Katherine Green
Al has one last chance to break his friend Puggy Weaver’s alley record before Puggy moves away, and he brings the children along to film it for posterity. Then Peg starts bowling strikes and will not stop. The episode is where Al first articulates the Bundy Curse, which became the family’s explanation for everything.
Steve is out of work after the hotline disaster and has been filling his days taking Peg and the kids to the zoo instead of job hunting. Marcy, now demoted to drive-up teller and working fifty hours a week, finds out. The episode is unusual for giving Al and Marcy a genuine scene as friends.
Peggy wins two weeks of training with a television aerobics instructor and accidentally kills him, by introducing him to cigarettes, Bundy food and Bundy afternoons. The episode ends with a dedication to the cockroach.
The series’ first Christmas episode opens with a content warning. A parachuting mall Santa lands fatally in the Bundys’ back yard on Christmas Eve, and the neighborhood children start arriving with questions. David Faustino has called it one of his favorites.
Al will not pay for a call to Canada, so the phone company cuts off the house. Meanwhile a new neighborhood crime light shines directly into his face at night. Kelly’s whistle down the phone line ended up in the show’s syndicated opening credits.
Al and Peggy’s favorite burger joint is closing and they cannot get out of the house to reach it. Bud needs help, then Kelly, then Marcy is in their kitchen in a towel. The series’ only real-time episode until “The Desperate Half-Hour” ten years later.
Al and Peggy agree to skip anniversary gifts and neither can stick to it. Peggy buys one anyway. Al’s credit card is declined at the jeweler’s, so he comes home with nothing. The series ran the same story again nine years later for their twenty-fifth.
Al and Steve buy a 1965 Mustang to restore, and the project consumes both of them entirely. Peggy and Marcy find their own common ground in hating it. Al’s dream sequence about escaping in the car gets undercut a week later, when the license plate turns out to be Peggy’s.
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