Ned wants to impress Linda at the school dance, but the town showoff, Rusty McCabe, also wants to impress Linda, and challenges Ned to a dance contest. Ned is completely unable to dance, but he hopes that Newton will be able to tutor him. When this doesn't work, Newton gets the idea to put Ned in a large costume, where he stands on his shoulders while Newton dances.

After watching too much television, Newton gets the idea to improve Ned's life with all the things featured in the various commercials he's watched.

Ned's friend Doogle has a pet dog, an obese, listless dog named Lummox. Doogle, when overhearing his parents talking about fleas on Lummox's fur, thinks his parents are going to get rid of him, and feeling sympathy for the fellow pet, Newton tries to prove Lummox's worth by setting up a series of situations where Lummox does incredibly useful things for Doogle's family.

Friendly Falls is experiencing a drought, which is ruining Ned's summer, and might cause trouble for the various newts in town when the ponds and rivers they live in dry up. Newton tries to end the drought with various plans to make it rain, and they succeed, even though it has been raining so much the town flooded.

Ned visits his grandparents, who are retired farmers. Newton, who doesn't know what retirement is, thinks the animals and crops are simply being lazy and tries to whip them into shape.

Ned's mother goes to a different town to participate in a perfume saleswoman convention, but Ned mistakenly thinks that they are moving to this town. To convince Ned's parents that they shouldn't move there, Newton poses as a tour guide to describe various "horrors" throughout the town, and tries to make it seem as though wild boars roam the streets by putting boar masks on the stray dogs.

Newton helps Ned and Linda win tickets to a rock concert, but their date is ruined when Doogle, while digging a hole to raise money for charity, accidentally unearths a race of subterranean trolls bent on taking over the world's "metropolises-es", and Ned and Newton have to stop them.

Rusty McCabe is well-known around town as a snobby rich boy, but when Ned's photos get mixed up with Rusty's at the photo booth, Ned finds out that Rusty's family is broke. At first, intending to disgrace him, Linda instead convinces him to be sympathetic, and people start donating things to Rusty's family. They later find out that these photos were from a theme park called "Live Like Ordinary People Land", where rich people pretend to be poor.

Ned signs up for the school debate team to be closer to Linda, even though he's bad at public speaking. Newton helps him by passing him notes, and Ned becomes the school debate champion. He's so good, in fact, that he successfully debates in favor of the town mayor's ridiculous plan to replace all of Friendly Fall's streets with canals, to ease pollution.

Ned's parents are holding a costume party, but Newton had accidentally put the invitations in a wood chipper after Ned was supposed to mail them, so no one is coming. To make up for his mistake, Newton uses the time machine he built to gather several historical figures as party guests, including Cleopatra, Napoleon and Josephine, and Bonnie and Clyde.

Ned is showing a health science project to his class that could make or break his passing grade, a film he's made to show where food comes from. The film is extremely strange, however, because of the various roles Newton plays in it: from the Hard-Boiled Chicken, source of the world's hard-boiled eggs, to the Imitation Crab, source of the world's imitation crab meat. Ned's project is initially doomed because of Newton's involvement, but Ned's teacher thinks that it was actually a creative writing project that was due the following week, for which he gets an A+. She wonders where his health science project is, and the final episode ends with Ned saying "I'll be right back," and leaving the classroom.