Your best friend comicalArchitect here, with the first of a series of OT headers covering especially memorable episodes of The Amazing World of Gumball, my all-time favorite television series.

Season 1 is definitely the worst season of Gumball, operating much more on the “kids’ show” level, without as much of the experimentation and social satire that would make the later seasons so great. But there’s still some good shit in Season 1, and my single favorite of the season is “The Dress.”

In this episode, our hero Gumball Watterson is forced by circumstance to wear his mother’s wedding dress to school, all other clothes in the household having been shrunk by his father’s careless laundering. Gumball adopts a new persona, the beguiling European exchange student “Gumball Oopseggwobbleunderpants,” and is immediately seen by his classmates as so beautiful and exotic that he (she) should be waited on hand and foot. Most entranced of all is Darwin (Gumball’s adopted brother, best friend, and former pet), who, failing to recognize his brother, becomes romantically obsessed with him, causing awkward shenanigans.

This episode is ground zero for two running jokes/motifs that would continue throughout the series—one, Gumball crossdressing (and, crucially, not being ridiculed for it, really), then two, weird gay subtext between Gumball and Darwin, whose brotherly and friendly relationship would repeatedly lapse into iffier territory as a punchline.

The header image here contains this episode’s (and perhaps the series’s) most disturbing Gumball/Darwin gag—when Gumball realizes Darwin is in love with the fictitious exchange student, he flashes forward to a horrifying future where he’s never taken the wedding dress off, and where they’re married with multiple fish-cat children.