Season 6 Episode 20: Hi I.Q.
March 22, 1992
Kelly Bundy receives an invitation to a party thrown by Alpha, an organization for people with very high IQs, and she accepts it at face value. The viewer works out what is actually happening some time before she does. The Alpha members have a tradition: each of them brings the dumbest person they can find as a date, and there is a prize for the winner. Kelly is somebody’s entry. The episode gives Christina Applegate one of her best stretches of the season, because it plays the reveal straight and lets Kelly be genuinely wounded by it rather than oblivious, and what follows is Bud offering her the only two forms of recourse the Bundy family recognizes. The first one she declines on hygiene grounds. The second, which he describes as destroying their superior smiles with sheer pointless violence, she accepts. In the meantime Al and Jefferson have bought a flat-packed workbench and are attempting to assemble it, an undertaking that the two of them are catastrophically unqualified for and that Peg and Marcy watch from the kitchen with the detachment of people observing a cartoon. Some of the hardware in the box is not even workbench hardware. The project reaches its natural conclusion when Al picks up a blowtorch to investigate whether it is clogged and asks Jefferson to hold the lighter. Ed O’Neill named this one of his favorite episodes of the whole series.The two halves do not intersect at all, which is fine, because both are about intelligence and the people who think they have it. Alpha believes it is smart and behaves appallingly. Al and Jefferson know perfectly well that they are not, and set themselves on fire anyway.
Episode Facts
- Original air date: March 22, 1992
- Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 20
- Overall episode number: 125
- Written by: Steve Crider
- Directed by: Gerry Cohen
- Taped: February 21, 1992
- Production note: Ed O’Neill named this one of his favorite episodes in the 1995 special My Favorite Married.
- Title note: A play on “high IQ,” generally taken to mean a score of 130 or above. The fictional Alpha society stands in for Mensa.
Guest Cast
- Joshua Beckett as Scott (credited as Joshua Rifkind)
- Christopher M. Brown as Ralph
- Rana Kirkland as Margie (credited as Rana Mack)
- James Quattrochi as Delbert (credited as James Quarter)
- Gary Epp as the security guard
- Tim Hill as the man
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