Season 5 Episode 8: Wabbit Season

November 11, 1990

Published 11/11/90

Al is brought home from work having lost his mind. The cause was sixteen consecutive hours of a midnight madness sale, and his account of the breakdown ends with the detail that undoes him completely, which is that it was only Wednesday. His prescribed recovery is gardening.

The garden produces vegetables, which Al does not eat and has said repeatedly that he hates, and then it produces a rabbit, which eats the carrots. From there the episode is a single escalating campaign. Al bites back when bitten, announces that nobody bites Al Bundy and lives, and eventually arrives at the hose. He puts something in the region of a million gallons down the burrow, by his own estimate, floods the block, and sends enough water next door that Marcy comes over to hit him.

The best moment is quiet and belongs to Peg, watching her husband on his knees beside a hole in the ground with a garden hose. She remarks to the children that the sad part is she does not really want him, and then adds that a promise is a promise. It is delivered with a grin and it is the closest thing to a statement of commitment anyone in this marriage makes all season. Worth watching for how the show handles Al losing his mind, which it treats as an entirely reasonable response to his job rather than a punchline at his expense. The breakdown is played for laughs, but the cause is not exaggerated: sixteen hours on a shop floor, on commission, selling shoes to people who dislike him. The rabbit is just where all of it finally goes.