- Phil, Claire, and the kids try to improve their communication skills by giving up their electronic devices. Gloria is getting obsessed over a neighbor's barking dog, and Mitchell and Cameron try to find a preschool for Lily.
- Everybody has problems right now. Gloria (Sofía Vergara) can't stand the constant barking of the neighbor's dog, Claire (Julie Bowen) can't stand that the family is more into their electronic devices than being with each other...even Phil (Ty Burrell)..., and Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cameron (Eric Stonestreet) got faked out by the moms whose kids play with Lily and didn't enroll Lily in pre-school soon enough. (MITCHELL: "Leave it to the gays to raise the only underachieving Asian in America.") Gloria confronts the neighbor, except his ex-wife owns the dog, and he wants them to stop their parakeet. The one that goes Jay! Jay! Jay! (Apparently, Gloria's voice even sets off car alarms.) Claire unplugs everybody in the house for a week, and Phil makes the mistake of offering a reward to the person who can last the longest, since he thinks he can live without his iPad longer than Alex (Ariel Winter), Haley (Sarah Hyland), or Luke (Nolan Gould) will.
Mitchell and Cameron head to the Wagon Wheel pre-school, where Claire's kids went. The guys are definitely uptight, but one of the teachers tells them being a gay couple adopting a minority baby is a triple-threat, and schools will bend over backwards to get them into the fold so they can brag about diversity. Suddenly Cameron is VERY relaxed. Jay (Ed O'Neill), not so much. The neighbor accuses them of taking the dog, which Gloria promptly denies. But Jay knows better.
JAY: Gloria's grandfathers and uncles were butchers, so she's always had a certain comfort level when it comes to...killing. One time we had this rat...(which Gloria killed and beheaded without a second thought)...she left the head out there to send a message to the other rats.
Jay talks to Manny (Rico Rodriguez) privately about it, but Manny is too scared to want to know what Gloria did to the dog. Jay continues his investigation. The rat-killing shovel is clean, but Gloria catches them and is upset by their accusations. Gloria tells Jay the dog is in a better place. That she took it to live on a farm in the country. THEN she shows that she really did all of that, because she had a cousin with three kids who love the dog. Jay apologizes with a trip to Colombia, as he wants to see her old neighborhood. But she had a couple of car accidents down there, so she doesn't want to go back.
Things are going OK with the unplugged rule at the Dunphys. Luke even built a condo project out of cans and plastic bottles. That had no fire escapes and substandard electrical, which he destroyed. ("At least he's using his imagination.") However, a parasailing donkey video on YouTube and a B on a science paper make Luke and Alex quit the contest. Claire was actually out next, as she realized changing reservations for a trip to see Phil's family requires the Internet, and shouting "representative" into an automated system sucks. (We've all been there, right?) Phil thinks he can last, until one of the players on his fantasy team is injured. Fortunately, Haley is texting someone on her phone, so Phil wins the contest. Only Haley made a phone out of a bar of soap and a marker to fake them out. Haley just got herself a car. ("Holy crap, we've been Shawshanked.")
Cam and Mitch get Lily into Wagon Wheel, but Mitchell is feeling lucky after he gets the interview as the ultra-posh Billingsley School. He thinks it's like Cam and he got picked first in gym class for once. (CAMERON: "I always got picked first in gym class. I could put a dodgeball through plywood.") They think they have the winning poker hand as a gay couple with an adopted Vietnamese baby. Until another couple stopped in.
CAMERON: Disabled interracial lesbians with an African kicker?
MITCHELL: I did not see that coming.
Even Cameron pretending to be a Native American didn't help. Actually, it made things worse.
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