomgold appear to spend their shared time in the Billionaires Club sitting in the middle of the room glaring hatefully at each other.
• Did Not Think This Through: With a hint of Gone Horribly Right. Mark Beaks's Get-Rich-Quick Scheme makes him Duckburg's newest billionaire... and puts him squarely in the crosshairs of revenge-obsessed Flintheart Glomgold.
  Courier: Letter for billionaire Mark Beaks.
  Mark Beaks: Aha, that's me! (opens letter) Oh, an invite to a Billionaires' Convention on a yacht. Awesometown, population Beaks! I still get to be a Duckburg billionaire.
  (The courier reveals himself to be Flintheart Glomgold as Mark Beaks eagerly runs off.)
  Flintheart Glomgold: And everything that comes with it. (pulls out phone) Get the sharks ready!
  (Close episode on Evil Laugh and Dramatic Thunder)
• Disney Villain Death: Subverted both by Falcon Graves and Mark Beaks - they both fall off the roof of the Waddle office building upon their defeat, but are saved by a high-impact trampoline.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Mark Beaks barges his way into the Billionaire's Club, changes the obnoxious bagpipe music for an equally obnoxious techno remix and basically made him self an insufferable boor in front of Scrooge and Glomgold. While Scrooge just wants to blackball Beaks, Flinty decides this is the time to end him... permanently. With the use of a yacht, a volcano and sharks.
• Downer Ending: Huey and Dewey lose the jobs that they worked to get, after saving their new boss's life; while they manage to humiliate him, that's small compensation. Glomgold initiates his evil scheme to dispose of Beaks, who managed to break the billionaire mark despite his scheme. Scrooge is the only person who gets somewhat of a happy ending, to work honestly and harder than Mark Beaks.
  • On the other hand Huey and Dewey’s experiences did give them character development and strengthened their bond meaning their efforts weren’t entirely All for Nothing, plus it’s implied that they didn’t want the job anymore by the end anyway.
• Enemy Mine: Deconstructed with Scrooge and Flintheart. Aside from disliking Mark Beaks, they have very few things in common to make any team-up work. Scrooge doesn't like Flintheart's megalomania, his openly murderous plan (since Scrooge is not a murderer), and of course the fact that Flintheart is plotting to stab him in the back anyway and even prepared slides for it. Scrooge decides to get revenge on both Mark Beaks and Flintheart by working hard and square.
• Establishing Character Moment: Mark Beaks's introduction establishes his character pretty well (a swift-talking millennial obsessed with modern tech and fame). The fact that he starts grumbling and playing with his smartphone the instant he's out of the billionaire club's main room shows that there's a hidden darkness beneath his lighthearted banter. He also completely blanks Huey and Dewey until Huey calls him a genius.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Falcon Graves might be a corporate spy and saboteur who steals the secrets of companies for whoever pays him, but he can't stand being lied to and used as an unwitting pawn in a con artist's schemes. Note that Mark Beaks said he'd pay Falcon Graves the agreed upon price and had a helicopter ready for the getaway before Graves declared he was going to throw him off the roof. It also seems to be partly because he simply finds Mark Beaks and his faux-Mellow Fellow condescending smarmy tech-savvy schtick that irritating.
• Evil Versus Evil: Glomgold has an elaborate plan to murder Mark Beaks. The episode ending implies that he'll at least attempt to go through with it.
• Exact Words: Beaks' tagline for Project Tah-Dah! is literal.
  "It's everything you think it is, but nothing you expect."
• Foreshadowing: Glomgold removing his fake beard in the episode's final scene foreshadows the main plot of "The Ballad of Duke Baloney!", i.e. that Glomgold is not who he seems to be.
• Freak Out: Huey has a brief one when, after getting an internship he earned fair and square, Mark Beaks makes Dewey a VP for no other reason than his stylish briefcase and then makes Huey work for him. This deeply offends the eldest triplet's sense of hard work and fair play, and causes him to ramble in an increasingly frustrated manner, throw papers around, and start wrecking an edible desk. Lampshaded by Dewey:
  Dewey: Oh, no. Huey's broken!
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • When Beaks shows his smartphone as he breaks $1 billion, you can see a green "YES!" in the lower-right corner of the screen.
  • When the saboteur tries to open up the briefcase, you can see Glomgold's face on the lock.
• Funny Background Event: While walking to the Waddle internship, behind the bus with the Tah-Dah advertisement, there is both a drone carrying a package and what appears to be a self-driving car.
• Get-Rich-Quick Scheme: Mark's plan in the episode revolves around breaking that $1 billion mark, and he does it through Project Tah-Dah! He hires a sabateur to come into his company and steal Project Tah-Dah, which doesn't even exist. He hypes up the press for the project, which gets him tons of investors, then he reports that Project Tah-Dah has been stolen, which allows him to keep the money from the investors without having to do any of the work.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: Apparently Scrooge and Glomgold set aside time every day to hang out at their gentleman's club just glowering at each other.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Mark Beaks says that the internship starts mañana.
