Season 4 Episode 9: Oh, What a Feeling

November 19, 1989

Published 11/19/89

Al’s car has stopped working, and the episode opens with him pushing it up the hill to his own house while his children watch from the garage and offer commentary. Kelly suggests that a man could have a heart attack doing that in such heat. Bud reports that he and his friends had bet against Al making it up the slope. Neither of them considers helping, and Al’s offer to push the pair of them to the ice cream parlour is accepted immediately and with enthusiasm.

He has been saving for a replacement, five thousand dollars, buried in a shoe box in the garden. Peg found the box some time ago and has spent the lot, which means the car hunt happens with no money at all. What follows is a descent through the used car market, each option worse than the last, until Al arrives at the only vehicle he can actually afford.

It is his own car, cleaned up and sold back to him. That ending is the show at its most precisely cruel, because nothing has been taken from Al that he did not already have, and nothing has been gained. He pushed the thing up a hill, lost five thousand dollars he had hidden from his wife, spent a day being condescended to by salesmen, and drove home in the same Dodge. The series ran eleven seasons on variations of this shape, and this is one of the cleanest versions of it. One practical note for a rewatch: the shoe box in the yard is the earliest hard number the show gives for Al’s savings, and five thousand dollars is a lot of money for this household in 1989. The fact that he buried it rather than banking it, and that she found it anyway, is the entire marriage in one prop.