Season 4 Episode 17: You Gotta Know When to Fold ‘Em (2)

February 18, 1990

Published 02/18/90

Part two picks up with Peg and Marcy stranded in Las Vegas, having lost the money, the return fare and any dignity they arrived with. Al takes both children and flies out to collect them, giving them instructions to fan out across the casino and sound the Bundy yell if they find their mother. The yell, Bud establishes, is “I wanna die.”

The way out of the hole is a wrestling match, and Al is the entrant. His opponent is a professional woman wrestler who is considerably better at this than he is, and the fight is not close. The best exchange of the two-parter happens while he is flat on the canvas being dragged across the ring: Peg leans in to tell him she is disappointed because the children are watching, and Al explains, between breaths, that this is precisely why he is trying to keep the blood inside his body.

Part one is here, and the pair of them are best watched together. The setup half carries the Steve and Marcy collapse and the television being sold; this half is pure spectacle, and it closes out the stretch of season 4 that followed the Rhoades marriage breaking down. Structurally this is the show testing how far it could push away from the living room. Season 4 had already sent the family to Florida and the zoo and a music video set, and here it books a casino, a wrestling ring and a crowd. It is one of the most expensive looking half hours the series made to that point, and it never really went bigger until the England two-parter.