• Hannibal Lecture: When Huey and Dewey accuse Beaks of being a sham, he simply says this was how he made money. The world is filled of people who went along with Beaks’ schemes and made him a millionaire; either they were dumb enough to believe him, or those that saw through him wouldn’t say anything because it’d humiliate them (no one can admit they were made a fool of without legal defense to stand with them). As Beaks represents a new generation, it means people are more easily enthralled by cool and popularity and don’t look beyond that (at least not till it’s too late).
  • Thankfully subverted when Huey and Dewey post a humiliating status update on his social media account, and it gets a bunch of likes. People must have been waiting for some time to see Beaks make a fool out of himself.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Huey, who works incredibly hard to complete the tasks set for them by Mark Beaks, wins the internship — but Dewey, who slacks off and has nothing to recommend him but an "ironic" briefcase, is promoted to a VP position in a moment of indulgence by Beaks. This injustice, naturally, sets Huey raging. Deconstructed, however, since Dewey is clearly out of his depth (as indicated when Dewey can't even point Falcon Graves to the room where Project Tah-Dah is stored without Huey's help), knows full well he doesn't deserve it, and admits to Huey that the only real reason "performers" like him and Beaks are able to make it to the top seemingly without effort is because they rely on all the hard work of the people operating behind the scenes to help them.
• He Knows Too Much: Huey and Dewey find out the truth about Project Tah-Dah, so Beaks fires them, reasoning he can ruin their potential credibility by giving them a reason to hold a grudge.
• Hidden Depths:
  • For all of his academic smarts and dutifulness, Huey has a very volatile temper when pushed to breaking point. To the point where he's willing to just stand by and watch Falcon Graves throw Mark Beaks off a building.
  • Dewey's general intelligence is showcased most prominently here, where it's he - and not Huey - who figures out Mark Beaks' Get-Rich-Quick Scheme. He also tells Huey that they have to stop Falcon Graves from murdering Mark Beaks, simply because it's the right thing to do.
• Honor Before Reason: Falcon Graves is a corporate spy and saboteur, but he has his standards, and being used as part of a baroque scheme by a tech billionaire who cares mainly about buzz is low even by his standards. As such, he decides to kill Mark out of spite, even after the latter has paid and rewarded him for his plan.
• I Think You Broke Him: When Huey goes crazy about Dewey getting promoted to VP, Dewey says "Uh, oh, Huey's broken."
• It Runs in the Family: The episode emphasizes that Huey has inherited his great-uncle’s work ethic and commitment to the value of hard work, and also his uncle’s tendency to snap into violent rage when his breaking point is reached and/or his sense of justice and fair play is offended.
• Jerkass: Mark Beaks is a self-obsessed, flippant jackass running a seemingly chill but actually very unethical and exploitative business franchise.
• Karma Houdini: Mark Beaks ultimately gets away with his Get-Rich-Quick Scheme at the end; although Huey and Dewey humiliate him on social media and it's shown that Glomgold is going through with his own revenge scheme, his investors apparently don't find out the truth.
• Mellow Fellow: Mark Beaks for the most part, although some cracks in the facade do start to appear when he gets his 2:15 coffee at 2:14, prompting the beginnings of a rant about order. It's also deconstructed, since his blithe lack of concern about anything gradually makes him seem less relaxed and chill and more vaguely sociopathic.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Glomgold's scheme with the suit of armor dropping its axe is taken straight from the Transylvania level of the NES game.
  • Mark Beaks' scheme to create demand without an actual product mirrors Fenton Crackshell's plot in the original DuckTales series. The key difference being that Beaks is in it for his own profit, while Fenton's was an accident (he made test commercials that accidentally got put on the air).
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Beaks, Huey, and Dewey take it for granted that Beaks will never have to release a real project Ta-Dah as long as he can make people believe "It was stolen" — that requires this trope to be fact in this world, since he would face no expectation that he could make and release it again, just behind schedule.
• Not Hyperbole: When Scrooge questions the need for Glomgold to explain his plan with a slide show, Glomgold tells him "You're in my world now, McDuck." Scrooge allows him to elaborate, but Glomgold clarified that he meant Scrooge was stepping into his side of the room.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Used by Scrooge, who bemoans that in wasting a day obsessing over and plotting against someone he doesn't like just because he doesn't like him he's been acting just like Glomgold. To his credit, he objects strenuously to the more murderous aspects of Glomgold's plan (having just wanted to kick Mark Beaks out of their club rather than destroy him) and demonstrates how he is ultimately better than Glomgold by washing his hands of the whole affair and resolving to just beat both Glomgold and Beaks fairly by being a better billionaire rather than waste time plotting against them.
