Can an episode of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends have neither the Home, nor Madame Foster, nor Mac, Bloo's best friend? Apparently so. Can it be good? Yes. Was it actually good? Well... After an odd repeat of the opening sequence, "Pranks for Nothing" takes the entire houseful of imaginary friends out of the eponymous house so it can be fumigated. (What of the flea friends, I wonder.) They decamp at a hotel seven hours away, and the normally bratty Bloo turns absolutely aggravating.

This is the first episode without Mac; however, his absence doesn't seem to be the weak link. On a show that prides itself on character-based plots, focusing on Bloo and his hapless roommates should be able to yield an interesting story. Even the barebones plot should work: Bloo plots to annoy people; Coco and friends get the better of him; rinse and repeat. Instead, the writing was remarkably flat. Maybe if one guzzled a whole pot of coffee, the individual gags might keep the whole thing afloat. Maybe. The last real laugh in the episode is Mr. Herriman's warning about the hotel room fridges: "There's nothing honorable about [the honor bar]!"

The storyline constantly violated that old writing axiom: "show and don't tell." Are we supposed to buy that Bloo is a prankster to be reckoned with? All we get is his hyper, whiny side. The ensuing war is supposed to be a match of two dueling pranksters; instead, the outcomes are all so predictable that there's no suspense and certainly no pay-off. They were aiming for Bloo as an exasperated Daffy Duck, and they couldn't even muster Trix Rabbit.

More disturbing than the lack of funniness is that beyond the uninteresting prank war, this was a show about smacking down on Bloo. Given that Bloo partly exists because Mac is bullied by his older brother, one would think "friends" wouldn't take joy out of jeering at him. Even though the roommates are supposed to be the sympathetic party, it's hard to admire the clever climax or the rare visual gems when they've spent the night humiliating him while he's down. Bloo's supposed to lose, but he persists. We're not supposed to root for him, but it's a disappointment when he doesn't win.

What's frustrating is that this set-up works on paper. However: with no Mac, there's no foil, and with no Home, there's very little in visual interest. So the comedy has to stand by itself, and in that they failed miserably. Adding in Bloo's cohorts Frit and Frat—with their constant Beavis-and-Butthead snickering—only highlights the one-note joke. What's more the "twist" ending made even less sense because there were no characters involved besides Frit and Frat, Coco, timid Eduardo, and placid Wilt. From this pool of suspects, were we supposed to be surprised by the unmasked mastermind, when said mastermind spent the episode laughing at Bloo? It should have been creepy and funny. It was just boring. Thanks for nothing.