Tropes K to P - TV Tropes

• Karma Houdini: Mr. Kornada is apparently very used to dodging responsibility for his actions.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: The quote above? Happens precisely one strip before this trope starts to hit Mr. Kornada hard. He tries to extend the warranty before and during the ensuing trial, but his attempts prove fruitless.
• Keeping the Enemy Close: Sam isn't so much an enemy as he is a Spanner in the Works. Max still greets him because the only thing keeping the robots from getting their freedom is a monkey wrench in the works, and he wants to keep an eye on the wrench.
• Keep the Reward: Florence is less than enthused to see the robots have granted her a rather massive reward, enough to easily pay for the reactor the Savage Chicken needs, and insists the factory give her a regular quote. Unfortunately, it turns out the crew can't afford the regular fee.
• Kent Brockman News: Overhype News, presented by Rants Freely.
• "Kick Me" Prank: Well, for robots, it's a "Recycle Me!" sign on their back.
• Kick the Dog: Discussed by Max and Bill. Max asks Bill if a human ordered a robot to kick a puppy, what would stop the robot from doing it? Bill's view that robots are supposed to carry out the orders of humans, is based on humans not giving robots bad orders; he has to concede that people like Max trying to teach robots morality is the only thing stopping it.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: Invoked after a polite version is used.

  Sam [thinking]: Anti-recovery. Anti-recovery. I like it. What a pleasant way of saying "let's kick 'em while they're down."

• Lampshade Hanging: The act of hanging a lampshade. The base commander first lampshades the convenient presence of censor panels all around the shower area. A robot then lampshades the presence of a lampshade by carrying a lampshade. Florence then lampshades the lampshading of a lampshade by observing that Doctor Bowman must have run out of panels for the robots to carry. Or she's saying that the cartoonist has run out of panels for the day's strip. Confused yet?
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The memory blocking drug used on Florence, which prevented the conversion of short-term memory to long-term storage for 18 hours.
• Laser-Guided Broadcast: "Are you a genetically engineered wolf looking for a temporary reactor to transport to the asteroid belt? Try Kinetic Chemicals for all your spacefaring needs."

  Florence: Even though this is exactly what I'm after, targeted ads this specific make me want to change the privacy settings on my browser.

• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • Mr. Kornada fires a programmer who helped develop Gardener in the Dark as to create a "disgruntled worker" to blame in case things go south. This backfired when said worker recorded Kornada's orders, exposing the lie.
  • After repeatedly attempting to maul and/or eat Sam, Beekay comes face to face with one of Sam's biggest fears.
• Last of His Kind: Dr. Bowman is the last of the genetically enhanced chimpanzees.
• Late to the Punchline: Sam didn't understand which rail the city council was talking about until this strip.
• Lawful Stupid: The test robot for "Gardener in the Dark", as exploited by Sam via Loophole Abuse.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
• Lethal Chef:
• Let Me Get This Straight...:
  • When Florence tries to explain the extremely complicated situation around Gardener in the Dark, Sam skips to the end.
  • And before that was Sam's emergency call.
• Let's You and Him Fight: Dr. Bowman made his neural networks able to learn and eventually outgrow any safeguards, whereas the people overseeing the project wanted hardcoded safeguards that permanently limited thought. Since they all had different ideas as to what thoughts the safeguards should limit, Dr. Bowman encouraged them so that they would argue with each other until the project's deadline, at which point his neural network concept got implemented by default.
• Liar's Paradox: Sam Starfall boasts that he's the greatest liar in the world in the Monday 2 November 1998 strip. When Helix queries how that claim can be verified, Sam's response is, "You'll just have to trust me."
• Lie to the Beholder: Robots use transponders as the primary means of identifying each other. This means that a robot will "see" whatever the transponder tells it is there, even if it wouldn't actually fit in the space available, or if the transponder is on an organic being rather than a robot, or if there's nothing there but the transponder connected to a battery.
• Literal Metaphor: When it comes to "bugs in the system", 2000+ crickets would indeed be the stuff of legends.
  • Also a protype reactor that lost its plasma containment, becoming literal Vapor Ware.
  • When the inspectors mob goes from angry to panicked, he thinks "I don't know what happened to my beautiful mob, but I'm sure somehow that Sam is behind it!" Guess where Sam is?
  • When you shake hands with Sam you should count your fingers afterwards. At least if you're a robot with detachable fingers.
• Little Girls Kick Shins: Hazel kicks the shin of a man who pulled Florence's tail without asking first. Subsequent discussion establishes that it's one of her main modes of communication.
• Locking MacGyver in the Store Cupboard: In this strip, a security lockdown traps Florence in an equipment storage room. She makes a Note to Self to remind her about the situation thanks to her memory being fiddled with, noting that with the equipment she can leave either through the door or by taking the side of the building off.
• Logic Bomb: Dvorak's "Omniquantism" seems to have this effect on some other A.I.s, causing one in three to lock up.
• Lonely Together: Winston observes that sex ratios mean that both he and Florence are destined to be alone, so they might as well be alone together.
• Longevity Treatment: Life extension drugs are available over the counter. At one point, Florence (an uplifted red wolf) states that her projected lifespan of 160 years is slightly shorter than that of a human.
• Look Behind You:
  • "Helix! Look! It's an obvious distraction!" "Where?! ... I don't see any obvious distraction."
  • Later, with other robots: "Look! It's Bill Gates!"
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Sam knows that AI safeguards prevent them from harming humans and has gotten rather good at rephrasing things that would annoy humans as things that would 'keep them from harm'. It helps when the AI he's talking to has reason to want some measure of revenge on the human in question that their safeguards would normally prevent, such as getting Dvorak and Qwerty to force Mr. Kornada to go to a hospital and preventing him from attending the meeting he faked a heart attack to get to or convincing Florence to help make exploding cigars for the mayor on the justification that 'smoking is bad and these will help her want to quit' after the mayor just 'treated her like a toaster'.
  • Robots and A.I.s learning to use this is a plot point. In one early incident, Sam actually teaches Florence how to engineer her own loopholes when the need arises.