• Not the Fall That Kills You…: Both Falcon Graves and Mark Beaks plummet off a 20-story or so building and their fall is broken with a simple trampoline.
• Obsessed Are the Listmakers: Huey makes long checklists for the internship challenge, and even includes "complete checklist" as an item on the list.
• Only Sane Man: Falcon Graves constantly reacts to Mark Beaks’s flippancy over the situation with annoyance and incredulity, is not impressed by his mellow work place attitude, and interrupts Mark’s tantrum about receiving his 2:15 coffee a minute early by yelling at him to just drink the damn coffee anyway. It gets to the point where you start to see his decision to throw Beaks off the roof of his building as perfectly rational.
• Plausible Deniability: Mark Beaks' plan involves having his 'product' 'stolen' by a corporate saboteur, thus explaining why he can't release it but still keeping all the investments and hype. He then fires Huey and Dewey after they discover his scam, so if they spill the beans, it just looks like they're disgruntled employees lying to get back at him.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Scrooges gives quite a succinct one to Glomgold while at the same time chastising himself.
  Scrooge: I can't believe I wasted an entire day obsessing over somebody I don't like! And it almost got me killed! Who am I, you?
• Restrained Revenge: After Huey and Dewey find out Beaks is defrauding his investors, and he fires them to cover it up, they decide to just take his (last backup) phone, write an embarrassing social media post in his name, and throw it off the roof. Ironically, this almost kills Beaks because he jumps after it, but the trampoline manages to save both him and his phone—which breaks anyway seconds later, not that he cares for long.
• The Reveal: Glomgold reveals that his iconic gray beard is a fake, the first hint about his fraudulent faux-Scottish get-up in the series. He also pulls off a decent American accent.
• Revenge Before Reason: Huey, still sore from having his idol be revealed as a Broken Pedestal, has to be coaxed by Dewey into making sure that Mark Beaks isn't murdered by Falcon Graves.
• Reverse Psychology: Huey defeats Graves by telling Dewey that "whatever you do, don't tell him what's in the briefcase." Naturally, it was all a ruse to shift Graves' attention away from them and to the briefcase, which (they thought) has nothing inside it. It is actually filled with money, but it also startles Graves off the roof when it opens suddenly.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The marketing campaign for Project Tah-Dah is highly reminiscent of the "Ginger" campaign from the late 1990s. "Ginger" did turn out to be a real product (specifically, it was Segway) but it was still a massive letdown after the overblown and vague ad campaign.
• Sanity Slippage: Huey does not take Mark Beaks making Dewey a VP well at all.
  Dewey: Oh, no. Huey's broken.
  • Also happens to Mark Beaks when he's brought his 2:15 coffee at 2:14. His slow-boil rant about order and control is cut off when Huey shows up at 2:15 with coffee.
  Mark Beaks: Ooh, yummy! Man, things got real for a second back there, right?
• Save the Villain: Huey and Dewey save Mark Beaks from being thrown off the building by Graves. He ends up falling anyway, but is ultimately unharmed.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Huey and Dewey never even act like there's any possibility they could expose the billionaire scammer for the fraud he is — they and Beaks just seem to take it for granted that the truth about his phony product is never going to be known and he's never going to have to pay for bilking his investors.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After dealing with Mark Beaks' personality, finding out that he was hired by Beaks himself as part of a scam, and failing to get revenge on Beaks by throwing him off the building, Falcon Graves decides he's had enough and just leaves.
  Falcon Graves: And I'm untagging myself from all those photos!
• Shark Pool: One of Glomgold's plans involves the pool of the yacht with Mark Beaks, having sharks to swim in. Scrooge expresses amazement at where the sharks would come from, but Glomgold insists "I know a shark guy!"
• Short-Distance Phone Call: Once Falcon Graves discovers Project Tah-Dah is a fake, he decides to call his employer. One of Mark Beaks's many phones rings, and Graves realizes the guy he's been holding up all day is his employer.
• Skewed Priorities: Mark Beaks cares more about his social media presence than anything else, up to and including his own safety. When Huey and Dewey throw his last spare phone off the top of the roof, he jumps after it.
• Slouch of Villainy: Flintheart Glomgold when he is disguised as a postman slouches on his bicycle.
• Social Media Before Reason: Mark Beaks runs on this in general but this episode provide perhaps his most obvious example of this. When Dewey swipes Beaks' phone from him and posts "My face looks like a butt!" to Beak's social media page, immediately garnering 1000 likes before Huey throws the phone off the roof of the company, Mark dives down after it, and posts the message "#YOLO" before hitting a trampoline he did not know would be there.
