Bottle and Switch Episode

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We all know the Bottle Episode. They are designed to save money, and clearly show it.

Well, This Is Not That Trope. The Bottle and Switch Episode is when an episode seems to start as a low-budget yarn, with only the main cast and the bare minimum. Then it veers off-course, and the budget starts to flow.

Criteria where we get a Bottle and Switch Episode and not a bottle episode:

1. When it seems that the cast are going to be confined to a room or one set for an episode, they abruptly veer to a new place.
2. The budget clearly is higher than standard, either with special effects, guest stars, or more.
3. A Clip Show has new footage, especially if it shows events that people did not see before.

Examples of Bottle and Switch Episode include:

Anime and Manga

• Pokémon
  • "Pokémon Shipwreck" takes place mostly in the sunken St. Anne ship. Turns out that Ash and his friends, along with Team Rocket, are still alive! The boat has maintained a pocket of air for them, but it won't last for long. Misty takes charge because she knows the layout of the St. Anne's from building a model, and orders everyone to call truce so she can find a safe way out for them. The third act then takes place on a raft that the kids all made, with Team Rocket tagging along after nearly drowning. After they anger James's new Magikarp by accident, it evolves into a Gyrados that summons other Gyrados, and sets them all swirling in a cyclone. One of the most beautiful and devastating scenes emerges, separating everyone in the storm.
  • One episode features Ash, Misty and Brock visiting a haunted place in Lavender Town to catch a ghost Pokémon. It seems at first that the ghosts in question will chase them out, but Ash needs one of them to defeat Sabrina in a fair gym battle. So he goes in alone with Pikachu, only for a chandelier to fall on them. The rest of the episode has the ghosts showing an Astral Projection Ash and Pikachu their view of the world, from the Lavender Town views to their toy room before Ash and Pikachu decide to return to life.
• The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya features this in the Wham! Episode arc "Endless Eight". It at first seems that the second episode is an exact copy of the first, down to the dialogue, until the climax when Kyon learns everyone is in a Groundhog Day Loop. Turns out that Haruhi's latent powers were at it again; something about the summer is dissatisfying her, and she won't let her friends escape the loop subconsciously. They go through about a few thousand loops, each identical to the previous one, until the eighth episode. This also leads to Yuki, who remembered all of the loops, erasing paranormal beings from the world and thus erasing Haruhi's existence by default, as well as becoming a human.

Live-Action TV

• Community has had a few bottle episodes. They also have this type of episode:
  • One Clip Show features the gang looking at memorabilia that the monkey Annie's Boobs stole. We then have cuts to different adventures that the group had, which we hadn't seen before. They were on a ranch, substituted for the Glee Club, and ended up in straitjackets.
  • "Remedial Chaos Theory" seems to be a bottle episode, given that the whole story takes place in Abed and Troy's new apartment. We see seven different timelines play out, however, depending who gets the pizza for the group. It took several months to film, accruing expenses, and they also had to spend the season's music budget on "Roxanne" to play it multiple times.
  • The season 3 Halloween episode also sets up like a Bottle Episode, with Britta trying to assess which person in their group scored terribly on her psychology tests. Then each person tells a different story, with a set change. While Abed's is pretty straightforward and dull, with a couple preparing to bunker down in a cabin, Annie's involves both vampires and werewolves, while Troy imagines a psychological thriller where he gets sewn to Abed.
  • Another Clip Show episode with a psychologist featured new clips as well. The gang recalled bits of their time at Greendale Community College, to justify why Abed should not be committed.
• Scrubs: "My Big Bird" features this when Dr. Cox and Dr. Kelso lead a mortuary conference to find out how a patient died on J.D., Turk, Elliott and Carla's watch. Though they are all in the room, we get a Whole-Episode Flashback with everyone having an Imagine Spot about what they would do if they won the lottery, as well as ostriches attacking J.D. and Turk at a patient's house.
• How I Met Your Mother: "Say Cheese" is about Lily reaming out Ted for bringing another random woman to her birthday party, which she specifically requested to be "family only". She then brings out her photo albums, revealing just how many "skanks" that he brings to special occasions while hoping they are the One. While the whole episode takes place in Lily and Barney's apartment, we get a series of flashbacks with past girlfriends and new characters. Robin gets in on it when she revealed she attended a wedding with an ex in Japan, and is part of that photo forever.
• The Good Place has a few of these:
  • "Michael and Janet" seems like it will take place entirely in Michael's office as he and Janet try to determine why she is glitching. The special effects and flashbacks, however, go all out with rainbows coming out of Janet's ears and Michael showing that a bad Janet will lose her head via explosion if she tries to be good.
  • "A Fractured Inheritance" has the A plot featuring Michael showing Eleanor one reboot where she and Chidi fell in love and professed it while hiding at Mindy's place. Though they are in a public library and later a café, the Whole-Episode Flashback features many animals, including a bearded dragon, a CGI mirror-centaur that Tahani chooses, and a real owl. The episode also ends with Shawn in the Bad Place creating a portal to Earth, using Vicky as a guinea pig.

