Marcy Rhoades
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.
Marcy dents Steve’s new Mercedes while he is away, and rather than get angry he announces that the stress has made him impotent — and then commits to it entirely. Marcy spirals. It is also the first episode to show the real Tang bottle.
Steve returns from a rafting trip with a beard and refuses to shave it, which ends with him moving in next door. Al is delighted to have a houseguest who cooks. It is also the first episode directed by Gerry Cohen, who went on to direct more of the series than anyone.
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 invites Steve to poker and Steve loses his whole paycheck to him, which Marcy wants back. It is the only episode of the series without Bud, and the first without Kelly. It also introduces Al’s friends, one of whom lasts long enough to become a NO MA’AM member.
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.
Steve and Marcy have a tax refund and want to add a room, so Al lobbies for a pool room while Peggy and Marcy want an exercise room. Four people spend the episode negotiating over a room no Bundy will pay for. It is one of the series’ two bottle episodes.
A robber is working the neighborhood, so the Rhoades get a guard dog and Al buys a gun. Both defenses are tested on the same night and the dog comes off worst. It aired the same night The Simpsons first appeared on television, as shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show.
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