Season 5 Episode 12: Married … with Who

January 6, 1991

Published 01/06/91

Marcy wakes up after a banking convention married to a man she does not know. His name is Jefferson D’Arcy, he has a past he is vague about, and he has no apparent intention of working. Al’s response is to offer to arrange the wedding, properly, with a guest list he controls, which is how the Bundys end up profiting from the neighbour’s second marriage.

This is the episode that introduces Jefferson, and it was not a settled appointment. Ted McGinley had appeared once before, in season four’s “It’s a Bundyful Life,” as Norman Jablonski, and when he joined here the producers were uncertain enough about whether the character would last that his billing was held in the closing credits as a recurring player for the remainder of the season. He stayed for seven years.

Al’s financial interest in the wedding has a payoff the series had been setting up since season one. He pays off Lake Chicamocomico with the proceeds, the retirement property he first mentioned in “Nightmare on Al’s Street“, and the episode shows the place for the first and only time at the end. It is not what he described.

The half-hour also gives both Bundys a fantasy about the other’s death: Peggy imagines Al falling into a volcano in Hawaii, Al imagines Peggy going head first into the quarry at Lake Chicamocomico. Peggy’s assessment is that the average relationship contains at most three weeks of happiness. Al’s edits to the guest list remove Marcy’s mother, her sister, her Aunt Mary and Reverend Applebee. Bud’s soccer team, the Reepers, appears for the first time, in uniform at the wedding.