Season 10 Episode 8: Blonde and Blonder

Kelly’s five-year Polk High reunion is the main event, and the episode gets there by way of a story she tells at Bud’s expense. Needling him about his prom night, she produces a better humiliation of her own: a boy named Eric Waters, whose glasses were held together with tape, asked her out one New Year’s Eve, and she sent him to the top of the Hancock tower stripped to the buff. She tells it as a triumph. The reunion is where the bill arrives, because Eric Waters turns up handsome, rich and on a cell phone, and he has had five years to think about how to handle the four of them.

The revenge he chooses is precise. He does not insult Kelly or expose her; he simply makes himself available and then withdraws, leaving each of her friends to make a move and be declined in turn before taking Kelly outside and stranding her in the cold. The episode is unusually interested in consequence for a show that generally refused it, and it lands because Kelly’s account of the original cruelty was so cheerful. The reunion also introduces Fawn, Ashley, Jessica and Mindy, three of whom stick around for later episodes.

At home, Marcy is running a toys-for-guns exchange, which gives Al and Peggy a reason to dig through the attic and discover that a foam dart gun is more fun than anything else in their marriage. That scene, two people in their forties shooting each other and laughing while Marcy stands in the doorway appalled, is the warmest thing in the half-hour, and Al’s and Peg’s back-to-back assessments of what exactly is happening between them make it the episode’s best exchange. Jefferson spends the rest of it finding things of Marcy’s to blow up.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Sunday, November 5, 1995 on FOX
• Season 10, Episode 8
• Overall episode 219 of the series
• Production code 10.08
• Written by Stacie Lipp and Richard Gurman
• Directed by Gerry Cohen
• The title riffs on the 1994 comedy Dumb and Dumber
• Kelly’s banner dates her Polk High graduation to 1990

Guest Cast

• Casper Van Dien as Eric Waters
• Heidi Mark as Ashley
• Lisa Boyle as Fawn
• Lisa Picotte as Mindy
• Sarah Ann Morris as Jessica
• Tina New as Debbie
• Troy Fromin as Chad
• Armando Garza as Fireman Roberto

Eric Waters Settles Up

Most of this series runs on the principle that nothing the Bundys do ever catches up with them. This episode breaks that rule for one of them, and the structure makes the point efficiently: Kelly tells the Hancock tower story in the first act as a boast, which means the audience knows exactly what Eric is owed before he walks in. The script does not need him to explain himself.

His method is worth noting because it is the opposite of what the show would normally do. There is no speech and no public shaming. He lets four women compete for his attention, declines all of them, and then applies the same treatment Kelly gave him, in the same weather, with the same casual air. Casper Van Dien plays it almost entirely straight, which is why it works: the character is not a cartoon getting even, he is a person who remembers.

The toys-for-guns subplot is pure texture, and it is where the episode’s affection lives. Al and Peggy’s dart-gun fight is one of the handful of moments in the back half of the series where the two of them are simply enjoying each other, and the show immediately undercuts it with Peg’s observation that it cannot be foreplay because she is enjoying it. Marcy’s campaign gets steadily less dignified from there, with Jefferson contributing loaded dice and finding creative uses for a Mr. Potato Head.

Famous Quotes

• Al: “Hey, Peg. Do I smell garlic chicken?” / Peg: “No, Al. But guess what I found in the attic.” / Al: “Hey, if I wanna keep a noose upstairs, that’s my business, Peg.”
• Marcy: “What is going on here?!” / Al: “This is foreplay.” / Peg: “No, honey, this can’t be foreplay. I’m enjoying it.” / Al: “And I’m in the room.”
• Bud: “Sure, go ahead, make fun of me now. But you’ll come back to me when you’re 25 and gravity has pulled you apart like a Stretch Armstrong.” To Ashley, who has just reminded him she stood him up on prom night.
• Kelly: “There was this guy in high school who was an even bigger loser than you: Eric Waters. Even the tape on his glasses had acne.” Setting up the story that the rest of the episode collects on.

Notes

• The episode introduces Kelly’s friends Fawn, Ashley, Jessica and Mindy. Jessica appears only here; Ashley, Fawn and Mindy return for the two-part “Spring Break,” and Fawn also turns up in “Love Conquers Al.”
• Al’s noose in the attic is a long-running detail: he had tried to use it as far back as season six’s “The Egg and I.”
• Signs in the reunion hallway read “…President Richie Gurman” and “…Prez Kim Weiskopf,” nods to writer-producers Richard Gurman, who co-wrote this episode, and Kim Weiskopf.
• The lyrics to the Polk High anthem are written on a whiteboard near the stage.
• Lisa Boyle, who plays Fawn, had appeared in season eight’s “NO MA’AM” as Bubbles Double Dee. Heidi Mark, who plays Ashley, was Playboy‘s Playmate of the Month for July 1995.
• An instrumental version of Rick James’s “Super Freak” plays at the reunion.
• Kelly also reveals how she broke her legs: joyriding a nerd’s car with another boy, steering it with their backsides until it crashed.
• Goof: Peggy says she found the foam dart gun among the kids’ old attic toys, but the model was only released in 1994, roughly a year before taping.