Season 10 Episode 8: Blonde and Blonder

November 5, 1995

Published 11/05/95

Kelly’s five-year Polk High reunion is the main event, and the episode gets there by way of a story she tells at Bud’s expense. Needling him about his prom night, she produces a better humiliation of her own: a boy named Eric Waters, whose glasses were held together with tape, asked her out one New Year’s Eve, and she sent him to the top of the Hancock tower stripped to the buff. She tells it as a triumph. The reunion is where the bill arrives, because Eric Waters turns up handsome, rich and on a cell phone, and he has had five years to think about how to handle the four of them.

The revenge he chooses is precise. He does not insult Kelly or expose her; he simply makes himself available and then withdraws, leaving each of her friends to make a move and be declined in turn before taking Kelly outside and stranding her in the cold. The episode is unusually interested in consequence for a show that generally refused it, and it lands because Kelly’s account of the original cruelty was so cheerful. The reunion also introduces Fawn, Ashley, Jessica and Mindy, three of whom stick around for later episodes.

At home, Marcy is running a toys-for-guns exchange, which gives Al and Peggy a reason to dig through the attic and discover that a foam dart gun is more fun than anything else in their marriage. That scene, two people in their forties shooting each other and laughing while Marcy stands in the doorway appalled, is the warmest thing in the half-hour, and Al’s and Peg’s back-to-back assessments of what exactly is happening between them make it the episode’s best exchange. Jefferson spends the rest of it finding things of Marcy’s to blow up.