Season 4 Episode 18: What Goes Around Comes Around

February 25, 1990

Published 02/25/90

Bud has been carrying a grudge for five years. A girl called Heather McCoy humiliated him in sixth grade, the story has followed him around school ever since, and he has decided this is the week he settles it. What he plans and what actually happens are not the same thing, which the title gives away.

The reason to watch, though, is Al’s speech. He has been invited to address the homecoming dance, and he treats the invitation as the public platform he has been denied his whole adult life. He opens by holding up an egg and announcing that this is your brain. He moves on to what women claim about football before marriage versus after, then to his mother-in-law, then to an assessment of the shoe trade as no kind of life for a man. Peg eventually comes on stage and physically removes him, at the precise moment he begins recounting his last game at Polk High.

Underneath the comedy there is a genuinely bleak detail about Marcy. Steve has gone, nobody has spoken to her since, and she implies that she lay down in the Bundy driveway as they were pulling in. She is also still calling herself Marcy Rhoades, which she kept doing for a while. The show was figuring out what to do with her in this stretch and the answer, for a few episodes, was to let her be visibly unwell. One practical note: the speech is delivered in pieces across the episode rather than in one block, so the funniest material is spread from about the midpoint to the final scene. Anyone skipping to the dance will miss half of it.