Season 6 Episode 2: She’s Having My Baby (2)

The back half of the season 6 premiere, and the point at which Al and Jefferson decide that the correct response to impending fatherhood is flight. Both men have reached the end of their tolerance. Al has spent the episode trapped in a house with two pregnant women who want to tell him about a visit to a baby psychic, and when he tries to escape into television every channel he lands on is somehow also about pregnancy. Jefferson has been to a baby expo and come back shaken. So the two of them end up at a bar called the Paternity Ward, which exists specifically to serve men in their position, and begin seriously discussing getting on a plane. The bar is one of the better single jokes of the season. The clientele is entirely composed of expectant fathers. A vendor circulates selling fake identities, false noses and hair dye to anyone who wants to stop being himself, and when she asks Al and Jefferson whether they would like to be somebody, Al inquires about the going rate for an ex-football player with a cool name. The bartender has already left his own wife and is happy to explain when. Another regular puts on a nose and glasses the moment his departure gate is called. Whether either of them actually goes through with it is the question the episode exists to answer, and the answer is the one the show always gave: the Bundys and the Darcys do not escape anything.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: September 15, 1991
• Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 2
• Overall episode number: 107
• Written by: Kevin Curran
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Production note: Conclusion of the two part season 6 premiere. Kevin Curran, who wrote this one, was also the regular voice of Buck.
• Title note: A play on the 1988 film She’s Having a Baby.

Guest Cast

• Monty Hoffman as the bartender
• Joey Sagal as the man with the nose
• Lisa Saxton as the girl vendor
• Cyndi Pass as the dancer

The Paternity Ward

A bar built entirely for men running from fatherhood is the sort of premise the show could sustain for an act and a half without ever explaining itself, and it does. The vendor’s inventory is the detail that sells it: monocles, family trees, gum, fake IDs, hair dye. She is not selling disguises so much as whole alternate biographies, priced accordingly. Two hundred dollars buys you an ex-football player with a cool name. One dollar buys you a shoe salesman named Al.

The man who puts on a fake nose and glasses the instant Gate 6 is announced is played by Joey Sagal, Katey Sagal’s brother. He came back to the series in season 10’s “The Two That Got Away” as Randolph, who owns the cabin Al and Jefferson retreat to. Monty Hoffman, the bartender here, returned in season 7’s “Christmas” as the Santa who sits next to Al at a bar and then leaves with a woman.

The first act belongs to Al alone in the living room with the remote, and the gag is simple and perfect. Every channel he tries is about babies. Mork and Mindy, Bonanza and Lassie all cough up a pregnancy line on cue, and the Lassie one in particular is not something you would expect to get past a network.

Marcy and Peg’s report from Madame Rachel the baby psychic gives Amanda Bearse one of her better scenes with Ed O’Neill. Marcy’s account of her symptoms is more detail than Al wants, and when he complains that the conversation is boring, she turns it around by asking him what goes through his mind in the exciting moment of selling a shoe.

Famous Quotes

• Al, on the long-term consequences of one evening: “God, I feel like Exxon. One spill, I’m paying for it the rest of my life!”
• Al, having had enough of the psychic’s findings: “Oh please, Peg, can’t we hear more about Marcy’s nipples?”
• Al, answering Marcy’s question about what he thinks when he sells a shoe: “I always think, ‘How can someone buy something so cheap and ugly and stupid?’ But then I think, ‘Hells bells! Someone knocked up my next door neighbor, so anything’s possible!’”
• The vendor at the Paternity Ward: “Monocles! Family trees! Gum… Gentlemen, would you like to be somebody?” Al: “Uh, how much for an ex-football player with a cool name?”

Notes

• Al reports that Peg has consumed four Grand Slam breakfasts.
• Jefferson’s summary of the baby expo is acres of fat pregnant women wearing Keds.
• Al works in a Prince reference while rubbing both bellies, noting that soon he will be partying like 1999.
• Lisa Saxton, the vendor, returns a few episodes later in “Looking for a Desk in All the Wrong Places” as one of the women in Jefferson’s fantasy.
• A goof: the bartender walks away from the counter after his line about leaving his wife, but his hand is still visibly resting on it in the next angle before he exits again.