• Staring Contest: Scrooge and Glomgold begin the episode locked in a "vision-based battle of wills".
  Dewey: So it's a staring contest?
  Glomgold: It's not just a staring contest! It's a— [Catches himself drifting away from Scrooge's gaze to look at Dewey] Nice try, McDuck! But your family bickering will never get me to look away! Never!
  Dewey: It's a staring contest.
• Stating the Simple Solution: Glomgold has spent all night trying to turn off Mark's music. Scrooge simply turns it off with the same button used to turn on the music; it apparently never occurred to Glomgold that the same button could also turn it off.
• Stylistic Suck: Glomgold's slide show is just stick figure drawings he clearly drew himself. Apparently, Glomgold is too cheap to hire a professional artist.
• Swiss-Cheese Security:
  • Played With for Waddle. Falcon calmly walks through security with ease, but not because they're letting him. Then again Beaks turns out to be the one who hired him to "steal" his big secret, so you have to think Beaks might've hired incompetent security guards on purpose. Of course, on the other (other) hand, why would he tell his lowly security guards about the plan when he's apparently told no one else (including the saboteur he hired)? Or change up the security roster in a way that might be suspicious to investigators? After all, if Falcon Graves gets to 'Project Tah-Dah' then he's 'stolen' it as he was hired to do, but if he gets captured by security then Mark can claim he was a diversion while someone else stole the device and not even have to pay his hired pawn.
  • The briefcase Dewey's been lugging around for the episode turns out to be full of millions of dollars of Glomgold's money. When Huey asks where he got it, he replies that he grabbed it from the billionaire's club, and notes the poor security. The combination is also the factory default.
• Technician vs. Performer: Huey is the technician, keeping a checklist of work tasks and doing them all meticulously, while Dewey is the performer, mostly slacking off day-to-day work tasks but impressing people by embracing the company culture and doing things like ordering everyone pizza for lunch. The result is that Huey gets the internship for all his hard work, but Dewey gets a much better VP position for no other reason than owning a briefcase. This is actually discussed by Dewey in his pep-talk, telling Huey that while everyone is drawn to and impressed by the performers, it's the technicians' hard work that make the performer's role possible.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Note that in Glomgold's Evil Plan to kill Mark Beaks, that it only starts getting complicated AFTER Beaks has jumped in the lava...
• This Is My Side: Scrooge and Glomgold have divided a room at the Billionaires' Club between them, complete with a thick, black line down the middle.
• Too Important to Walk: Mark Beaks uses a hoverboard (i.e. a self-balancing scooter) everywhere in Waddle.
• Totally Radical: Even on the day of its release, some of the Internet references were dated ("#YOLO" is a major punchline, already five years out of date in 2017). Possibly intentional given it all comes from Mark Beaks.
• Truth in Television:
  • Mark Beaks' investment scheme is not so far from real tech company practices. His plan on getting investors to invest with hype and internet buzz is not far from Amazon, which is a loss-making company that runs itself entirely on investment and the strength of its brand value on the stock market. His workplace conditions being simultaneously chummy, and exploitative, echoes many complaints about Silicon Valley billionaires.
  • Getting people to invest in things that aren't real or at least are just a concept is a common practice of a lot of companies going all the way back to the industrial revolution. In today's society, many crowd funding sites have had problems with people funding fake projects.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Mark thanks Huey and Dewey for saving his life by firing them, mainly because they know the truth and can't be allowed to air it. They decide to Pay Evil unto Evil by stealing his last spare phone and post an embarrassing social update that gets lots of likes, then tossing it over the side of the building.
• Villain Ball: Sure, Glomgold, make a slideshow on how you're going to backstab Scrooge. That will go over so well with the man you're trying to (reluctantly) cooperate with.
• Visual Pun: As noted in Ripped from the Headlines, Project Tah-Dah is a lot like "Ginger," the ad campaign for Segway — the predecessor of the "hoverboard" that Mark Beaks rides all around his company.
• Wacky Startup Workplace: Deconstructed. Beaks' company appears to be one on the surface, with the office providing wacky things like slides, trampolines, and free snow cones, but this is all to distract the employees from how much of a Control Freak Beaks really is, and he prefers to foster a competitive environment rather than a cooperative one.
• Xanatos Gambit: Mark Beaks' Get-Rich-Quick Scheme. The moment Falcon Graves announces his intent to steal Project Tah-Dah (possibly from the moment he entered the building), Mark could spin the situation in such a way as to explain the absence of Project Tah-Dah to his investors and keep all the money no matter the outcome. Either Falcon Graves succeeds in 'stealing' it or he's apprehended and Mark Beaks can claim he served as a distraction for a (nonexistent) accomplice. He might not have counted on Graves getting angry about being a hired pawn and trying to kill him though.

---