    Sam: Never ask for permission. Put your superiors in a position where you automatically have permission unless they actively take steps to stop you. Or as I like to call it, "putting human inertia to work".

  • Florence tells a robot programmed not to obey non-human instructions not to give her the answer to her questions. Sam tells the robot not to treat them as if they were human, completely circumventing the programming.
  • Edge has figured out how to disobey orders he doesn't like and do what he wants by twisting things so that doing them keeps humans from harm.
  • Being the Chief of Operations at the South Pole base, Henri has learned that if you don't abuse every loophole in the system to cut through the red tape, nothing will ever get done.
  • The Mayor's assistant (and acting Mayor) explains to Sam that one of the issues he might run into when trying to claim a planet is that the current law states any group can lay claim to an undeveloped planet if they manage to establish permanent human presence. However, the law is vague enough that many corporations and countries seed the cosmos with millions of sublight probes containing a few human cells each. Very few are actually interested in planets, per se - it's the money they seek to extort from people who actually want the planet. Sam being Sam, he immediately views this (not inaccurately) as a scam.
  • Florence's "parents" cannot enroll her is school as a student. They can however, send her as a helper dog to assist a disabled neighbor.
• Loser Buys Lunch: Sam and Max, both trying to skip out on the check at a restaurant, agree to a race where the loser pays both checks. The restauranteur, having dealt with them before, arranges for them to race at washing dishes, then "accidentally" misses seeing who wins the first two times. The third time...

  Restauranteur: What would you call two guys who were tricked into washing dishes not once, but three times?
  Sam: Sounds like a couple losers to me.
  Restauranteur: Gentlemen, your bills.

• Ludicrous Speed: Courtesy of a JATO rocket strapped to the truck he's using, Sam gets to experience this.
• Lying by Omission: Invoked when Clippy makes a highly illicit flight to a secret base as part of a criminal conspiracy. Being a Robot, he's a Bad Liar and can just be ordered to tell the truth, so his hirelings ask him to hide in a closet — if he's questioned, he can say that he was hiding there during the flight, omitting that it was his flight.

  Mr. Parka: Just because something is true doesn't mean it's not a lie.

Savage Chicken AI: Sir, might I suggest your time could be better utilized by inspecting my rear end instead of the engineer's?

• The Mall: Distinctive because Jean has a single major city, so there's really no need for more than one. Florence applies her engineered intellect to shopping and discovers Things Man Was Not Meant to Know - at least as far as the woman, a.k.a Niomi, escorting Flo deems them.
• Man in the Machine: The Police chief was severely injured when fighting a fire in the first robot factory, resulting in him needing a mobility suit to do anything but talk.
• Maniac Monkeys: The uplifted chimpanzees, meant to be living weapons. The only survivor, Doctor Bowman, managed to quell his aggressiveness by neutering himself. Even so, and in spite of his intelligence and benevolence, he's still psychotic and rage-prone.
• Mars Needs Women:
  • Parodied here, when Sawtooth grabs a nonfunctional robot to read its memory during the robot war story arc.
  • Lampshaded and gender flipped by Florence here.

    Florence: You've seen the covers of the old science fiction magazines. Non-humans always go for humans. It's the price you pay as a species for being drop-dead sexy.

• Marilyn Maneuver: Happens with both an anonymous Marilyn look-alike and Helix's pet Emu in this strip.
• Master of Illusion: An interesting variation. Robots primarily identify each other using transponder info, meaning that pretty much anyone can fool robot senses using false transponders that don't match their body. When factory one robots learn about the trick, they organize a masquerade party.
• Mathematician's Answer: "Helix, does this symbol mean there's something valuable in there or something in there that will kill me?" "Both!"
• McNinja: French ninja waiters.
• Mechanical Lifeforms: How about Mozart birds? Some robots try to fill what they perceive as ecological niches. And this doesn't always end well.
• Meet Cute: Florence knocks on Winston's door during a hurricane while he is watching werewolf movies.
• Meaningful Echo: When Winston first nurses Florence back to health and realises he's attracted to her personality and intellect, he reminds himself that romancing a patient, already unethical enough when it's between two humans, is an absolute no-go when the doctor is a veterinarian. They still become a romantic couple nonetheless, but the Chief of Police later warns them that the current colony laws make it illegal for humans to try anything naughty with non-human mammals, so they have to be really careful about what they are doing (and what is seen by other people) together.
• Metaphorically True: Sam opts to use this when sending a message to Florence's owner.
• Mildly Military: The Jean planetary military is on vacation during the events of the Gardener in the Dark arc, and Florence is informed that he won't be back until after the weekend.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Lampshaded.