Newspaper Comics

• Calvin and Hobbes had Bill Watterson go all out for extra stories in the treasury collections. He said that he would use watercolors to set the mood.
• We get the visual variant in Pearls Before Swine when a girl named Libby chided Stephan Pastis's Author Avatar, saying that she could do better. Bill Watterson ended up drawing those strips, meaning the art was more ambitious than usual.

Puppet Shows

• Sesame Street has had a few of these for the high-budget songs or celebrity cameos. There are several versions of "Put Down the Duckie" that feature celebrities over the decades singing and dancing the song. These celebrities include a young John Candy, Jeremy Irons, Danny DeVito and Rhea Pearlman dancing together, Itzhak Perlman, and Paul Simon. It took several years to make because they would ask celebrities coming for other segments to film a short lyric.

Western Animation

• Gravity Falls had two anthology episodes that embody this trope:
  • "Bottomless Pit" has the cast tell stories while falling down said titular pit since Stan can't do card tricks, and Dipper doesn't want Mabel to spin him around. Dipper and Soos's stories have guest stars voicing Dipper and a pinball machine respectively.
  • "Little Gift Shop of Horrors" is about a series of tales that Stan narrates to the faceless protagonist to get them to buy merchandise. "Abaconings" has Neil DeGrasse Tyson as a Special Guest, while "Clay Day" features stop-motion animation, and was confirmed to be the most expensive one of the season.
  • "The Last Mabelcorn" after a tense Cold Open starts with Dipper and Mabel debating on playing a board game for the next "twenty minutes". Grunkle Ford then calls a family meeting, and prepares to lock down the Mystery Shack to protect it from Bill Cipher. He then takes Dipper to another level of his lab, while Mabel goes on a quest to prove herself worthy of earning unicorn hair.
• Rick and Morty does this at least once a season by parodying the Clip Show trope or making fun of the Bottle Episode concept:
  • The first Interdimensional Cable episode "Rixty Minutes" featured channels from different shows. In addition, Rick gives Beth and Jerry a device that shows how their lives would have been different if Summer had never been born.
  • "Total Rickall" in season 2 takes place entirely in the Smith household, because Rick puts it under lockdown after he accidentally gets contaminated with alien parasites. Each time a parasite introduces itself, it uses fake memory flashbacks to create more of them. By the next commercial break, Rick lampshades their home has become a Where's Waldo picture. Unsurprisingly, it was the most expensive episode of season two.
  • While "The Ricklantis Mixup" has only three voice actors total -- the Rick wafers narrator, child Beth, and Justin Roiland-- it is one of the most ambitious episodes of season three. While our Rick and Morty spend time in Atlantis where Morty loses his virginity to a mermaid, the audience is taken to the Citadel, where several plotlines center around the idea of Ricks and Mortys escaping their programming of hero and sidekick, and an oncoming election which promises change. It ends with a Wham! Shot of most of these characters who died onscreen or offscreen in space, revealing that Evil Morty won the election.
  • "Morty's Mind Blowers" features countless clips of episodes that Rick has erased from Morty's memories. Sometimes they are at the boy's requests due to his screwups or his family causing further trauma. Other times, Rick has erased the memories out of spite. Due to Mind Screw, they may not even be from this episode.
  • "Never Ricking Morty" has the plot being that Rick and Morty are trapped on a train where all the characters know them and are exchanging stories about their adventures with the duo. We see new trippy stories that Rick confirms are not real-- the conductor of the train, Storylord, was messing with reality to drain Rick and Morty of their story potential.
