Season 1 Episode 11: Nightmare on Al’s Street
June 14, 1987
Steve is out of town, and Marcy starts dreaming about Al. Not a nightmare, a romance, with a version of Al who is charming, attentive and considerate, appearing nightly and refusing to stop. She becomes a wreck about it, and the episode gets its comedy from the gap between the man in the dream and the man across the fence, who is in the middle of an argument with her about gender roles and losing it loudly.
It is an early example of something the series did well for eleven years: handing Marcy an interior life that nobody around her is equipped to take seriously. Amanda Bearse plays the mounting horror straight, and the show is careful never to suggest Marcy wants this. The dream is an intrusion rather than a wish, which makes it funnier and also keeps the character intact: this is the second episode in a row to establish that the series would not cheapen its characters for a joke.
The half-hour is dense with first appearances and asides. The Bundy house number, 9764, is seen for the first time. Steve’s middle name is Bartholomew. Peggy claims she married Al for a dare, which Al later reframes in season three as a bet, the only one he ever won. Al’s retirement property at Lake Chicamocomico is mentioned for the first time, two-thirds of a toxic acre that the series eventually visited in season five. Peggy also mentions that Al once had the chance to buy into the land the Sears Tower was built on, which would have been around 1970, the year before they married. Exterior shots still show the Bundy house as brown, as it is in the first-season titles; it turns white later.
Episode Facts
- Original air date: June 14, 1987
- Season 1, Episode 11, and the 11th episode of the series
- Written by Michael G. Moye
- Directed by Linda Day
- No guest cast is credited.
Marcy Dreams About Al
Steve is out of town, and Marcy starts having the same dream every night: Steve walks in, asks if she wants to fool around, and turns into Al. She is horrified. Al is delighted. Peg treats the whole thing as a reasonable topic for coffee. Nothing actually happens in any of the dreams, which Peg says sounds exactly like her Al.
The episode is one of the earliest to put Marcy and Al on the same axis rather than opposite ends of a feud, and the show spent the next ten seasons mining that. It is also the episode where Peg gets some of her best early material, including her own recurring dream in which Al has no feet.
Al’s retirement plan, the two thirds of an acre at Lake Chicamocomico, is named here for the first time. The family finally goes there in Married… With Who?.
Famous Quotes
- Peggy: “Because in my dreams, Al has no feet.” Her follow-up question to Marcy, asked completely straight.
- Al: “Look, I’m not sexist. I’m just saying women don’t know nothin’.” Al clearing that up.
- Peggy: “If you loved me you would have paddled!” On Al failing to rescue her from her own drowning dream, feet or no feet.
- Steve: “Al, I’m horny. What are you gonna do about it?” Steve arriving at the Bundy house with a problem Al cannot solve.
Notes
- The title plays on A Nightmare on Elm Street. Robert Englund, who played Freddy Krueger, later appears on the show as Lucifer in “Damn Bundys.”
- The Bundy house number, 9764, is seen for the first time in this episode.
- Steve’s middle name is revealed to be Bartholomew.
- Peggy says she married Al on a dare. Al later calls it a bet, and the only one he ever won, in “Married… with Prom Queen.”
- Lake Chicamocomico is named here for the first time, along with Al’s account of how toxic it is.
- Peg’s line about Al interfering with a ball and keeping the Cubs out of the World Series aired in 1987, sixteen years before the real incident in the 2003 National League Championship Series.
- The Bundy house exterior is brown in this episode, matching the season 1 title sequence. It is white in later seasons.
- The production code shows this was the twelfth episode produced and the eleventh aired.
