I am truly ashamed to admit…it took me to the end of the episode to get the title.  The Belchies. I thought it was like an award, like the Emmys or Tonys.

No. It’s a riff on the GOONIES.  Sometimes I’m just not that quick on the uptake.

The Belchies...with Sloth/Taff, Cyndi Lauper, and everything!

Anyway….yay! Bob’s Burger is back!  And with an all new exterminator during the credits too! (Stan Mermin, The King of Vermin, sorry no screen grab available).

And with the beep of a metal detector, the show is back.  The kids are looking for buried treasure at the beach: Tina hopes they find tinfoil so they can recycle it; Gene hopes they find a shovel so he doesn’t have to dig with his hands.  At the beach we also meet Zeke, Jimmy Pesto Jr’s testosterone driven new friend.  They wrestle together. Tina enjoys.

It is Teddy who tells the family of the mystery of Caffrey’s treasure, hidden in the taffy factory.  Teddy’s uncle, who was a maid which was a job men did before women entered the work force and stole their jobs thank you very much, told him the story of the treasure…and tricked him with the butt drawing.  Louise remained convinced that the treasure is real, butt map and all because, if you were going to draw a map, what shape would you draw?

That’s right. A butt.

While the kids are sneaking out to explore the taffy factory before it’s demolition the next day, Bob and Linda go into their room for some wild, scheduled sexy times.  It is absolutely as awkward as it sounds.  They use a pair of “sexy dice” to spice things up, which never works as well as one would hope. The chair hug is probably my favorite.  Jon Benjamin let’s his Archer side come out here – never let it be said though, that Bob doesn’t try for debonair.

Bob and his mustache enticing Linda

The episode unravels pretty much the way you’d expect: the kids and their uninvited friends – Jimmy Jr., Zeke, and Jimmy’s weird younger brothers Ollie and Andy (I have a funcussion!) – explore the taffy factory looking for treasure.  Gene runs around licking things. The kids get stuck in an elevator, as you do, and Louise who is hellbent on finding the treasure won’t stand for that. She finds a way into the taffy factory’s tunnels and via one of Caffrey’s booby traps, finds a taffy guard whom she calls “Taff” (yes, now I realize Taff=Sloth).  They become best friends and she even tells him she’s going to take him home, and he’s going to live with her now.

Linda quickly puts the kibosh on that.

As always, what works on Bob’s Burgers are the little moments, the offhand comments.  For example, Bob’s raging erection caused by Linda slipping a little viagra into his cassarole.  We never see said erection, it is a kid’s show, but its effects are clear when Taff remains stuck to Bob…in the groinal region.  And of course another is Gene yelling “Let’s find butt treasure!” at the top of his lungs. That’s a keeper.

There’s also the running plotline of Tina using a pulp romance novel she found on the beach, I believe it was called “The Darkest Crevice”, as a guidebook for how to win over Jimmy Jr.  But her strong womanhood asserts itself and by the end of the episode she declared she is tired of hiding who she is just to attract ” a hot boy who dances his feelings”.

But I think my favorite call back in the episode is Teddy’s 3 bean salad party, bring your own bean. “Can I put you down for garbanzo?” he asks Bob. And then the construction worker has a great throwaway line where brings up the “bring your own bean” concept again.  It is so patently absurd and so wholly in the world of Bob’s Burgers.

Was this the funniest episode they’ve done? No.  It changes every so often, but mostly I give that title to Art Crawl.  But The Belchies was a good welcome back and I look forward to another great season.