Gerry Cohen
The lost episode. Filmed in January 1989 and shelved when FOX’s censors and the producers could not agree during the Rakolta boycott, it aired overseas that year but was not shown in America until FX broadcast it on June 18, 2002.
Bud’s prison pen pal breaks out and turns up at the house with two accomplices, taking the whole family and the D’Arcys hostage. Kelly falls for one of the accomplices. Marcy’s one job is not to mention the Mercedes.
Lonnie leaves prison and proposes properly, and Al’s objection evaporates once he learns the family fortune involved. The wedding gets as far as the back yard. This is also the episode that became the show’s ending, which nobody involved intended.
Marcy’s cousin Mandy arrives, befriends Al and Jefferson, and makes Marcy jealous. Then Mandy tells Al she is gay. Amanda Bearse plays both parts, four years after coming out publicly herself, and ten days before Ellen did the same on ABC.
Jefferson turns forty and Marcy decides he needs a job. Al tries to cure Peggy’s shopping habit. And Bud and Kelly shoot a commercial at the shoe store, with Al in the role of shoe salesman, which he cannot perform.
A children’s show host has a breakdown on air and Kelly takes over as Princess Kelly, becoming a hit. Then she introduces a puppet based on her brother. Meanwhile Al and Peggy try twin beds, and then bunk beds.
Bruce starts suggesting improvements to the Bundy household and loses the family immediately. Al, meanwhile, works his way back in on a series of pretexts. Peggy’s memories of the marriage arrive as a montage pulled from across the whole series.
Al moves into an apartment by the airport and Peggy stays home crying at the home shopping channel. Both of them end up at the same singles bar, where Peggy attracts a wealthy admirer and Al attracts a woman who thinks he is having a heart attack.
The Bundys holiday in Branson, Missouri, where Peggy and Kelly try to launch a mother-daughter country act and Tammy Wynette appears as herself. Back home, Marcy and Jefferson are house-sitting, and Marcy wants to try something cheap and trashy.
The Dodge is failing, and Al treats it as a medical emergency, complete with a specialist, a chart and a diagnosis. The rest of the family quietly starts shopping the parts around. The only fuel pump that will fit is rumored to be in Cuba.