Season 10 Episode 6: The Weaker Sex

Peggy takes a women’s self-defense class, turns out to be good at it, and gets moved up to the advanced group. For Al this is not a hobby his wife has picked up, it is an attack on the natural order, and the half-hour is built around a man who cannot tolerate the idea that the person on the couch might be able to handle herself better than he can. He works through his position out loud, in a line at a cinema, using the animal kingdom as supporting evidence, and the episode arranges for reality to contradict him in the most public way available.

Kelly supplies the plan. If Peg can be lured out on the night of her class, she will fall behind and drop it, so Al books a romantic evening: the director’s cut of The Bridges of Madison County, which has drawn a queue of delighted women and a row of men in visible distress. The scene is one of the season’s best bits of staging, panning down the line past husbands drinking from flasks and one Englishman who flings himself into traffic rather than watch Meryl Streep in a bathtub, before settling on Al defacing a poster with a marker.

Then a man reaches for Al’s wallet, and Peg puts him on the floor with one punch while a news crew films it. The rescue is the worst possible outcome for Al, not because he was robbed, but because his wife saved him on camera, and the local reporter treats it as an act of heroism. Bud’s subplot runs him into a biker bar and a woman who takes him into the bathroom, which goes about as well for him as everything else does.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Sunday, October 22, 1995 on FOX
• Season 10, Episode 6
• Overall episode 217 of the series
• Production code 10.06
• Written by Dvora Inwood
• Directed by Amanda Bearse
• The title nods to the 1948 film The Weaker Sex and to the old line about women being the weaker sex

Guest Cast

• Dot-Marie Jones as Dot
• Joseph D. Reitman as Genghis
• Dee Booher as the Biker Chick
• Jody Mullenax as Thunder
• Steve Valentine as the Man in Line
• Mike McKenna as the Bartender
• Jonathan Fahn as the Camera Person

The Wildebeest Argument

Al’s case against self-defense classes is delivered as natural philosophy, and the script gives him enough rope to hang himself with it. He works through the wildebeest and then the ant, laying out a theory of how creatures divide their labour, while behind him a thief closes in on his back pocket. The timing is the whole joke: the argument and its refutation occupy the same shot, and Peggy settles it with her fist before Al has finished the sentence.

What stings for the character is the witness. Al has been humiliated privately for ten years and absorbed it; being rescued by his wife in front of a television camera is a different order of injury, and the reporter’s breathless framing of it as bravery makes it worse. The episode is careful not to let him recover: there is no late scene in which he reasserts himself, only the footage.

The episode also closes out two recurring guests. It is Joseph D. Reitman’s last turn as Kelly’s boyfriend Genghis, a character he had played twice in season nine, and the fourth and final appearance of Dot, the enforcer attached to Marcy’s feminist group, who had turned up two episodes earlier at the Church of NO MA’AM. Dee Booher, who takes Bud into the bar bathroom, came out of Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, where she worked as Matilda the Hun, one of several GLOW alumnae the show used over the years.

Famous Quotes

• Peg: “Oh, Al, isn’t this romantic? Finally you’re taking me to a movie that doesn’t have the words ‘Debbie’ or ‘does’ in the title.” Joining Al at the back of the queue.
• Al: “Well, Pookie, tomorrow I may not be in the mood to see Meryl and Clint playing ‘Hide the Loofa’ in the bathtub.” Explaining why it had to be tonight, of all nights.
• British Man: “Oh, my God, I’m in line to watch Meryl Streep strip?! NO BLOODY WAY!” Followed by the sound of a car, and Al’s verdict: “Yeah, sure, go ahead, take the easy way out.”
• Al: “Don’t you understand, Peg? This women’s self-defense is against nature. Take the mighty wildebeest, for example. He hunts while the wildebeestess just stays on her couch watching the Oprah-beestess.” Delivered while a pickpocket works his back pocket.
• Miranda: “This is the bravest thing this reporter has seen since Bill said, ‘Hillary, I beg to differ.’” Miranda Veracruz de la Jolla Cardenal arriving at the scene just in time to get Peg on tape.

Notes

• Al’s line to Jefferson, “If you got the tailpipe, I got the lips,” calls back to season six’s “My Dinner with Anthrax,” where Jefferson found him with his car’s tailpipe in his mouth.
• Frank Lloyd, the show’s stunt coordinator and the actor who played Al’s friend Norris in the early seasons, appears uncredited as the mugger.
• “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer plays briefly as Al and Griff start their shoe race.
• Al admits to cheating at the shoe race and eating Griff’s lunch; Griff’s rebuttal is that Al drank the Kaopectate.
• Goof: the dummy Marcy and Peggy practise on in the back yard is visibly a prop with a Ted McGinley head, and the string holding it upright can be seen in more than one shot.
• Goof: in the bar, Bud and the biker chick swap positions between consecutive shots.
• Kevin Curran supplies the uncredited voice of Lucky.