Season 8 Episode 18: Get Outta Dodge

February 20, 1994

Published 02/20/94

Peg has finally worn Al down on the subject of the Dodge, and he agrees to sell it, which produces the best sequence in the episode: a parade of prospective buyers at the Bundy front door, each one worse than the last. A pair of winos arrive first with forty dollars, having decided they should not drink and drive. The advertisement, it turns out, was supposed to read four thousand. After them comes a succession of visitors whose interest in the vehicle says more about the car than any description could, and somewhere in the middle of them Kelly turns up at her own front door, looking for a man named Waldo in a book, and fails to recognize the house. Then the Dodge Corporation gets involved. A representative named Bill Ellis has noticed that the car is about to roll over one million miles, and offers Al a brand new Viper in exchange for the right to film the moment. So Al has to drive the remaining distance on camera, which takes him out into the desert and through a town the script calls Burnt Scrotum, New Mexico. Whether the odometer cooperates is the question the episode turns on, and the answer involves the length of the Bundy driveway. It is one of the better Dodge episodes and the one that finally forces Al to put a price on the car, which turns out to be the hardest thing anyone asks him to do all season. The parade of buyers at the door is the funniest sustained sequence in it, and the Dodge Corporation subplot gives the episode somewhere to go once that runs out.

Episode Facts

Original air date: February 20, 1994
Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 18
Overall episode number: 175
Written by: Mark Driscoll
Directed by: Sam W. Orender
Production note: On the original broadcast the credits continued Al’s drive through the desert. Later prints replace it with a still.
Title note: From “get the hell out of Dodge,” doing double duty for a man getting out of his Dodge.