  • "Rickternal Friendshine of the Spotless Mort" features Rick going into Birdperson's comatose mind to save him and revive memories of their friendship. We get a very trippy journey as a result, especially when the mind starts trying to eject him.
  • "Full Meta Jackrick" has Storylord come back for an encore when he traps Rick and Morty within a meta adventure.
• BoJack Horseman is fond of these episodes, along with a few standard Bottle Episodes:
  • "Downer Ending" is set mostly in BoJack's house, while he is trying to prove he can write a better book than Diane. It's easy to mistake this one for a Bottle Episode given the first scene is short in Pinky Penguin's office. But then BoJack recruits Sarah Lynn, Todd, and Sarah Lynn's drug provider Dr. Hu, and a Mushroom Samba ensues. BoJack has a trippy dream about raising a daughter with Charlotte, as well as Diane being a melting blob monster as well as a Peanuts pastiche. It finally ends with BoJack waking up outside his house, running to apologize to Diane at a ghostwriters convention, and beg her to answer if he is a good person.
  • "It's You" takes place at BoJack's house when he celebrating his Oscar nomination that turns out to not be real but something Mr. Peanutbutter and Todd made up when they lost the real list of nominees. There are hundreds of characters, some who only exist for this episode.
  • "The Old Sugarman Place" is a Whole-Episode Flashback that at first promises to take place in the titular location, as BoJack spends the winter in his family's rundown vacation home. The episode then veers as BoJack accepts help from a neighbor named Eddie to rebuild the place, and steal back a weathervane. We then get a heartbreaking scene where Eddie sings "I Will Always Think of You" in the present as a distraction while BoJack grabs the weathervane, and Honey Sugarman, BoJack's grandmother, sings it in the past while thinking of her older son Crackerjack at a party, creating a haunting duet. Oh, and also when BoJack tricks Eddie into flying, Eddie tries killing them both in a Murder-Suicide.
  • "The View from Halfway Down" takes place in a mansion where BoJack visits his mother, taking a young Sarah Lynn with him. It turns out to be a recurring dream that he has, of attending a dinner party with dead people he knew, some as close as his parents, and some as distant as Zach Braff. While at first it seems the episode will be people talking about their lives, we find out it's a hallucination that BoJack is suffering after he drowned himself in his old swimming pool. Soon the visuals get trippy, especially when everyone performs one last time, and tar submerges the entire mansion.
• Steven Universe
  • "That Will Be All" at first seems it will have Amethyst and the Famethyst messing around with Greg and Steven and bonding. Then the Diamonds appear, with Broadway star Patti Lupone as Yellow Diamond and the Pearls singing "What's The Use of Feeling Blue" to cheer up Blue Diamond. Steven and Greg are as breathtaken and terrified as the audience.
  • The Wham! Episode "A Single Pale Rose" appears to be a Bottle Episode at first, when Steven goes into Pearl's pearl to find her new cellphone. It seems at first that Pearl will find her phone in storage. Then it turns out there are multiple Pearls "inside Pearl inside Pearl's Pearl" that each show Pearl at a different stage of her long life. We get Pearl grieving over Rose's impending death, the battlefield after the Corruption, and Pink Diamond's shattering. The last one takes place in Pink Diamond's palanquin, where Steven finds out his mother, Rose Quartz, was Pink Diamond and our Pearl was her Pearl.