Season 4 Episode 7: Desperately Seeking Miss October

November 5, 1989

Published 11/05/89

A woman comes into Gary’s Shoes and Al, who has a professional eye for exactly one thing, recognises her from a magazine. Specifically from the October issue, and specifically as the centrefold. The rest of the episode is him trying to establish that he is right, which requires producing the magazine, which requires the magazine still being in the house.

It is not. Peg has sold the entire collection, and she has spent the proceeds on a statue called Tubro, the fat Panamanian god of money, which she bought in the belief that it would win her the lottery. The scene where she asks Al for the hundred and ninety-five dollars to buy it in the first place is the best thing in the episode, mostly because of what Al says the money could have meant to the family and what the camera cuts to while he is saying it.

Running alongside is Bud helping Kelly with a current events report by bringing home a supermarket tabloid, on the stated reasoning that everyone else will be using actual newspapers so his sister should differentiate. Kelly picks her story on the grounds that she has at least heard of one of the names in it. Then she asks Bud what a word is, and the look he gives her does more work than the line would have. Watch for how little the episode needs Al to actually be wrong. He is right about the woman, he was always right about the woman, and the magazines being gone is the only reason the point is in doubt at all. The show was usually happy to simply humiliate him, so an episode where his claim is true and he still loses the argument is a slightly different and better machine.