Season 3 Episode 8: The Gypsy Cried

February 5, 1989

Published 02/05/89

A psychic reads the cards and finds good fortune for Steve, Al and Peggy, and disaster for Marcy. Marcy, who has a business flight to New York, reasons that the safest thing to do is take the three lucky people with her as insurance, which is how the Bundys end up on a plane they have no business being on, with Marcy monitoring everyone’s horoscopes.

The premise is a good vehicle for the two households’ respective relationships with superstition. Marcy’s belief is total and entirely self-interested; Al’s scepticism lasts exactly as long as the prediction favours him. The episode is also one of the series’ better uses of a location it rarely visited, putting the four adults in an aeroplane cabin with nowhere to retreat to and a first-class curtain to fight over.

Several threads tie back and forward. Bud and Kelly turn up with petrol cans, having siphoned fuel from a Rolls-Royce in the Rhoades’ driveway on Al’s instructions, one of the cars from season two’s “Master the Possibilities.” Kelly needles Bud about working solo “much like at Lover’s Lane,” a reference to his Masked Lover Lane Peeper reputation from “The Great Escape.” And the Bundys meet gypsies again three seasons later in “Psychic Avengers,” which goes considerably worse: that one ends with the family turned into monkeys.

The Los Angeles musician Chuck E. Weiss appears uncredited as a passenger, visible beside the curtain divider as Al and Peg come into first class. Steve Bean, who returns Al’s wallet, came back in season seven as a Playgirl photographer.