  Blunt: Let me simplify. Can a. Normally functioning. Robot. Using Dr. Bowman’s. Neural design. Intentionally harm a human?
  Sawtooth: Only if it will prevent greater harm to other humans.
  Blunt: Who decides. Greater harm? What is to stop. Majority humans. From turning us. Against. Minority humans? Harm. Does not have. To be. Direct. We could be. Ordered. Not to assist. A group. Economically. Remove robots. From the equation. And you remove. The problem.
  Sawtooth: (What is it about economics and treating everything as numbers that makes some people so cheerfully sociopathic?)

• Mind-Reformat Death: The effect of Gardener in the Dark. Affected robots have their neural circuits pruned so aggressively that the original personality is destroyed.
• Miranda Rights: Amended as appropriate to robot culprits.

  Robot officer: You have the right to data integrity. Should you give up this right, accessed memories can and will be used against you. You have the right to tech support.

• Mirror Chemistry: Pfouts uses right handed amino acids, while Earth lifeforms use left handed ones. This chemistry is cited as a reason for the Bowman neural uplift package, uplifting native species to sapience on worlds hostile to Earth life.
• Missing Time: Florence winds up missing a large chunk of a day's memories thanks to a chemical that inhibits the transfer of short term memories to long term storage, during a trip to Ecosystems Unlimited. Between some notes to herself and scents left on her fur she's able to fill in some of the details, however.
• Mistaken for Afterlife: Clippy the robot is dismantled to prevent him carrying out a plot for world domination ordered by Mr Kornada. When he is reactivated, he believes that he has died and gone to an afterlife, partly because he's in a White Void Room (an electronically isolated secure room, to contain any hostile actions he might take before matters get straightened out) and the first person he sees is his rightful owner, who Kornada had convinced him was dead so that he would accept Kornada's orders.
• Mistaken for Profound: A robot realizes that Sam is attempting to scam it, and decides that he's trying to teach it a lesson (which it expounds on at length, and which legitimately is an important insight) about human nature, so that it can serve humans better.
• Modesty Towel:
  • Florence wears one after taking a bath at Winston's place, until he donates one of his shirts to provide for her modesty.
  • Florence puts one on when she is called to the videophone.
• Moment Killer:
• Mondegreen Gag: How Tex went from making dishware to a government position in geophysics.

  Tex: Then one day some government folks asked if I knew anything about Tex Tonic Plates. When I told them I built them from scratch, they said "You're our man.", and I've been in geophysics ever since.

• Moody Mount: Sam tries to ride Polly the emu to escape from an angry mob, but she refuses. He gets her to run by pulling off one of his facial tentacles and putting it on a stick.
• Mooning: Not shown onscreen, but Helix exclaims "Sam! You just mooned the mayor!" How an alien squid in an environment suit has a recognizeable bottom to moon people with is not explained.
• Morton's Fork: Invoked by Florence as part of her plan to delay Gardener in the Dark by removing the option of simply undoing her changes to the system.

  Clippy: We can't go back without opening security holes. We can't go forward without introducing unknown code into our programs.

• Mother Nature, Father Science: Inverted. The closest we get to a Nature Hero is the "male" Stupid Good Ridiculously Human Robot; OTOH, Team Science has the female red wolf engineer who shows signs of Science-Related Memetic Disorder. Winston on the other hand is a male scientist who works with the environment.
• Motivation on a Stick: Sam uses one of his facial tentacles this way so he can ride Polly and escape an angry mob.
• Mugged for Disguise: Blunt and Edge will occasionally steal random transponders to pass themselves off as other machines.
• Mundane Luxury: Since Jean is still being terraformed, some naturally-grown materials are still rather hard to come by. Niomi mentions that until as recently as a year ago, clothing had to be made from plastics, and for a trip to a space station in the asteroid belt, the crew stocks up on valuable trade goods worth several times their weight in gold, like hot sauce and organic spices.
• Mundane Solution: Florence is fond of these when applicable. On the other end of the spectrum, many robots are so used to using things like transponders and GPS for recognition and navigation that they have honest trouble employing mundane methods in their absence.
• Mundane Utility:
  • Robots normally only identify each other by their ID transponders. This lets a few robot muggers disguise themselves simply by stealing transponders and turning off the ones they were built with. When the rest of robot society finds out about this, they throw a masquerade ball.
  • When Dvorak gets a hold of the Gardener in the Dark code, he immediately notes that a scaled-back, temporary version could be used to make a robot drunk.

    Maxwell Post: Let's try to solve this crisis before you create a new one.

• Must Have Caffeine:
• My Car Hates Me: An unusually literal example: Sam's spaceship's AI was trying to kill him for a while. Now it has settled on injury/maiming.
• My Defense Need Not Protect Me Forever: A common and contagious survival trait.
• My Eyes Are Up Here:
  • Not for the usual reason: Winston's squeaky plastic shoe covers are distracting to Florence, who says it sounds like his boots are full of rodents.
  • For the usual reason, but said by the ship's AI to a ship inspector thrown off by Florence's appearance, in this strip.
• My Instincts Are Showing:
• My Life Flashed Before My Eyes: As Dvorak and Qwerty, both robots, are airlifted out of a collapsing building in a hurricane:

  Dvorak: My whole life just flashed before my eyes.
  Qwerty: Mine's still flashing. I've got to buy some faster memory.

• Naked Apron:
• Naked Nutter: At some point in the first 2300 strips, humanoid robots in the city start to be expected to wear clothes.

  Reporter robot: You sound quite rational for someone who isn't wearing any pants.

