Lobsterary Confinement

**"Lobsterary Confinement"** is the seventeenth episode of the first season of *Sammy & Co*. It premiered on December 25, 2015, on Netflix.

## Synopsis

When fishermen capture Lulu's cousin, Ricky and the gang find him being held prisoner in a lobster farm and try to set all the captives free.

## Plot

The episode opens somewhere outside the reef village where Lulu is taking Ricky, Ella, Pipo, and Annabel on a field trip to study about human civilization. The group visits a place where there are numerous cinder blocks being sunken in the sea to meet someone there. He introduces his students to another lobster named André who's his cousin. A few miles away, a fishing boat is heading towards the kids and the lobsters which have a lobster cage attached to it. At the same time, André gives the students a tour of his home and tells them about his fascination with humans "having a gift for constructing fabulous edifices". He likes how the cinder blocks they made are able to last longer because of how indestructible and solid they are and how they can help him provide shelter for any nearby predators. But when he gives the kids a tour to his art studio, everyone notices the lobster cage coming towards them which causes Lulu and his students to all panic. But before they can hide in the cinder blocks to take shelter from the cage, André grabs onto the cage and rides on it when he mistakenly thought the humans are "coming to deliver [his] new furniture". Realizing that André has mistakenly put himself in danger, Lulu and his students all follow the direction where the fishing boat is taking André to rescue the lobster.

The kids and Lulu all reach a lobster farm where they stop outside of it and notices that there's a large colony of captive lobsters. When Ella asks a large red lobster if he has seen André, he rudely ignores her without answering her question. Ricky knows that the five must find a way to get inside the lobster farm to find André, but the fence of the farm is too strong to pull it off and there's not the slightest opening anywhere to get in. Just when the five are about to lose hope, they notice that a lobster farmer has poured lobster foods for the captive lobsters inside the farm. Ricky swims up and looks out of the surface to see the lobster farmer pouring the food from a bucket which gives him an idea. Ella asks her best friend if he has a plan, but Ricky says that "there's no time to discuss" so the five all get inside the bucket full of lobster foods. The lobster farmer pours the bucket into the lobster farm and he unknowingly gets the five all inside the farm.

Inside the lobster farm, André shows up in front of Lulu and his students after he stopped his fellow captive lobsters from attacking the five. Ricky is about to tell André that they're here to help him escape, but as soon as he says the word "escape", Edgar, the leader of "Lobsterville", shows up and tells them no one escapes from the farm. Lulu tries to explain to Edgar that humans are dangerous since they capture so many lobsters for the farm, but Edgar refuses to listen to him and informs him and the kids that he sees the lobster farm as a "peaceful life" since the farmers have fed and lodged them there so he wants everything to stay exactly that way. He refuses to let Lulu and the kids help the captive lobsters escape and encourages them that they're more than welcome to like living at the farm as long as they work for their little "community".

After Edgar leaves, the kids and Lulu are talking to André about their situation. Lulu sees Edgar as a delusional leader of the colony since he knows that humans are fearsome predators who love lobsters to eat them. He reminds the kids about his experience in the Tank after the humans kidnapped him and locked him up there seven years ago. He even mentioned remembering seeing them at work and he can tell that they have a ferocious appetite for lobsters. André tries to dismiss his cousin's claim by telling him that humans aren't so mean since the farmers have given out food to everyone earlier. But Lulu assumes that the farmers are doing it so they could fatten the lobsters up so they could prepare to eat them later on which makes Lulu believe Lulu's assumption. Wanting to get out of the farm, everyone all looks at Ricky and asks him about his plan. However, it turns out that Ricky didn't think about his idea all the way through since he only planned his friends and teacher to get inside the lobster farm to look for André earlier but he didn't think about how to get out of the farm. He even defends himself by saying that he "never said [he] has a plan". Lulu calms down his students by saying that Ricky just wanted to help André despite him not thinking about the consequences of his plan when they all try to get inside the farm to look for André. Lulu even points out that he and his students have too followed André without thinking first so nobody is to blame. Instead, he, the kids, and André should try to find a way out of the lobster farm together.

Ricky looks out of the farm and sees a fisherman fishing nearby. He informs his friends and the two lobsters that while they can't call upon the kindness of humans to get them out, they could instead use their strength to free them. Annabel puts the fishing hook to the barbed wire cage and shakes the cage, which leads to the fisherman pulling the cage when he mistakes it for a fish. The kids, Lulu, and André all try to push the barbed wire cage open since the rest of the captive lobsters refuse to help them, but then Edgar arrives and ruins their plan by pulling the fishing hook out of the barbed wires. Edgar gets angry at the six for trying to escape and not listening to his order so he condemns them all to the Lobsters Under Surveillance District, which means putting them in a timeout inside a lobster trap.

