Season 7 Episode 22: ‘Til Death Do Us Part

April 25, 1993

Published 04/25/93

Word gets around about Al’s performance in the bedroom, and by the time the episode starts it is common knowledge in the neighbourhood and a running joke among people Al has never met. Kelly reports that children settling fights now invoke his name as a measure of speed. Al’s response is to get himself back into shape, and the training montage that follows is scored to “Tuff Enuff,” the cue the show reserves for Al attempting something physical. The regime is punishing and conducted largely in the Bundy basement, which the series shows for the first time here. It also goes badly enough that Al ends up unconscious on the Darcys’ lawn and has to be carried home, which produces the episode’s most memorable and least explicable sequence, involving a flattened squirrel that Marcy identifies by name and then uses as a weapon. Peg, meanwhile, spends the episode managing her husband’s confidence, including a phone call to Marcy conducted within Al’s hearing in which she reports results that have not occurred. Whether the program works is answered in the final act, and for once the show lets Al have the win outright. The episode is unusually small: no guest cast at all beyond Kevin Curran’s voice work for Buck, and nearly all of it inside the house. What it lacks in scale it makes up for in sheer oddity, and the squirrel is the reason anyone remembers it.It is also one of the rare occasions on which the series lets Al succeed at the thing he set out to do, and then moves on without making him pay for it.

Episode Facts

Original air date: April 25, 1993
Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 22
Overall episode number: 153
Written by: Stacie Lipp
Directed by: Gerry Cohen
Taped: March 26, 1993
Production note: The Bundy basement appears on screen for the first time in this episode.
Production note: No guest cast beyond Kevin Curran voicing Buck, which makes this one of the smallest episodes of the run.
Title note: From the wedding vow.