Season 7 Episode 14: It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This

Al has arranged one week alone at a mountain cabin belonging to his boss, and the only thing he wants from the trip is silence. Peg decides to come. Marcy, having had another argument with Jefferson about his spending, decides to come as well. So Al spends his vacation carrying two women’s luggage into a cabin and then listening to them fight with each other continuously for several days, a sequence the show eventually gives up on scoring seriously and sets to “Yakety Sax.” By day three the arguing has followed him into the bedroom and then into the bathroom. When he finally secures a room with a door that closes, his reaction is to stand in it and weep with gratitude, and the speech he gives about every television father he grew up watching having had a bed of his own is the most sincere thing in the episode. Back in Chicago, Bud, Kelly and Seven have been left behind without warning. Bud’s parting curse, yelled at an empty street, is one of the best things David Faustino ever got to deliver. The three of them then discover Marcy’s credit card, and Jefferson joins in, and by the time Marcy gets home there is a massage therapist and a lingerie model in the Bundy living room and a great deal of food. The episode is Michael G. Moye’s only solo writing credit of the season, and it is structured as two completely separate farces that never touch, which is the right call: neither group has any idea what the other is doing, and neither would care.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: January 24, 1993
• Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 14
• Overall episode number: 145
• Written by: Michael G. Moye
• Directed by: Sam W. Orender
• Taped: January 15, 1993
• Production note: The cabin exterior in the closing snow scene is a reused set from the ABC sitcom Free Spirit, where it served as the back of the Harper house. That show shared production companies with this one, and MWC writer-producer Richard Gurman was its executive producer.
• Production note: From this episode the closing credits switch to a larger type treatment, a style that spread to the opening producer credits a few weeks later and reverted in season 11.
• Title note: From the idiom, with a probable nod to the Old Milwaukee beer campaign that used the same line.

Guest Cast

• Joel Gretsch as Johnny
• Terri Wilgren as Mindy

Yakety Sax at the Cabin

Dropping Boots Randolph’s “Yakety Sax” over Peg and Marcy chasing Al around a cabin is the moment the episode stops pretending it is a story and admits it is a cartoon. It works because Ed O’Neill plays the whole sequence as a man being slowly destroyed rather than as a man in a chase scene.

Al’s monologue about never having had a room of his own is the emotional centre and it is built entirely out of television references. Ozzie had his own bed. The father on Father Knows Best had one. Al Bundy has never had one, and when he finally gets a door he can close, he announces it to his late father. He had done something similar earlier in the season in “If Al Had a Hammer,” and the repetition is deliberate.

Bud’s curse at the departing car is the best writing in the episode, a four-part escalation delivered at full volume to nobody, ending on his grandmother and a supply problem. It is the kind of line that only lands because the show had spent seven years establishing exactly how much Bud hates his own family.

Marcy’s complaint about Jefferson sets the whole trip in motion, and Al’s follow-up question about what else Jefferson says in his own defense is one of the harder lines the series ever gave Marcy to absorb.

Famous Quotes

• Marcy, on her husband’s expenses: “You know what he said when I called him on it? ‘Hey babe, I’m good-looking.’ That’s his answer to everything!”
• Peg, on Al’s attitude to his own vacation: “Oh, stop pouting, Al. If I don’t see a smile, I will forbid you to come with us!”
• Al: “You didn’t forget anything did you?” Peg: “Nothing that matters.” Then, as the children appear at the top of the stairs: “Cheese it! The kids!”
• Bud, to an empty street: “CURSE YOU! I CURSE YOU TO YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE: AN ETERNITY OF BEING TOGETHER!… AND YOU CAN’T LEAVE THE BEDROOM!… AND GRANDMA’S THERE!… AND SHE’S OUT OF DEPENDS!”
• Al, on his own position in the household: “Look dad! It’s all mine!”

Notes

• Al wears a shirt reading “I FISH, Therefore I Am.”
• Marcy mentions that Jefferson still has his job, which would make him still employed at the Manhole bar from “Al on the Rocks.”
• Al describes the destination as a mountain cabin, which is a problem given that Illinois does not have any mountains.
• Al also says the cabin belongs to his boss, two full seasons before he actually meets Gary.
• A goof worth watching for: Katey Sagal is visibly laughing during what is supposed to be the most heated argument of the trip, on the bed on day three.
• Bud and Kelly complain about being left alone without supervision and without money, despite both being over eighteen and Kelly holding a paying job at the diner.