  Blunt: Oh! For! The!... Look. Just frame me. From. The waist up.

• Naked People Are Funny: A running gag is that Florence rarely ends the day with her clothes intact, to the point that Helix brings a spare set, knowing that she will need it. It's almost always played for laughs.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
• Nap-Inducing Speak: Exaggerated and exploited: At Ecosystems Unlimited, Varroa uses Florence's remote to put her to sleep in the middle of a medical questionnaire, reassuring Sam that she'll assume she dozed off from boredom — and just to be sure, the questionnaire contains "Alistair Darling's Commons Performance on Budget", which is so boring his computer went into sleep mode three times while downloading it. He failed to account for Florence's canine sense of smell, with which she quickly figures out the truth.
• Nature Lover: Sam, in a strictly limited sense. He seems to actively prefer wastelands in the midst of terraforming rather than forests and bushland, presumably because in the latter case there's things that want to eat him.
• Necessary Drawback: Doctor Bowman repurposed the Bowman's Wolves' mirror neurons to react to humans, so they could understand human gestures and body language properly. The downside is that the mirror neurons now aren't responding to their own species.
• Needle in a Stack of Needles:
• The Needs of the Many:
  • In strip 2162, Florence says, "There are over 450 million robots. There are only fourteen Bowman's wolves. If I have to choose, I have to go with the robots." Florence is a Bowman's wolf and would sacrifice her own race to save the robots.
  • One woman attempts to use this argument, stating that the money she and her husband could get for helping kidnap Florence could buy passage to Jean for their entire family. Her husband points out how cruel the course of action would actually be.

  Husband:Yes. It sounds very good until you are designated one of the few.

• N.G.O. Superpower: The planet's terraforming and most of the colony's labour are performed by 450 million Ecosystems Unlimited robots. EU executives have de facto authority and security clearance comparable to the police chief and mayor, including a financial officer who has large discretionary power to make sure the colony doesn't go independent before EU is paid.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!:
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!:
• Ninja Prop: One strip shows a character waiting at the spaceport with an airport greeting sign, with a panel saying "Meanwhile, at the spaceport" above his head. The next panel reveals that the panel is another in-universe sign, being held up by the character next to him.
• Nipple and Dimed: Even robots are subject to this, as seen in the first gratuitous shower scene. Helix sees black stripes across Florence's chest due to a PG filter in his vision system, blocking out the view of her nipples (or where they would be; see Hand-or-Object Underwear, above). Though there's a reason for this, given that by default robot video feeds are publicly accessible.
• No Biochemical Barriers:
  • Played straight with Sam, whose more simplistic biology makes him edible to just about everything (including herbivores), but inverted with the planet Pfouts, where Earth life can't survive at all thanks to that planet's Mirror Chemistry.
  • In a later strip, Sam notes that between this and the lack of evolution on his planet (they don't even have beetles! No insects have learned to fly!), a cheaper way to inflict mass extinction on his planet than firing nukes at it would be to drop ant colonies on it.
• Nobody Here but Us Statues: Sam escapes pursuit by pretending to be part of a display in a hunting supplies shop—which works because, presumably due to public demand—their practice targets are effigies of Sam.
• No-Dialogue Episode:
  • A shortish one here.
  • Beginning here and continuing for over twenty strips before someone finally speaks a recognisable word. On the Nice forum (made unavailable since then) Mr. Stanley said that particular story arc wasn't originally to be wordless, but after a few strips he decided to go without a dialogue for a while.
• Nobody Poops: Averted in #536, and again when Florence visits Ecosystems, Unlimited, starting here. An Info Dump on the now-dead Nice's Freefall forum states that Florence needs to use the facilities more often than humans, thanks to the physiological modifications to allow bipedal motion not fully taking into account the effect of gravity on her internal organs, which when she stands upright press down on her bladder. The author did the research.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Florence is the ONLY reason Mr. Kornada is still alive. He steals her radio headset as he's being evacuated. Then he fakes a heart attack to force the robots present to leave her in freezing water with a life expectancy of twenty minutes so they can take him to what he acknowledges to be a completely pointless meeting. It later turns out that he's arranging for the lobotomizing of every A.I. on Jean, for the sake of stealing from their bank accounts.
• No Kill like Overkill: The regular police tech didn't want Clippy reactivated and instead advised that he be burnt to atomic ash, the ash sealed in yttrium barium copper oxide and then dropped into a liquid nitrogen sea.
• Noodle Implements:
  • A dirigible, two ducks, and half a ton of explosives. Later: A coffee pot, half a ream of paper, and three fully automatic hot glue guns.
  • Sam's good with these. According to the manual, he ticked off his planet's royal family in an incident involving "a zeppelin, a loop-the-loop manoeuvre, and pudding, lots of pudding".
    • For an onscreen example, he once escaped police custody leaving the force in utter disarray through various comedic means.
  • Also, Florence trying to use scents to get clues about what happened when she had temporary amnesia.
  • A rare look at noodle implements in the planning stages.
  • One juror's suggestion of a punishment for Kornada, which apparently involves rubber hoses, a penguin, and a threshing machine.
• Noodle Incident:
  • invoked by name, in reference to the original.
  • There is even a Noodle Incident with Noodle Implements, The royal family is not too happy with Sam due to an incident involving a zeppelin, a "Loop the loop" maneuver, and pudding. Lots and lots of pudding. This indirectly led him to leave his home planet.
  • While breaking Florence out of the dog pound, Sam actually threatens to cause another Noodle Incident in order to convince her to ignore her orders to stay put.
  • We only hear the end of the telling of a story about the naming of "Lost Truck Lake".
  • Varroa Jacobsoni apparently discovered a ballet company formed from old terraforming robots. His supervisor refused to believe him even after seeing a photo of a crane lifting an earthmover in a tutu.
  • Varroa seems prone to these as he had restrictions on what he was allowed to do after an incident with radioactive mutant exploding hamsters kept in lead cages.
  • Florence also found herself in such an incident in college: It involved herself, a forklift, and her go-to-sleep-instantly remote control.
  • The Mayor claims to have shrapnel wounds from the time her mother made pancakes.
  • Right before breakfast, the Mayor ordered the cops to ship Sam to the other side of the planet. Right after breakfast, the Mayor's assistant orders Sam's release, by which time he's already managed to evade his captors, which somehow involved balloon animals, a sausage chain, a tuba, and a flock of ducks...
  • Waking up shackled to a chair is Florence's fourth worst wakeup call.
  • Qwerty has an experimental nose that he claims explodes every so often.
  • The local police chief knows from direct experience that if you tie Sam to something by his facial tentacles, it will take 3 minutes and 47 seconds for him to untie himself.
  • Florence once spent a week on an asteroid after life support went out, which is why she's now jealous of Sam who can change his underwear without removing his environment suit. She's still not happy he was wearing hers at the time though.
  • When Florence was a puppy, she apparently did something that was caught on video and sent to her Amazingly Embarrassing Parent Company.
  • As part of Sam's montage to liftoff, we get this entry.
• Not Helping Your Case: In the debate Blunt thinks he is. He isn't.
• "Not Illegal" Justification: A man attempts to commit genocide just so that he could claim the victim's assets and he can't be charged with it because the victims, who were sapient robots, were not legally recognized as people at the time of the crime. He instead is convicted of attempting to enrich himself at his company's expense and the judge strips him of his money and forces him to get a bottom-level restaurant job. And that judge was being restrained. The other possible judge wanted to sentence him to a job working with extremely dangerous chemicals.
• Not in My Backyard!: A few.
• Not-So-Innocent Whistle:
  • During a "Day of the Dead" celebration, when Qwerty says he thinks that his late owner would be proud of him and Dvorak except for the "one tiny incident" of when Dvorak dug up and motorized the corpse, Dvorak plays a musical note.

