On their quest to gather all the lost mutagen canisters from the previous episode, the turtles bring a mutant squirrel back to the lair and horror ensues.
This episode provides examples of:
- Body Horror: The squirrels' tongues flail around outside of their mouths and they multiply inside a living organism's stomach.
- Breather Episode: Downplayed. It's a break from the problems that the Turtles and April ran into, and Mikey's comic obsession does add humor to the plot. The Squirrelanoids and dark environments, however, heighten the creepiness factor of the episode considerably, even if the Squirrelanoids seem to start out fairly cute.
- Expy: See Shout-Out.
- Genre Savvy: Mikey uses his comic book to help defeat the mutant squirrels.
- Donatello notes the cliche ways to "get eaten", as Raphael so eloquently put it whilst dealing with the mutant squirrels.
- Gilligan Cut: Splinter gives a Rousing Speech to his sons asking which of them is brave enough to face the Squirrelanoids. Cut to Metalhead going in their place.
- Killer Rabbit: The Squirrelanoids at first glance look like normal squirrels, but eventually turn into horrific monsters.
- Off with His Head!: The Squirrelanoids decapitate Metalhead.
- Orifice Evacuation: The squirrelanoids force their victims to vomit them out after they asexually reproduce in their hosts stomach. Michaelangelo Lamp Shades this when he says that the aliens in his comic come out of their victims rectums.
- Orifice Invasion: The Squirrelanoids reproduce by forcing themselves down a living being's throat, splitting into two inside the stomach, then forcing their way back out through the mouth.
- Sequel Hook: The Squirrelanoids survived and will be coming out again. Lampshaded before it's shown, even!
- Shout-Out: The mutant squirrels are like lower-rated versions of the alien from Alien, and Mikey's comic is kinda similar too.
- Not to mention him quoting the second Alien movie.
Mikey: Game over, man. Game. Over. - Vomit Indiscretion Shot: The way the mutant squirrels finish reproducing. This leads to an infected bum vomiting in slow-motion directly into the camera, and later Raphael after he's infected too.
- Xenomorph Xerox: The Squirrelanoids that are an obvious Expy of the Xenomorph from Alien, are a pack of mutants that spawned when a squirrel discovered a spilled canister of mutagen. The squirrel found a homeless man and forced itself into the bum's stomach where it divided into two squirrels (a process similar to the chestburster, though non-lethal because they exit out the mouth), one of which repeated the process with Raphael. They later underwent a transformation, becoming more monstrous mutants similar in appearance to Xenomorphs, including an elongated, translucent head, a second mouth hidden within its first one and a skeleton-esque exoskeleton.
