Tuca is looking to liven up her sex life by finding a new date, and Bertie is trying to find a new therapist.
To solve her problem, Tuca lines up several prospective dates on a "Sex Bus" and putting them through a reality show-like series of competitions (called Sex Bus) and ends up with a mechanic. Meanwhile, Bertie takes the advice of the several therapists she's seen, but it backfires on her anniversary dinner
This is the start of the show's first season on [adult swim].
This episode provides examples of:
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Bertie tries the tactic of repeating words that Speckle is saying to calm herself, and ends up repeating "brutalist", "skeletal", and "paperwork".
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: The first time Bertie imagines herself to be a haunted house, the closeup shot shows Tuca and Speckle knocking on the front door... which is located at her groin.
- Epiphany Therapy: Averted - Bertie wants this, but the aesop of the episode is that real therapy is much messier. Rather than put forth the energy and emotional labor that would entail, Bertie wants a quick fix that will make it so she stops having panic attacks. However, all the therapists offering said quick fix turn out to be quacks, not what Bertie needs, or help make her situation worse. In the end, she decides to go back to Dr. Joanne, a kindly, patient, and understanding therapist who guides Bertie to discuss and heal from her trauma.
- Fourth-Wall Portrait One of the painter's "paintings" of Tuca is an actual photograph of a toucan.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus:
- Tuca's dating app profiles appear on screen for a couple seconds, including such gags as her with her beak full of Havarti cheese (with the Brick Joke caption "Where the Havarti at?"), "toucans are members of neotropical near passerine bird family", and "@*$%-+~/??!".
- The descriptions of the various therapists that Bertie is seeking online. One, "Dr. Upsidedown", has the text written upside down.
- Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Both Dr. Esther Emu and her secretary say "frick" when Bertie enters her office.
- Imagine Spot:
- Bertie imagines Speckle and Tuca ditching her for a "super chill girlfriend" who is a surfing flamingo with a Valley Girl accent. When Bertie and Speckle go out to eat, their waitress is just that.
- Dr. Emu's advice to Bertie is to "imagine the world five minutes in the future". This backfires when said Imagine Spot turns out to be the restaurant on fire and the chef running out with blood gushing from his eyes. This ends up happening when Tuca, Bertie, and Speckle leave the restaurant early; Tuca knocks over a candelabra, setting a table on fire and scaring the flamingo waitress, who flings meat skewers into the chef's eyes.
- Lampshade Hanging: Tuca finds a tube of lip balm and point out that it's made for animals that, like her, don't have lips. When a dog character points out that it doesn't make sense, she calls him the "logic police".
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: As the "Sex Bus" scenes are framed like a reality show, they are narrated with a dramatic voiceover. Said voiceover turns out to be one of the prospective dates auditioning.Male bird: And here we are at round three, in which Tuca decides if a contestant is a good voiceover announcer.
- Earlier in the episode, the therapist keeps rambling about how Tuca and Bertie's names sound wrong and eventually transitions to the theme song.
- Narrative Shapeshifting: Bertie imagines herself to be a haunted house, and her body shifts to looking like an actual haunted house.
- Ocular Gushers: Bertie breaks down crying in this fashion when her tactic of "repeating colors" backfires due to their dinner being entirely red, like blood.
- Stop Copying Me:Therapist: To manually reset your socially neurotic brain, repeat whatever it is your conversation partner is saying.Bertie: Repeat whatever it is your partner is saying.Therapist: Okay, stop repeating me.Bertie: Stop repeating me.Therapist: ...You are a very handsome therapist?Bertie: What?
- Toilet Humor: The running gag with the flamingo waitress is that she never shits. She undergoes Potty Failure at the end, however, which is met with a standing ovation.
- Visual Pun: The bird who works as Dr. Emu's secretary happens to be a secretarybird.
- Waxing Lyrical: The therapist Bertie visits at the beginning of the episode says Tuca and Bertie's name sound weird together, and demonstrates it by saying "Tuca and Bertie, Tuca and Bertie, Bertie and Tuca" - which is the (only) lyrics of the theme song.
