SPOILER ALERT: The following contains spoilers for Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head Season 3, Episode 4, “Bike / Nuts.”

Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head Season 3 has had some fantastic callbacks to the original series. The show is getting better by hitting the notes that made Beavis and Butt-Head so funny in the first place. Yet in Season 3, Episode 4, “Bike / Nuts,” there’s an opportunity for a deep cut that the writers barely miss.

As Old Beavis and Butt-Head are critiquing a music video that features a lifelike doll, Beavis quickly becomes obsessed with the idea and decides that he wants to build one himself. The video is largely forgotten about, as the cuts back to the apartment become more frequent and the audience sees Beavis at “work.” Unsurprisingly, his DIY attempt ends in a cloud of black smoke and a painful injury.

All of this is ridiculous, yet also familiar. The sequence echoes what happened when Beavis and Butt-Head watched Wilco’s “Box Full of Letters” video ages ago. Fans will remember that they didn’t talk much about the video, because Beavis spent the whole time trying to make pancakes. You can watch the segment below (courtesy of user Jesse Tharp on YouTube):

The “Box Full of Letters” bit was so hilarious because the viewer never saw any of the gags. The jokes were created almost entirely through dialogue and sound cues, except for Beavis passing through at one point. But things like the sound of him going to Butt-Head’s bedroom to find proper cooking utensils (why?) and asking how much mayonnaise he needed made the fans imagine a complete disaster, which was perfectly capped off by the beeps of a smoke alarm as the Wilco video ended.

In contrast, Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head relies more on the visuals to sell a similar gag, and that’s why it doesn’t work quite as well. It’s still funny to watch Beavis emerge from the kitchen with an armful of plastic bottles and the clouds of dark smoke coming out of the corner of the screen are worth a laugh. Yet seeing the joke is less effective because it’s essentially handing the audience the punchline. By having to guess what was going on in the Wilco video, the viewer could make it as absurd and outrageous as possible. This time, it’s entertaining but not quite epic.

“Bike / Nuts” still has appeal in other ways. This is the first episode to make good use of the “Tom Anderson’s War Stories” filler segment, by charmingly revealing how Tom met his wife Marci. And getting to see kid Beavis and Butt-Head again is adorable, even if it’s once again reinforcing how little Butt-Head cares about Beavis. And discovering that Beavis has a nut allergy is a joke that does work visually, reminiscent of Pam Poovey’s allergy attack on Archer. Yet it could have been that much better if it had gone a little bit deeper into the show’s playbook.

Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head airs Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m. ET/PT. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Paramount. Video Credit: Clip from MTV, uploaded by Jesse Tharp on YouTube.

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