Season 6 Episode 14: The Mystery of Skull Island

January 5, 1992

Published 01/05/92

Two plots, and the one that gets quoted is the board game. Peg and the Darcys have produced a relationship game called Ethical Dilemma, and Al has been conscripted into playing it. The game requires participants to answer questions about their feelings, which for Al is a form of torture, and the sessions go on for days. One prompt asks him to say what he cares about, and what comes out is a poem. Another produces Marcy’s story about her childhood dog Winkums, a story that reduces her to sobbing and whose actual ending the audience never hears, because Al has stopped listening and drifted into a daydream about his high school friends inviting him out on a Friday night with a keg in the back of the car. Peg, during her turn, nominates an old boyfriend named Jimmy as the man she would have a sleazy affair with. Meanwhile Bud has met Kara, who is beautiful, who finds his Grandmaster B persona compelling, and who is interested exclusively in men who do dangerous things. Her previous boyfriend bored her because all they did was make love. Bud, after an internal monologue in which he firmly and repeatedly rules out skydiving, looks at Kara once more and signs up. The skydiving instructor is played by Danny Lee Clark, better known at the time as Nitro from American Gladiators, and the episode ends with Bud going out of the airplane whether he likes it or not.The two halves never meet, which is fine, because both of them are about the same thing: a Bundy man doing something he has no interest in doing because a woman has made it unavoidable.

Episode Facts

Original air date: January 5, 1992
Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 14
Overall episode number: 119
Written by: Kevin Curran
Directed by: Gerry Cohen
Taped: December 13, 1991
Production note: The last episode of the series filmed in 1991 and the first to air in 1992.
Production note: The airplane set and Bud’s jumpsuit had previously been used on the ABC sitcom Free Spirit, in an episode with a near-identical skydiving premise.
Title note: Skull Island is King Kong’s home.