Season 7 Episode 1: Magnificent Seven

September 13, 1992

Published 09/13/92

The season 7 premiere, and the single most argued-about episode in the series. Peg’s cousins Zemus and Ida Mae Wanker turn up at the house with their young son in tow. The boy’s name is Seven. Zemus and Ida Mae are played by Bobcat Goldthwait and Linda Blair, they are recently former nudists, they volunteer that they are swingers with no particular preferences, and shortly after arriving they step out for cigarettes and do not come back. The Bundys have been left with a child. Al’s reaction is immediate and total despair. He tries to give the boy to Marcy, framing the offer as an act of friendship toward a woman he has decided is incapable of having children of her own, and the delivery of that speech earns him the Ten Fingers of Death. Peg, alone in the household, is delighted. She sees Seven as a second chance at mothering, and sets about it by bribing Bud and Kelly with candy to entertain him, which produces the sight of two grown Bundy children singing “Baby Face” to a small boy against their will. Al, displaced from his own bedroom, ends up in Bud’s, where he discovers his son’s magazine collection and then discovers something considerably worse. Whether the addition of Seven was a good idea is a question fans have been answering for thirty years, mostly in the negative. What is not really in dispute is that the episode itself is funny. Goldthwait and Blair are only in it for a few minutes and they make the most of them, and Al’s two scenes, the one with Marcy and the one in Bud’s bedroom, are as good as anything in the seventh season. The character around whom all of it was built is the problem, not the writing in front of him.

Episode Facts

Original air date: September 13, 1992
Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 1
Overall episode number: 132
Written by: Arthur Silver
Directed by: Gerry Cohen
Taped: August 21, 1992
Production note: Shane Sweet’s debut as Seven. He appeared in twelve episodes across season 7 and then vanished from the series without explanation.
Production note: Bud’s bedroom is seen for the first time here, established as being across from Al and Peggy’s.
Title note: A play on the 1960 western The Magnificent Seven and the arrival of the character.