Ellen L. Fogle
Kelly’s birthday gets forgotten again, and when she cancels a date to spend the evening at the movies with her family, all five of them end up at the multiplex. The episode gives each Bundy an interior monologue over the same film. It is also David Boreanaz’s first credited screen role.
Al tells a bartender how he worked twelve part-time jobs in twelve days to pay for Christmas presents, the worst of them being the mall Santa shift. Flashbacks run back to 1974. The gifts he eventually hands out were taken from the bar. One of the uncredited children in the choir is Meghan Markle.
Peg buys a series of increasingly expensive outfits to get Al’s attention, and Al holds out for a steak dinner instead. Bud spends the episode loitering in a lingerie shop talking to a mannequin. Best remembered for two minutes on the couch where Al and Jefferson invent a dessert.
Kelly’s date abandons her on a dark road for refusing him, and calls her a tramp on his way out. Walking home she meets other girls left there for the same reason. Al and Peg try to save their marriage by talking, and Bud gets a date with a girl who has measles.
The Bundys win a free trip to England, courtesy of a village that has been cursed since 1653 and can only break it by killing the last two male Bundys inside its limits. The neighbouring village needs them to die outside it. Part one of three.
Steve Rhoades returns to reclaim Marcy and finds she has remarried, which puts both her husbands in the same room. He is also on the run from the police, so the Bundys have to decide whether friendship beats the reward money.
Al falls out of the bedroom window after seeing the twenty-five hundred dollar painting Peg commissioned of herself. He wakes up convinced he has been shown God’s shoes and chosen to sell them. Jefferson handles the business side, using Marcy’s money. Kelly is the only member of the family who takes the revelation seriously.
Buck loses his appetite and the whole family devotes itself to the dog, which leaves a pregnant Peggy ignored enough to move back in with the Wankers. It is the last episode to show Peggy pregnant, and the reasons behind that were real.
Al and Peg go across the street for a movie night at the Darcys’ and promptly take the house over. Bud lands a girl and a pair of concert tickets. Kelly takes a babysitting job minding seven children named after the months of the year, and it does not go well.
Marcy wakes up after a banking convention married to a stranger named Jefferson D’Arcy, and Al offers to arrange the wedding so he can profit from it. Ted McGinley joined here on terms uncertain enough that his billing was held in the closing credits.