When Zach is given detention, Rusty and the rest of their friends try to toughen him up so he'll fit in.
Synopsis[]
Thanks to his mishap, Zach is given detention by Mr. Bolhofner.
At the middle school, the Action News Team is trying to come up with a new story to top their previous one. As they brainstorm ideas, Zach's alien life detector starts to beep, indicating that there's an alien nearby. While roaming in the hallways, Zach's machine indicates that Mr. Bolhofner is an alien, and proceeds to attack him. When Mr. Bolhofner asks him why he did that, Zach tries to prove he's an alien, only for his machine to reveal that he has a low battery. To add insult to injury, Mr. Bolhofner tells Zach that he has been given two days of detention for tackling a teacher. Zach's friends, having just arrived, are horrified about Zach's predicament, saying that middle school detention is far different from elementary school. Luckily, Rusty says that he knows how to help.
Sometime later, Rusty is holding a session with his friends called Rusty's School of Hard Knocks, where he'll teach Zach about how to get around all the different hardships of detention (as he claims to be a "certified baddie"). The lessons he teaches Zach include making a strong impression, establishing his dominance, and instilling fear with a tough backstory. These lessons are taught to Zach with scripted dialogue by Rusty, and although all of Rusty's friends are unamused by how corny the dialogue is, Zach states that he's ready for detention.
Later, Zach, now wearing a tough guy outfit, arrives to Mr. Bolhofner's classroom, where detention is set. Upon entering, he discovers the other students in detention include eighth-graders Anderson, Pablo and Taylor, who had previously antagonized Lincoln and company on the bus. Initially ridiculed for fumbling his entry, Zach asserts his dominance by revealing that he got detention for getting into a fight with Mr. Bolhofner. At first, the three are skeptical of his story, but when Mr. Bolhofner arrives with visible injuries from the attack earlier, they suddenly realize that he was telling the truth, and are left impressed. Later, at Gus' Games and Grub, Zach's friends congratulate him for surviving detention, and Zach is confident he has nothing more to fear when he has to go back for his second day tomorrow.
The next day, Zach arrives to detention, and the eighth graders, now devoted fans of Zach, tell him that they want to have some fun. Sneaking out of the detention room, the four arrive to the teacher's lounge, where the eighth graders reveal that they intend to plant numerous booby traps and pranks all over the room in order to get revenge on their teachers for all the times they gave them detention in the past, much to Zach's horror. Upon setting up all the pranks, the four arrive back to the detention room just as Mr. Bolhofner arrives to inform them that they're free to go.
Zach earns the trio's respect for standing up for himself.
Later, as the four prepare to go home, Zach decides to excuse himself to pick something up. However, this is actually just an excuse for him to go to the teacher's lounge and remove all the pranks. Unfortunately, after doing so, the eighth graders appear before him, having become suspicious of his true intent. This causes Zach to confess that he's not really the tough guy he claims to be and stands his ground by saying that the teachers don't deserve this kind of pranking. Suddenly, to Zach's surprise, the eighth graders reveal that they didn't want to go through with the pranks as well, with Anderson admitting that they only reason they did it was because he assumed the others wanted to. As a result, the four of them remain on good terms with each other and, the next day, Zach admits to his friends that all he really needed to do to survive detention was to just be himself.
Rusty has a routine for working out his abdominal muscles that he has shown on the Action News Team's reports, which has been poorly received by audiences.
Zach has received detention before in elementary school.
One student who attended Royal Woods Middle School a long time ago had his growth stunted after some of the bullies in the detention room gave him a wedgie.
Rusty once got an extremely painful mosquito bite on his knuckle that landed him in the school nurse's office.
Lincoln does not know how to recognize indicators for stage directions on a script.
Detention at Royal Woods Middle School is held in Mr. Bolhofner's trailer.
Mr. Bolhofner swims in the gymnasium pool every day.
Anderson, Pablo and Taylor aren't as tough as they claim to be, saying that they only acted the way they did out of peer pressure.
Stella questioning Rusty's self-proclaimed status as a "certified baddie" because of an overreaction to a mosquito bite is similar to Lincoln not believing that he could be courageous enough to watch The Harvester because he once cried when a bird flew into the gym in "The Price of Admission".
Irony: Despite Chandler winning the "best detention-getter" category in "How the Best Was Won", he is never seen in the detention room.
References[]
Tough Guise - The title of this episode is a pun of the phrase "tough guys".
