Linda Day
Al and Peg face off against Marcy and Jefferson in the supermarket shopping spree, with Al competing in a homemade armored shopping cart he calls the Cart of Death. Meanwhile Bud and Kelly spend the episode harassing Jerry Mathers. Conclusion of a two part story.
A heat wave hits and Al buys a war surplus air conditioner that blacks out the entire neighborhood. With a torch-carrying mob at the door, the Bundys move into the local supermarket, where they are promptly named winners of a shopping spree. Part one of two.
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.
Al tells the family to start earning their own money, so Kelly takes a job dancing in a music video and Bud appoints himself her agent. Peg’s contribution is to set up a toll booth. This is David Garrison’s final appearance as a regular, and the first of Bud’s many stints managing his sister’s career.
Peggy’s relatives arrive — two feuding uncles and three singing aunts, played by the Del Rubio Triplets — while Al tries to watch Hondo. King Kong Bundy plays Uncle Irwin, and the family surname came from him in the first place.
Al wins twelve hundred and fifty dollars at the track and tries to keep it secret. Peggy has already started taking money out of his wallet. Neither of them will confront the other, because that would mean admitting what they are each doing.
Al and Peggy apply to a sadistic game show as Steve and Marcy, only to find that Steve and Marcy have applied as Al and Peg. Both couples have to compete under each other’s names. It is the second season’s best-built farce.
Kelly is grounded over her grades, and the house is being fumigated, so the whole family decamps to the shoe store. Kelly has a concert to get to. The episode aired the same night Christina Applegate guest-starred on 21 Jump Street.
Marcy tells Al that anything arriving unsolicited in the mail is legally his to keep, and then a credit card turns up addressed to Buck. Everything the family buys on it was borrowed from the homes of the show’s own cast and crew.
A mouse gets into the house, which means confronting Peggy’s childhood fear of mice and watching Al dismantle his own home trying to catch it. The mouse is never in danger. Bud’s goldfish, it later emerges, was not so lucky.