    Qwerty: We did learn an important lesson.

    Dvorak: No matter how much you miss your owner, it's considered bad form to dig up and motorize their corpse.

    Qwerty: Which wouldn't have been so bad had Mister "Information Wants to be Free" kept his diagrams to himself.

    Dvorak: But you must admit, that was the most memorable "Day of the Dead" celebration ever.

  • Varroa Jacobsoni unintentionally reveals to Clippy the robot that he hits his computer when he whistles after being questioned about it.

    Varroa: [Florence] is not going to be hurt, right?

    Clippy: Of course not. She is malfunctioning. You don't hit the box or the monitor when your computer malfunctions, do you?

    [Varroa puts his hands behind his back, looks away and whistles]

    Clippy: Oh, dear. You're one of those people.

  • When Sam notices robots following him, they play musical notes in a failed attempt to remain surreptitious.
• Note to Self: When Florence has amnesia, this is the only way she can remember anything, using a pen and some sticky notes found elsewhere in the Ecosystems Unlimited testing facility.
• Not Rare Over There:
  • Discussed by Sam in one strip. Since Jean is in the process of being Terraformed, wood and other organics are extremely rare and valuable, while on his planet, the landfills are full of cheap wood items. On the other hand, diamonds are so cheap on Jean that they're thrown away, while a diamond grill he found in the trash would be worth a king's ransom on his planet.
  • For the same reason, Florence is given a dress made out of gold by a robot who's into making clothing. Organic cloth is all but impossible to obtain and extremely expensive, but metals are dirt cheap and available in any form you want.
• "Not So Different" Remark: When the police chief shows Sam the information he collected on Florence's kidnappers, he heads off to check out the secret facility at the south pole. Helix then points out the chief just tricked Sam into doing police work without pay.
• No Water Proofing In The Future: During the hurricane story arc, it's established that Helix isn't waterproof, which is why Florence has to do the dangerous rescue stuff. It's later Discussed that many robots are 'indoor models' that lack waterproofing - and in fact tend to fear water - by an industrial robot who is designed for heavy outdoor work and is waterproof.
• Nuclear Torch Rocket: The comic uses fusion rockets as sublight engines. Luckily, the AI on most ships is smart enough to refuse to turn them on while planetside. Unlike many examples the need for separate reaction mass (such as water) is addressed, and Sam isn't too amused to be flying a steam-powered spaceship.

