Frankie and Gumball escaping from "prison".
The Wattersons visit Richard's dad Frankie, and conclude his life is a mess because he's used to living in prison. They decide to invite him into their home, which they make as much like a prison as possible.Tropes:
- Bait-and-Switch: As the show opens, it looks as if the Wattersons are being robbed, but it's just Nicole running a drill in case Frankie robs them.
- Bowdlerization: The Filipino dub cut Frankie seeing Darwin playing Five-Finger Fillet (despite him having no fingers) and Frankie getting stabbed in the nose with a spork due to fears that child viewers might copy it. Other international versions just cut the part where Frankie gets stabbed in the nose with the spork and leave in Darwin playing knife games in the kitchen.
- Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:Nicole: Frankie might want something from us.
Gumball: Or sell something to us.
Anais: Or sell one of us. - Chained Heat: Frankie and Gumball escape "prison" while handcuffed to each other.
- Crossing the Burnt Bridge: Richard offers Frankie the chance to live with them properly, but considering the family had stripped him, hit him with blunt objects, attacked, framed, electrocuted and imprisoned him, he understandable turns it down.
- A Day in the Limelight: For Frankie.
- Downer Ending: Despite Richard offering Frankie to stay with the Wattersons for as long as he wants, Frankie rejects the invite because of the ordeal the family put him through and lets himself be arrested and sent to prison.
- Failed a Spot Check: Frankie failed to notice the pipe he reaches the end of opens a few feet above an artificial riverbed and is not a drop he can dramatically jump from.
- Five-Finger Fillet: Darwin, playing a very unhinged inmate, pokes a spork on alternating sides of his Fingerless Hand, with Frankie pointing out that he only has one finger.
- Gone Horribly Right: Frankie's plan was to let the Wattersons take him in so that he could live rent free. He didn't count on them making his stay seem like a prison.
- Hellhole Prison: The Wattersons' conclude Frankie needs the ordered life prison gives, but instead make him suffer every possible bad thing about a prison: an apathetic warden, an abusive guard, psychotic inmates, unwanted physical contact, disgusting food, and everything is falling apart.
- Just Got Out of Jail: Anais figures Frankie had been in prison all this time and has trouble adjusting to the outside world, so they make their home into a prison to make him feel more comfortable. Turns out Frankie was never in prison, but he was sentenced to prison (for three days) for scamming old people into buying land parcels on the moon and had been on the run ever since.
- No Sense of Personal Space: Richard gets rather inappropriately close to his father, cuddling up and kissing Frankie in his bunk and the shower, to his mortification. It's also a pretty clear allusion to sexual assault in prisons.
- Not What It Looks Like: Frankie tries to explain to Donut Cop why he's wearing a striped jumpsuit handcuffed to a tattooed Gumball. He ends up running anyway.
- Ocular Gushers: Richard feels that there's a slight sadness in Frankie's eyes. Cut to Frankie crying a torrent of tears.
- Prefer Jail to the Protagonist: After the law catches up to Frankie, he agrees to go to jail instead of staying with the Wattersons, whom he considers to be crazy. In fact, before being arrested, Frankie seemed to consider killing himself a better option.Frankie: (resigned) No rent, free food. Why not?
- Police Code for Everything: According to dispatch, pursuit of a fugitive handcuffed to a tattooed child is a 12-57.
- Take That!: To the American prison system
- Tempting Fate: As they approach the old shack at the junkyard where they think Frankie lives, Nicole says that at least he's not living in that old pathetic trailer... which is where Frankie actually lives.
- Tin-Can Telephone: Frankie says his telephone was cut off, while holding two tin cans with the string cut off.
