Plot: Ten thousand smoits are stolen from a dancing duo right before a big competition. Smoits are essentially as good as money, redeemable for a variety of big prizes, so the suspect list is large. Fillmore and Ingrid have to figure out who the thief is and get the smoits back to their rightful owners.
Breakdown: Man, I love the vibe of this episode. It’s got a 1950s and then a 1920s type feeling to it. It’s great.
This show can’t really have kids stealing or gambling with massive amounts of money or else the real police would get involved, so we gotta deal with a fictional currency called smoits instead. Still, they’re redeemable for so many prizes that kids act as if they’re real money, allowing the story to go down fun routes like having an underground casino where smoits are being used as money.
Also, funnily enough, all they play down there is Old Maid and a game called Dandy for Candy, which is literally just Go Fish with candy-based cards. However, I do have to call shenanigans on that claim because there’s clearly a Craps table down there too.
Anyhoo, not only is the vibe very fun in this episode but so is the mystery. There is no shortage whatsoever of suspects in this episode, and they fit them all very organically into the runtime. Since everyone would want a massive amount of smoits, everyone has a motive.
Granted, the culprit turns out to be the one person who acts as if they don’t like smoits, which makes them a little obvious, but they were honestly so obvious that it looped me back around to thinking it couldn’t have been them. And even then it wasn’t the full story nor were they the only culprit.
That’s one of the weaker parts of this episode, to be honest. The partner that the culprit had didn’t fit in very well, especially given that the only other time we saw him in the episode she was treating him like crap for no reason if she was really in cahoots with him.
If I had to bring up other weak parts of the episode, I’d say there was really no point to the whole belt B-plot, if you can even call it a B-plot, and having the smoits get re-stolen in the end just to immediately get them back and also make it impossible to punish this culprit because he’s moving away the next day was weird.
With the belt B-plot, it’s literally just that Fillmore is too attached to his safety patrol belt that he refuses to get a new one even though his is literally falling apart. And, in the end, it melts in chili and he’s forced to get a new one. That’s it. There’s no lesson about moving on or being overly attached to stuff – it’s just, oh well, I guess I really do need a new belt now.
As a final note, this was probably the most Fillmore and Ingrid-shippy episode I’ve ever seen. Not only do they put Ingrid in a flapper dress and have her act as Fillmore’s, I guess, arm candy as he plays at the casino, but the ending is pretty blatantly shippy as they echo a line shared between two characters who, while never being said outright, are clearly romantically linked.
I did ship these two as a kid, but not hard, and today I really don’t. I just don’t think I’d want to see them dating. They work much better as a platonic partnership and best friends than I’d ever imagine they would romantically. Maybe things would change when they got older, but I doubt we’ll ever see a flash forward of this series.
All in all, an awesome episode and great season premiere.
Next Episode….
(One last thing, the Fandom page incorrectly says Tony Clementina is in this episode as a main character. He’s not. The character in question is named Toby.)
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