Season 10 Episode 19: Spring Break (2)

The conclusion splits into a road movie and a fixed contest. Marcy’s Mercedes breaks down in Tennessee after an encounter with a possum, which strands her and Bud’s friends at a gas station run by Parley Wayne Rockefeller, a mechanic with no tow truck and a few opinions about being called ZZ Top. The detour is the funniest material in the two-parter, mostly because Mickey Jones plays Parley Wayne as entirely unbothered by the fury of a woman in a German luxury sedan, and because Marcy has no leverage whatsoever and keeps trying to use some anyway.

In Fort Lauderdale the premise has escalated. Al learns the bikini contest Jefferson is judging carries a hundred-thousand-dollar prize, enters Kelly, and gets himself and Griff appointed to the panel so the result can be arranged. It is a plan with one weak link, and the show identifies it immediately: Griff can be bought for considerably less than a hundred thousand dollars. Miss Beverly Hills gets to him with an offer of marriage delivered at close range, Griff announces his vote and dares Al to stop him, and the next shot is Griff unconscious on the sand with Al kneeling over him holding a broken tennis racket and shouting that he did not want to do it.

Marcy and the boys arrive in time to sabotage the stage during the competition, scored to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and the two-parter resolves with nobody getting the money and everybody getting back to Chicago worse off. It is the last appearance of Kelly’s friends Ashley, Fawn and Mindy, and the last episode until the season finale to feature Katey Sagal at all.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Sunday, February 25, 1996 on FOX
• Season 10, Episode 19, part two of two
• Overall episode 231 of the series
• Production code 10.20
• Written by Calvin Brown, Jr.
• Directed by Gerry Cohen
• From this episode on, Katey Sagal is absent until the season finale, “The Joke’s on Al“
• Final appearances of Heidi Mark, Lisa Boyle and Lisa Picotte as Ashley, Fawn and Mindy

Guest Cast

• Mickey Jones as Parley Wayne Rockefeller
• Chris Hardwick as Dan Inwood
• Shawn Michael Howard as Barney
• Dave Ruby as Hummer
• S. Kyle Parker as Achmed
• Renee Tenison as Marla Strong, Miss Detroit
• Meadow Williams as Angela Cohen, Miss Beverly Hills
• Marie Caldare as Claudia Harrison, Miss New York
• Tonya Watts as Scarlett Turner, Miss Atlanta
• Todd Glass as the Policeman
• Denise Hulsey as the Waitress

Griff’s Price

The rigged contest is a good late-series Al scheme because it fails for a character reason rather than a plot one. The arrangement is sound: get on the panel, control the vote, collect the prize. What Al has not accounted for is that Griff’s loyalty has a ceiling, and the episode establishes exactly where that ceiling is, one contestant, kneeling, offering marriage. Griff does not hesitate and does not apologise, and the cut to his unconscious body with Al distraught above him is the best edit in the two-parter.

The Tennessee material is the better half of the episode and it works as a straight culture clash. Marcy arrives with the confidence of someone used to being the most important person in the room and runs into a man who has nothing she can take away and nothing she can offer. Mickey Jones had played almost exactly this part before, as the mechanic who fleeces the Griswolds in National Lampoon’s Vacation, a film this series had already borrowed from in its own opening credits, which lift a highway shot of the Griswolds’ station wagon.

The sabotage sequence closes out a thread the two-parter had been running since the first scene: the girls stole the trip, the boys came to take revenge, and the revenge takes the form of wrecking a stage during a swimwear competition to Cyndi Lauper. Nobody wins the hundred thousand. Everyone goes home.

Famous Quotes

• Marcy: “My German-luxury sedan is broken down after running over one of your state birds: the possum. I’ll be needing a tow truck.” / Parley Wayne: “Well, hell, I’d like a tow truck too. I’d also like a new wife and some more teeth.”
• Marcy: “Look, ZZ Top. We have got to get to Florida.” / Parley Wayne: “You keep on calling me names and you just might land there.”
• Angela: “Vote for me and I’ll marry you!” / Griff: “Al, I’m voting for Angela, my new wife, and don’t try to stop me.”
• Al: “NOW, LOOK WHAT HAPPENED TO ‘YA! YOU SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME GO AND DO?! I DIDN’T WANT TO DO IT!” Kneeling beside an unconscious Griff with a broken tennis racket.

Notes

• Mickey Jones played the extortionist mechanic the Griswolds run into in National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983); the Married… with Children main titles themselves use a highway shot of the Griswold station wagon from that film.
• Jones later played construction worker and drummer Pete Bilker on Home Improvement.
• Renee Tenison, here as Miss Detroit, had appeared on the series twice before alongside her twin sister Rosie, in “Looking for a Desk in All the Wrong Places” and “Route 666 (Part 2),” and both return a few episodes later in “Torch Song Duet.”
• Jennifer Echols appears uncredited as Tammy, one of the former Miss Spring Break judges, her third of several roles on the series.
• Bud and his friends sing a variant of “99 Bottles of Beer”; Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” plays during the sabotage.
• Goof: one contestant’s sash reads “Miss Beverly Hills 90440,” a joke on Beverly Hills 90210: 90440 is not an assigned ZIP code.
• Goof: the animated route map places Nashville far too far east; the labelled city is roughly where Knoxville sits.