Season 11 Episode 4: Requiem for a Chevyweight (1)

The Dodge is dying, and the episode treats it as a terminal illness. Al bursts out of the garage announcing an emergency involving the love of his life, both children assume he means their mother, and the correction, no, the Dodge, sets the tone for a half-hour played as hospital melodrama. The scene that follows was shot in the FilmLook process, a post-production effect that gives videotape the appearance of film, and staged as a direct spoof of ER: a specialist is summoned, a chart is consulted, an air-to-fuel ratio of 180 over 90 is pronounced a little high, and the diagnosis, when it comes, is the fuel pump.

Rick Overton’s Dr. Fisher, a Doctor of Automotive Engineering, Quaker State, plays the whole thing with a bedside manner, which is what makes it work. He asks what Al has been feeding her, observes that she has the hoses of a car with twice her mileage, and then absolves him, on the grounds that nobody knew then what is known now about octane. Al’s guilt about buying cheap petrol when the car was young is delivered as genuine remorse, and Ed O’Neill does not wink at it once.

While Al grieves, the rest of the family gets on with the practical business of finding buyers for the parts, and the episode fills its middle with flashbacks to the Dodge’s better days, including the night Al scored four touchdowns, which the series finally confirms was also the night Kelly was conceived, in that car, after a failure of equipment. The required fuel pump is rumoured to be in Cuba. Al’s response to that news takes in Castro, Khrushchev and, for reasons he declines to justify, Steve Allen.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Sunday, November 10, 1996 on FOX
• Season 11, Episode 4, part one of two
• Overall episode 242 of the series
• Production code 11.07
• Written by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher
• Directed by Gerry Cohen
• The title puns on Requiem for a Heavyweight, from the Rod Serling story, the third episode to use the construction, after “Requiem for a Dead Barber” and “Requiem for a Dead Briard“
• Amanda Bearse does not appear; this episode has no epilogue

Guest Cast

• Rick Overton as Dr. Fisher
• Cliff Bemis as Al’s Dad
• Hannah Swanson as Young Kelly

Requiem for a Chevyweight (1)

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