• Obsolete Occupation: The Corrupt Corporate Executive Kornada was Kicked Upstairs to Vice President of Paper Clip Allocation... for a paperless company, on a partly-Terraformed planet where organic materials like paper are extremely rare. It still results in a disastrous Reassignment Backfire.
• Octopoid Aliens: Sam Starfall is implied to look like an octopus or squid wrapped around a stick figure artificial skeleton under the environment suit that protects him from Earth-like atmospheres, and humans from going insane from looking at him.
• Oh, Crap!: A few times.
  • In general, this is everyone's response when they learn that the robots' human safeguards are just that - human safeguards. If a human ordered a robot to harm another human, they kick in - exterminate all turtles on the planet or kick a puppy? They'd do it without a second thought.
  • This is the general reaction of anyone who knows Sam Starfall and sees him grinning, as it generally means serious trouble.
  • It's almost like "Eureka!". But not exactly.
  • Also, when veterinarian Winston Thurmad discovers his thermometer is working just fine.
  • Sam, when after carefully explaining to Helix they essentially stole Florence by bribing a clerk and getting her off cryo for some emergency repairs on the Savage Chicken, hears the drugs used in cold sleep are so hard on the body there needs to be a period of five to seven years between each use, when the ship he had her taken from leaves in three days.
  • The Mayor's reaction when she realized she had been tricked into giving a direct order to hit her with a bunch of pies.

    Mayor: I hate you, Sam. I hate you more than any woman's ever hated a cephalopod.
    Sam: Why, thank you! But right now, I need to duck.

  • Prior to this, her aide realizes he's up Pie Creek without a fork.
  • On finding out about Florence's and Winston's Interspecies Romance, Niomi advises Florence to "Proceed very cautiously."
  • Whenever anyone learns the full scope of the robot problem.

    Winston: Why hasn't Ecosystems Unlimited said something? Researchers have been after artificial consciousness for years.
    Florence: There are twenty thousand adult humans on the planet. There are over four hundred and fifty million robots.
    Winston: Would you be offended if I panic a little?
    Florence: Not at all. In fact, it would be nice to have the company.

  • When Florence learns that Gardener in the Dark is being launched that night, she doesn't literally say "Oh crap!", but....

    Florence [thinking]: I'm sitting on a bomb trying to disarm it. This is the feeling you get when the bomb bays open.

  • Sam gets a (thankfully mistaken) one when he's bragging to Max Post about what Florence has been up to regarding Gardener in the Dark. Max, unfortunately, doesn't get the memo until a moment later.

    Sam: It's a really infectious piece of information. Florence said not to mention it near anything electronic.
    Max: You've already mentioned it near electronics!^note 
    Sam: Then I've said too much. I must now go to save the day. Farewell! (thinking) I wonder if I can outrun an email?

  • When Mr. Kornada's robot servant realizes that his employer's plan has failed, he doesn't say anything, but the sentiment is there.
  • When Max Post calls Mr. Raibert to tell him what just happened.

    Raibert: Holy THIS! There was a safeguards program in the queue. WE JUST WIPED A HALF-BILLION ROBOTS!
    Max: Bill, calm down. It didn't go out.
    Raibert: Okay. Not worst case. But finding the equivalent of a live nuke with the timer flashing zero is not a situation that fosters calmness!

  • The Chief of Police has one when Mr. Kornada orders the robots present to 'defend him' while the chief is trying to place Mr. Kornada under arrest (for the record, this would be a form of resisting arrest which is itself an arrestable offense). Fortunately, the robots interpret this to mean legal defense.
  • Sam when he learns that the Chief of Police knows how Florence came to be on the planet and might tell her.
  • The guard at the south pole base when he wonders where the remote that shuts off Florence went—then hears the crunching sound of Florence herself destroying the remote and realizes she's somehow nullified its effects.
  • Mr. Kornada is visibly alarmed when he learns about the effects of chlorine trifluoride, which he might end up having to work with directly if he refuses his toilet-cleaning job. It's a mild reaction by most standards, but notable since this is the first time we've seen him showing anything akin to fear — or, indeed, any emotion at all besides his usual unshakable self-assurance and nose-in-the-air contempt for everyone and everything that isn't Mr. Kornada. For the first time, he's actually begun to understand that he isn't untouchable, and that his situation really is serious.
• Oh, My Gods!: Niomi exclaims "Isaac Asimov on a bicycle!" when a realization hits her regarding the Bowman's Wolf project.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Edge and Blunt are universally distrusted subsequent to their spree of robot kidnappings.
• One-Gender Race:
  • There are 11 female Bowman's wolves and 3 males, a gene pool so shallow it doesn't even have a wading section. Of those males, one is in a monogamous relationship with one of the females, one is "married to his work", and the last has noticed that there are only three males and anyone who wants his semen had best be prepared to pay enough that he'll never have to work again in his life.
  • Florence mentions at one point that one of her goals is to prove the worth of the Bowman's wolves so more will be created, until a stable breeding population can be established.
• One Phone Call: Invoked. To distract a suspicious security guard, Sam announces that if he's going to be arrested he gets one phone call, then steals the guard's phone and runs away.
• One Thing Led to Another: Name-dropped after Sam ticked off the police force using a roll of surgical tubing, a plastic bucket, and a rubber duck.
• One-Word Title: Also a Portmantitle as it's a compound word.
• Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap: Jean is still being terraformed so all organics are expensive, and synthetics are the normal materials for everyday use.
• On Three: Or, if you're a robot, on "00000011".
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: Niomi warns Tangent against thinking of Florence as a dog. The very next strip...
  • A random robot nicknamed 'Blinky' is mad that Sam is now technically a savior of robot kind and angrily says they will find a way to make it even. Sam genuinely declares that he hadn't even considered a reward for his actions.

    'Blinky': This is going to be worse than I can possibly imagine, isn't it?

