Season 11 Episode 4: Requiem for a Chevyweight (1)

The Dodge is dying, and the episode treats it as a terminal illness. Al bursts out of the garage announcing an emergency involving the love of his life, both children assume he means their mother, and the correction, no, the Dodge, sets the tone for a half-hour played as hospital melodrama. The scene that follows was shot in the FilmLook process, a post-production effect that gives videotape the appearance of film, and staged as a direct spoof of ER: a specialist is summoned, a chart is consulted, an air-to-fuel ratio of 180 over 90 is pronounced a little high, and the diagnosis, when it comes, is the fuel pump.

Rick Overton’s Dr. Fisher, a Doctor of Automotive Engineering, Quaker State, plays the whole thing with a bedside manner, which is what makes it work. He asks what Al has been feeding her, observes that she has the hoses of a car with twice her mileage, and then absolves him, on the grounds that nobody knew then what is known now about octane. Al’s guilt about buying cheap petrol when the car was young is delivered as genuine remorse, and Ed O’Neill does not wink at it once.

While Al grieves, the rest of the family gets on with the practical business of finding buyers for the parts, and the episode fills its middle with flashbacks to the Dodge’s better days, including the night Al scored four touchdowns, which the series finally confirms was also the night Kelly was conceived, in that car, after a failure of equipment. The required fuel pump is rumoured to be in Cuba. Al’s response to that news takes in Castro, Khrushchev and, for reasons he declines to justify, Steve Allen.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Sunday, November 10, 1996 on FOX
• Season 11, Episode 4, part one of two
• Overall episode 242 of the series
• Production code 11.07
• Written by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher
• Directed by Gerry Cohen
• The title puns on Requiem for a Heavyweight, from the Rod Serling story, the third episode to use the construction, after “Requiem for a Dead Barber” and “Requiem for a Dead Briard“
• Amanda Bearse does not appear; this episode has no epilogue

Guest Cast

• Rick Overton as Dr. Fisher
• Cliff Bemis as Al’s Dad
• Hannah Swanson as Young Kelly

The Dodge on Life Support

The garage-as-emergency-room conceit is carried further than the joke strictly needs, and that commitment is what sells it. The post-teaser scene was processed in FilmLook, a technique developed in 1989 to make video look like film, which gives the sequence a visual texture nothing else in the series has and marks it out as a deliberate parody of ER rather than a passing reference. The medical vocabulary is maintained throughout, chart, specialist, prognosis. And nobody in the scene acknowledges that they are discussing a car.

The flashbacks give the episode its emotional spine, and they confirm a piece of Bundy history the series had circled for years. Kelly had always been said to have been conceived in the Dodge; this episode specifies the night, the four-touchdown game, and the cause. Cliff Bemis appears as Al’s father, which is a small oddity in itself, since Bemis is only two years younger than Ed O’Neill and shares the scene with him playing a teenage Al.

For a show that ran on the premise that Al Bundy loved nothing, the episode makes a reasonable case that he loved the car. The Dodge had been the butt of the joke since 1987, unreliable, ugly, repeatedly destroyed, and giving it a death scene with a doctor and a flashback montage is the series taking its own longest-running prop seriously for twenty minutes. Some fans treat the car as the origin of the Bundy curse: his life went wrong around the time he got it.

Famous Quotes

• Al: “Come on! The love of my life’s in trouble!” / Bud: “Oh my God! Something’s wrong with Mom?” / Al: “No, you idiot! It’s the Dodge!”
• Dr. Fisher: “I’m Dr. Fisher, the specialist.” / Peggy: “Doctor?” / Dr. Fisher: “Yes ma’am, Doctor of Automotive Engineering, Quaker State. I’ll need to see her chart.”
• Al: “Her air-to-fuel ratio is 180 over 90.” / Dr. Fisher: “Hmmm… That’s a little high.”
• Dr. Fisher: “What have you fed her?! She has the hoses of a car with twice her mileage!” / Al: “Well, I didn’t always buy her the best gas when she was young.” / Dr. Fisher: “Don’t blame yourself. If we only knew then what we know now about octane.”
• Bud: “There’s a rumor that the fuel pump you need is in Cuba.” / Al: “Damn Castro! Damn Khrushchev! Damn… Steve Allen!” / Bud: “What’s Steve Allen got to do with it?” / Al: “Nothing. Just… It’s that I just hate him.”
• Bud: “An emergency? What is it?” / Kelly: “An unforeseen circumstance that calls for immediate action, but that’s not the point right now.”

Notes

• The post-teaser garage scene uses FilmLook, an image-processing effect developed in 1989 that converts 60-field video to a 24-frame film look.
• Cliff Bemis, who plays Al’s father in the flashback, had appeared in season two’s “The Great Escape” as the Termite Boss. He is only two years younger than Ed O’Neill, who shares the flashback with him as a teenage Al.
• After saving the car, Al mentions dipping into the college fund, which upsets Bud, who graduated at the end of season ten in “Bud Hits the Books.” Season seven’s “The Old College Try” established that the fund was effectively empty until Bud’s grant money was deposited into it by mistake.
• In the drive-in flashback Peggy mentions falling asleep in home economics, the class season four’s “Peggy Made a Little Lamb” revealed she had failed and had to retake alongside Kelly.
• Continuity: the conception date given here sits awkwardly with Kelly’s stated 1971 birth, since Al would have left Polk High around 1966, and it contradicts the version Al told Charlie Verducci in “Top of the Heap.”
• Goof: the printout Al identifies as a specific celebrity photo is plainly a Big ‘Uns cover of a woman in a gold striped bikini.