Michael G. Moye
Al has a breakdown at the shoe store after sixteen straight hours of a midnight madness sale, and takes up gardening to calm down. A rabbit starts eating his carrots. The response escalates to flooding the burrow with a hose, which floods the street and the house next door as well.
The season opens with the Bundys trapped in a traffic jam on the way back from a trip, going nowhere for the entire episode. Kelly has her diploma, Bud is a senior, and Marcy has her bank manager job back by a method she describes in detail. Almost all of it happens in one stationary car.
Al has actually saved money for Christmas presents, and a late rush at the shoe store stops him reaching the bank before it closes. The two-parter aired the same night The Simpsons premiered on FOX, and both episodes lean on the same Christmas song.
A guardian angel shows Al what his family’s life would be like if he had never been born, and the answer is that they would all be much better off. Sam Kinison plays the angel — he had been the producers’ first choice to play Al Bundy.
Al has been burying money in a shoe box in the backyard for a new car. Peg found it, dug it up and spent it, so Al goes shopping with nothing and works his way down through progressively worse used cars. He ends his search with the same vehicle he started with, lightly disguised.
Al’s barber dies, which leaves him with nowhere to get his hair cut but a salon. The episode’s editor was nominated for an Emmy for it. It is also one of only three episodes in which Peggy turns Al down.
The upstairs toilet floods once too often and Al finally builds his own bathroom in the garage, realizing an ambition from season one. It is also the first appearance of the Ferguson toilet, which he stayed proud of for the next eight years.
Al finds a library book thirty-one years overdue and has to return it, which means facing the librarian he has been frightened of since childhood. The book is The Little Engine That Could, which the title turns against him.
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.
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