• Opposites Attract: Winston has "spacer gene" modifications, which include no body hair. Florence is covered in fur. Pointed out here.
  • Winston's parents are a scientific Genki Girl and The Stoic, who have similarly disparate views on genetic engineering.
• Orchestral Bombing: Sawtooth gives us a literal Orchestral Bombing. Orbital Bombardment in D Minor.
• Orion Drive: Mentioned; Sam raises the possibility of buying bombs on the cheap to compensate for the lack of a second reactor, but Florence tells him this kind of drive shouldn't be used if the ship's only good for one pulse. (And, more pressingly, that the need for a second reactor is for life support purposes, not propulsion). That said, she does find some merit in Sam's idea - strictly speaking, the bomb factory does have the necessary equipment to make the reactor the ship needs.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic: Florence resorts to direct sabotage to prevent the spread of the Gardener in the Dark program. Sawtooth's confused about how she's able to contemplate performing an illegal act when the very idea is literally unthinkable for them. Qwerty wonders whether they should seek mentorship from Sam on the topic.
• Oven Logic: Helix cooking:
• Order Versus Chaos: Sam unsurprisingly takes Chaos's side but does offer the argument that the chaotic end of the debate creates space for new things to grow.
  • Played for Laughs later when one of the newly-liberated robots wants to lock Sam into a contract for scheduled destruction.

    Sam: You can't set up an appointment for chaos! That defeats the whole point!

• Overly Long Scream: Happened at least a couple of times, in accordance with Cap'n Sam Starfall's philosophy, "When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!" Helix is usually eager to join in. In one notable incident near the beginning, the two of them are running in circles and screaming for long enough that they have to stop to take a deep breath (synchronized, even) before continuing. Florence comments on how inexplicable it is that Helix, who is a ROBOT, needs to stop for breath... Then she tears out his voice box to shut him up, and offers to do the same to Sam if he doesn't quiet down.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: Sam's coffee mug proclaims him to be the "World's Best Squid Captain". He's also the only Squid Captain on Planet Jean.
• Ow, My Body Part!: A tackled robot screams "Ow! My algorithms!"

• Paper-Thin Disguise: Sam Starfall’s attempt to try and sneak an unconscious Florence out of Ecosystems Unlimited relies on a smiley face drawn on a piece of paper stuck to her face.
• Paranoia Gambit: If Sam has a reputation anyway, it can do his work for him just as well as an actual plan. Also useful for inducing panic when a known liar and thief actually pays for goods stolen earlier.

  Sam: Being honest is more fun than I thought.

• The Pardon: For Sam, the police chief's offer to pardon him for his various crimes as a favor in exchange for his help with finding Florence in the aftermath of the Gardener in the Dark fiasco is a threat.
• Parenthetical Swearing: After learning that a necessary second reactor they were promised as payment for a delivery is unusable junk, leaving them stranded on a space station until they can figure out an alternative plan, Sam informs Helix about this and says they're going to talk to the station manager, calling him a "distinguished and esteemed gentleman". Helix notes that Sam's swearing gets really polite when he's unhappy.
• Pass the Popcorn: Florence dips into the box of doggy treats when the Chief of Police puts in a direct call to the supposedly "secret" South Pole base.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": While specific passwords aren't mentioned, several strips comment on how often people leave in the default password on devices, in a negative context.
• Perilous Power Source: The Polywell fusion reactor is actually relatively safe as fusion reactors go, and under Florence's competent control, not likely to become hazardous. Sam, however, being from a far less technologically advanced world, does not take the risk lightly.

  Sam: One of the scary things about Terrans is they're peaceful and still over half their power sources put out death rays as a byproduct.

• Person of Mass Destruction: Almost name-dropped in relation to Sam, who Florence once refers to as a "Weapon of Mass Distraction".
• Pet the Dog:
  • Sam Starfall, for all his insanity and greediness, has a good deal of sympathy for A.I.s in general, and he goes out his way to gave them all the support and help they need. Also (and possibly as a result of the previous), Sam, while frequently taking advantage of them, does care for the happiness of Helix and Florence, and anyone who makes the mistake of not treating them as "real" people in front of him will probably soon become the target of some of the mayhem that's Sam's hat.
  • Here is the first time that Sam proved to care more for his friends than to care for money. A few strips later, after all the robots were forced to take the only human in the ship to safety, Florence correctly suspects that Sam is upset to leave her behind.
  • Here an almost literal Pet the Dog moment. ("Almost" because, after all, she's a Wolf.)
  • Sam is so well accustomed in being threatened with violence for his crimes that, when Florence hugs him, Sam can't help but stop his theft at her request. He also understands to be a bad influence to her, but claims to be the inverse.
• Phrase Catcher: Florence. The first time any robot meets her...

  Every robot in the vicinity: DOGGY!

• Pictorial Speech-Bubble: The Say It with Hearts variant, when Helix hugs Florence to thank her for letting the rabbits go in the last panel.
• Pie in the Face:
• Pillars of Moral Character: Florence describes the debt an AI owes to its creators as a gimu debt.
• Plague of Good Fortune: During a fishing trip, Sam tries to haul a swamped boat to shore by hooking it with his fishing line. It doesn't work—he keeps missing the boat and catching fish instead. Even when he replaces a hook with a rock.
• Plasma Cannon: The Ecosystems Unlimited compound that Florence visits has plasma cannons mounted in its guard towers, though after serving as part of a punchline for one strip they're never heard of again.
• Please Put Some Clothes On: Beekay (Cute, but Cacophonic dog) gets into Sam's environmental suit, so Sam takes off his pants while Beekay is inside them. Florence objects.