The kids, André, and Lulu all try to push the door open, but it doesn't budge since Edgar has locked them in for their punishment. Pipo complains that they're done for, but Ricky tries to encourage him that they shouldn't give up yet. Pipo then rhetorically asks if they're supposed to make the walls of the lobster trap disappear by blowing on them as part of their next move, which happens to give André an idea. He makes Annabel squirt ink at the back wall of the lobster trap and he starts painting onto the ink, which makes it similar to a cracked hole on the wall. Later, the kids are carrying Lulu and André and the six all hide at the ceiling of the lobster trap when Edgar arrives to place several lobster-foods inside the cage to feed them. When Edgar sees the "cracked hole", he assumes that they somehow escape so he gets inside the trap and charges toward the back wall. He falls for the trickery because he trips, he accidentally got his pincers stuck onto the back wall which makes him pass out. The kids carry André and Lulu out of the trap and Ricky and Ella close the trap door to lock Edgar inside.

Pipo starts to panic again since they didn't find any more way to escape from the farm that he starts swimming in circles around Lulu and André. Ricky tells Pipo he should stop panicking because he keeps going on like that, he's "gonna bury them in the ground", which actually gives Ella an idea. Since she and Ricky are both sea turtles and have flippers, they can dig a tunnel on the ground to get out. But while Ricky and Ella are digging, their friends and Lulu all notice that the captive lobsters are charging toward them to prevent the six from escaping. While Ricky and Ella get back to digging, their friends and Lulu all try to distract the captive lobsters long enough for them to make their escape. Inside the lobster trap, Edgar wakes up and realizes that he's been tricked so he alerts his fellow captive lobsters that the kids, Lulu, and André have escaped. The captive lobsters all charge to the kids, Lulu, and André to capture them, but Lulu takes out a lobster food and he's about to eat it, which gives Ella an idea. She takes the lobster food away from her teacher and bribes the captive lobsters so that they can help them finish digging the tunnel, then the captive lobsters would eat the lobster food. The captive lobsters all accept her offer, so when Ella tosses the lobster food out of Lobsterville, they all charge forward and help the kids finish digging the tunnel which allows everyone, except Edgar who still traps inside the lobster trap, to escape.

At some time later, the kids and Lulu all visit André who has taken in the formerly-captive lobsters as his own colony and welcomed them into his home. André then leads Lulu and the kids to his art studio and he informs them that he's been giving them some sculpture classes. He then shows Lulu and the kids a large sculpture of Edgar that his colony has built. Ricky, wanting to have fun, swims behind the sculpture and pretends to be Edgar. He commands the lobsters to tickle Ella, which the female green turtle didn't find funny, but Pipo does. Ricky then commands the lobsters to tickle Pipo too, which makes Pipo being chased by the colony, much to everyone's amusement.

Meanwhile, back at Lobsterville, Edgar is still calling out for help since he's still trapped inside the lobster trap after he realizes that everyone else in the lobster trap has gone.

## Characters

### Major characters

* Ricky
* Ella
* Pipo
* Annabel
* Lulu
* André
* Edgar (antagonist)

### Minor characters

* André's lobster colony
* Humans

## Trivia

* In the French version, the episode is called "Un homard au mitard", meaning "A lobster in the lard".
* According to the synopsis on a French scheduling website called Play TV, "Lulu was abducted by fishermen. Sammy and our friends go out looking for him and find out that he has been placed in an intensive lobster farm, a true crustacean concentration camp." However, the synopsis has nothing to do with the plot within the episode itself. Though, it's possible that the French synopsis is for the episode's original plot that got scrapped during production. However, there isn't any confirmation yet.
	+ But if it is, then Lulu was originally going to be the one who gets kidnap instead of André, and Sammy originally going to appear in the episode.
* Despite this episode is the seventeenth to aired on TiJi like its US airing order, it's the sixteenth episode to aired in France on M6.
* The sculpture of the lobster lady André made is an allusion to the painting *The Birth of Venus*.
* At one point, Lulu mentioned the events of *A Turtle's Tale 2: Sammy's Escape from Paradise*.
* This episode reveals that Lulu has a cousin named André.
* When André thinks the lobster farmers aren't mean since they feed everyone at Lobsterville, Lulu claims that humans are fearsome predators who feed captive sea creatures to fatten them up and so they could eat them. This is similar to what Fluffy claimed to the ten-year-old Sammy in *A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures* after Snow and her hippie community rescued Sammy in 1969. However, unlike Lulu, Fluffy is actually lying to Sammy in an attempt to scare him into leaving the California beach, and Snow and her hippie community are all actually nice people. Because of this, it's unknown if Lulu is wrong about the lobster farmers are actually nice people like the hippies.
* When Lulu is trying to keep the captive lobsters distracted while Ricky and Ella are busy digging a tunnel on the ground to escape, he mentioned that they're "looking for a model to make a sculpture in honor of Edgar the Supreme Lobster". Later, after everyone, except Edgar himself, escape from Lobsterville, André teaches his lobster colony how to make a sculpture of Edgar.

## References

1. ↑ https://instantwatcher.com/title/80042306
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 https://playtv.fr/programmes-tv/m6/07-10-2014/
3. ↑ https://playtv.fr/programmes-tv/tiji/08-03-2015/
4. ↑ https://www.netflix.com/title/80042177
5. ↑ http://play.tv/tv-shows/1318011/sammy-et-co/