Season 5 Episode 24: Route 666 (2)

The season 5 finale, and one of the purest demonstrations of the show’s basic philosophy that the Bundys will never, under any circumstances, be allowed to win. Picking up from part one, Al has his map, Jefferson has put up the money, and the two families are out in the New Mexico desert digging for gold. At first it works. They find it, in quantity, and the discovery immediately does to all six of them what sudden wealth does to people in stories like this one. They stop cooperating. They start hoarding. They begin eyeing each other’s piles and making plans that do not include anyone else. Al sinks into a long fantasy sequence about the life that awaits him, populated by a procession of women named after nuts, in which he is wearing a Polk High jersey and is finally, at last, somebody. Bud announces his intention to buy a house next to the Playboy Mansion and run his own parties out of it. Peg and Marcy make their own arrangements. And then the punchline arrives, which is that the mine is not a mine at all. It is a tourist attraction. Visitors pay to dig there, the ground is salted with iron pyrite, and every ounce the two families have hauled out of the dirt and fought each other over is worthless. The episode closes on all six of them sitting on a California beach watching the ocean, which is as close to a happy ending as this series was ever prepared to go.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: May 5, 1991
• Season and episode: Season 5, Episode 24
• Overall episode number: 104
• Written by: Ralph R. Farquhar
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Production note: The season 5 finale and the conclusion of the two part “Route 666” story.
• Production note: Instead of the usual freeze frame of Al and Peg on the couch, the original broadcast closed on the Bundys and Darcys sitting on a California beach watching the waves.
• Title note: A play on U.S. Route 66 crossed with 666.

Guest Cast

• Pamela Anderson as Cashew
• Renee Tenison as Macadamia
• Ava Fabian as Honey Roasted
• Bobbie Brown as Pecan
• Heather Elizabeth Parkhurst as Almond
• Earl Billings as Demerson
• Sharyn Leavitt as Yetta
• Derek Sellers, Richard Hanson and David Nelson as Fantasy Men

Fool’s Gold

The gold strike is the setup for a morality play the show has no interest in moralizing about. Six people find money, six people turn on each other, and the only reason none of it has consequences is that the money was never real. It is a cleaner version of the same joke the series had been telling for five years, which is that the Bundys are not poor because of bad luck. They are poor because the universe has decided, and it has no intention of reconsidering.

Al’s fantasy sequence is the centerpiece and it is stacked with familiar faces. The women are all named after nuts, and four of the five actresses had already appeared on the series in other parts. Pamela Anderson, here as Cashew, had played Yvette earlier in the same season in “Al… with Kelly,” and the Playboy issue with her on the cover was visible in Bud’s confiscated collection in part one. Bobbie Brown had been Nibbles in the supermarket two-parter a few weeks earlier. Heather Elizabeth Parkhurst had been Flopsie in “Weenie Tot Lovers and Other Strangers.” Ava Fabian had appeared back in season 4’s “You Gotta Know When to Fold ‘Em.” Renee Tenison would come back repeatedly, including as Griff’s love interest Marla in season 10.

A nice detail in the fantasy: Al is wearing a Polk High jersey with the number 12, not the 33 he wears in almost every other flashback and daydream in the series.

Yetta, the woman in the pink sun visor, is played by Sharyn Leavitt, who was at the time married to series co-creator Ron Leavitt. Between her, Michael G. Moye’s cameo as Young Zeke in part one, and the Leavitt children in “Kids! Wadaya Gonna Do?,” the back end of season 5 is unusually full of people related to the people making the show.

Famous Quotes

• Al, on the provenance of his gold mine: he got it from an old man who, as he puts it, looks like John Byner. Byner did in fact play the prospector in part one.
• Bud, laying out his post-gold real estate plans: he intends to get a place next to the Playboy Mansion, and if the parties there have died down, Hugh Hefner is welcome to stop by Club Bud for the young women.

Notes

• The park in this episode is modeled on a real place: Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro, Arkansas, where visitors genuinely can dig and keep whatever they find. The difference is that the diamonds there are real.
• Pamela Anderson and Heather Elizabeth Parkhurst appeared together again on the spinoff Top of the Heap, playing sisters in the episode “Behind the Eight Ball.”
• Three of the women in Al’s fantasy had been Playboy Playmates of the Month: Pamela Anderson (February 1990), Renee Tenison (November 1989, and Playmate of the Year in 1990) and Ava Fabian (August 1986).
• Renee Tenison returned to the series with her twin sister Rosie for Jefferson’s fantasy in season 6’s “Looking for a Desk in All the Wrong Places.”
• On the DVD release the beach ending is converted to a still frame with the substitute version of “Love and Marriage” playing over it.