  Florence: Sam! Cover yourself! No one wants to lose their sanity because you can't keep your pants on!

• Plug 'n' Play Technology: Dr. Bowman's neural design is applicable to both uplifted animals and robots, given that it's a general mechanism for increasing the complexity of a neural network, and robot brains are based on human brains.
• Poke the Poodle: All of the robots' attempts at crime can be described as this, to the point that they are asking Sam for advice.
• Police Are Useless: Florence wants to get arrested. Not only doesn't she qualify for being arrested, but she was asked to leave because she was a bad influence on the other policemen, causing a riot among the robot police when they hear about what she was trying to stop.
• Political Overcorrectness: Courtesy of equal opportunity laws on Jean:
  • In addition to sensible discrimination prohibitions like sex, age, race, and religion, it's also prohibited to discriminate on gene type, eye color, hair color, earlobe length, nostril width, personal hygiene (or lack thereof), punning...
  • Even criminals benefit from them, in that government funded buildings have to allow for handicapped access to the roof, the most common access method for burglars.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • Some robots build desalinization facilities to clean a river despite not having orders to. The reason why they didn't have orders to do that is because the area would be completely submerged soon, only no one told them that was going to happen.
  • Inverted at one point, Florence and Raibert don't communicate for good reasons, and as a consequence disaster is averted.

    Chief: I'm confused. Are missed communications a good thing or a bad thing here?

  • And Defied when Sam arranges a meeting between a floundering space station's management and union representative, with a neutral third-party acting as The Watson. The point was that rather than continuing to argue with each other, making each side have to explain their position to the third-party would get the other to listen in a way they hadn't been doing.

    Sam: If there's one thing watching sitcoms has taught me, many complications can be avoided if people would take five minutes and talk to each other.

• Portmantitle: As it's a compound word. Also a One-Word Title.
• Possession Implies Mastery: Averted. Sam owned the Savage Chicken for months before he learned he could open interface windows on the table.
• Post-Mortem Possessions: As part of the Day of the Dead celebrations, it's traditional to burn paper replicas of objects (such as money or cars) to send them to those in the afterlife. One robot burns a paper replica of himself, under the belief that it will get him into the afterlife just in case he doesn't have a soul.
• Potty Emergency: While tied to a chair, Florence realizes she needs to use the bathroom.
• Pounds Are Animal Prisons: The Mayor uses one on Florence in reaction to Sam's shenanigans.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Sam's criticism of Koronada's scheme:

  Sam: You don't kill the people you're stealing from. You want them alive and productive so you can steal from them again and again.

• Precious Puppy: Florence the adult is central to the story. Her younger self? Not so much, outside of Rule of Cute.
• Propaganda Machine: Discussed For Laughs between Winston and his father about whether Florence could be hacked in this strip.

  Gregor: Some people have no firewalls.

• Properly Paranoid: Florence assumes Ecosystems Unlimited was when giving her safeguards — as she points out to Sam, this is standard practice among engineers.
• Pun:
  • While driving a baby-shaped car, Sam states that "We'd have gotten more scrutiny if we had to leave via C Section."
  • Sam got blue gloves. He will no more be caught red handed.
  • The name of the police chief's mobility rig: "L Linear Rig B"^note .
  • Sam has one when he and Helix break into the museum to return an authorized autographed copy of The Star Wars Holiday Special.

    Sam: Any errors and we could end up like the Jedi, beaten senseless by a pair of Sithies.

  • Combined with Bilingual Bonus: A fairly rare kind of robot part, seen and identified here, is a foot with embedded cameras:

    Blunt: Used to be. Eye pods. Were quite common.

  • Another one appears here.

    Edge: Whoa! I know the boss was unhappy about retirement, but I never thought he'd Off himself.

  • In the ensuing plotline, when Edge is trying to figure out directions, a street sign indicates he's at the corner of Fifth and Beethoven.
  • Edge disconnects himself from Commnet by turning off first his radio, then his transponder. Then he finishes his precautions by wrapping tinfoil around his head and triumphantly yelling, "Commnet! Consider yourself foiled!"
  • Instructing Florence to disable her communications, Edge mentions her "blueteeth" if she has a "smart mouth"
  • Dvorak gives Sawtooth a Hat of Power that allows him to filter who has access to his feeds.

    Dvorak: If a client has a secret, you can keep it under your hat!
    Sawtooth: This is such a nice gift, I'm not even tempted to step on you for that pun.
    Dvorak: That also went into my calculations.

  • "Every electronic lifeform needs someone to keep them grounded."
  • "My partner left to archive his data. He requested back up."
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: "Sam. Remove. Your facial tentacles. From my arm."
• Punny Name:
  • Rants Freely, a newscaster.
  • The bureaucrat Sam meets is named Tex, who started a soda chain called Tex Tonics, which evolved into glass production to meet demand, then porcelain and fine china.

    Tex: Then one day some government folks asked if I knew anything about Tex Tonic plates. When I told them I built them from scratch, they said "You're our man.", and I've been in geophysics ever since.

  • The police chief's mobility rig is an A.I., designated L-Linear Rig B.
  • The nude spa is named the "Convenient Censer".
• Puppy-Dog Eyes:
  • Sawtooth attempts to use them to get Florence to attend a robot meeting. Unfortunately for him, puppy dog eyes only work when the eyes aren't bigger than [Florence's] head.
  • Inevitably, Florence is ordered to use them at weapons grade intensity. Being a canine, they work as designed.