Season 2 Episode 2: Poppy’s by the Tree, Part 2

September 27, 1987

Published 09/27/87

The conclusion, and the episode gets considerably darker before it gets funnier. After a close encounter with the killer, Al decides to get his family out of Dumpwater immediately, and discovers that a storm has closed the roads, that the motel is effectively sealed, and that the locals have no intention of helping. The Bundys are trapped in a place where their deaths are a betting proposition.

Then the killer takes Peggy hostage in room 25, which puts Al in the one position the series almost never allowed him: having to act. He goes after her, and Peggy’s attempt to warn him through a gag that the man is behind the door and the whole thing is a trap is the best-remembered moment of the two-parter. The resolution is appropriately undignified for everyone involved, which is the only way this show would have played it.

The episode also introduces one of the series’ most durable small rituals. Peggy, surveying whatever catastrophe her husband has delivered, turns to the children and says “Thank your father, kids” and they respond, with varying degrees of bitterness, “Thanks, Dad.” It would recur for the next decade. Three members of the Dumpwater guest cast came back to the series years later in other roles: Charlie Dell as the insurance investigator in season nine’s “Shoeless Al,” Gary Grubbs as the car dealer in season eleven, and Ian Patrick Williams as the building inspector in season ten. Like part one, the end credits run over the motel exterior rather than the usual couch still.