Linda Day
Steve’s bank is a million dollars short the morning after he and Al spent the night in the vault, and everybody assumes Al took it. The family’s reaction is uncomplicated delight. Nobody asks where the money came from, which is the episode’s actual subject.
The series’ first two-parter sends the Bundys to Dumpwater, Florida, and a motel called Poppy’s by the Tree. An axe murderer has visited every five years since 1962, and the locals are taking bets on which Bundy he gets. The episode opens in black and white.
A storm traps the Bundys at the motel and the locals will not help. Then the killer takes Peggy hostage, which forces Al to actually do something. It is also the first appearance of “Thank your father, kids” — a ritual the series kept for ten more years.
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 learns the shoe store’s owner has died and is bothered only that he never got any recognition from a boss he has never met. When Gary turns out to be alive, Al pays a man to impersonate him so he can hear it said. His resignation speech follows.
Steve is away, and Marcy begins dreaming nightly about a romantic, attentive version of Al. She is appalled. The episode gives Marcy an interior life nobody around her can take seriously, and logs the first mentions of the Bundy house number and Lake Chicamocomico.
Al refuses to buy Peggy a VCR, so she takes a job selling clocks and earns the money herself. Al discovers that her absence leaves nothing between him and the children. Then both of them decide they want her home, and neither will admit it first.
Steve and Marcy take Bud and Kelly for a weekend expecting to be a good influence, and the house does not survive it. Al and Peggy, meanwhile, have the best weekend of their marriage in a cheap motel. It is also the first time the series shows Peggy cleaning anything.
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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