Season 5 Episode 14: Look Who’s Barking

“Look Who’s Barking” is the rare Married with Children episode that hands the emotional heavy lifting to the dog. Buck has had enough of the Bundy house, so he walks out and takes himself off down the street to find something better. What he finds instead is a white female dog, and he brings her home with him. She turns out to be considerably shrewder than Buck is, and she quickly works out that there is only room on that couch for one family pet. The campaign she runs to displace him is conducted entirely in dog, which is to say in voiceover, and it leaves Buck watching his own household quietly turn against him. Al, meanwhile, is pursuing something he considers far more urgent. He wants one specific dessert, a cherry cheesecake from a place called Chuck’s Cheese Bowl, and he has sent Marcy and Jefferson on a mission to bring one back from Tinuse, Wisconsin while they were honeymooning in the general vicinity. When the cheesecake they return with turns out to be an imitation, Al launches a hunt for Hans, the chef who originally made the real thing, which takes him through a string of restaurants and a great deal of indignation. Peggy does not appear in this episode at all. She is written out by being sent along on the Darcys’ honeymoon as a navigator, on the grounds that Wanker County is not somewhere outsiders should attempt without a guide. What is left is Al and the kids and a dog with a problem, which is more than enough.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: February 10, 1991
• Season and episode: Season 5, Episode 14
• Overall episode number: 94
• Written by: Katherine Green
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Production note: Filmed thirteenth in the season but aired fourteenth, which explains why Marcy and Jefferson arrive home from their honeymoon here after already living together as a settled couple in the previous week’s episode.
• Title note: A play on the 1989 film Look Who’s Talking.

Guest Cast

• B.B. King as a street musician
• Cheech Marin as the voice of Buck Bundy
• Catherine O’Hara as the voice of Buck’s girlfriend (uncredited)
• Brian George as the chef
• Rodney Kageyama as the restaurant owner
• Kort Falkenberg as Hans

Cheech, B.B. and a Dog With an Agenda

This is the first of three episodes in which Cheech Marin supplies the voice of Buck. The role normally belonged to Kevin Curran, a writer and producer on the series who voiced the dog’s inner monologue for most of its run, so hearing Marin in the part gives the episode an immediately different texture. Catherine O’Hara, uncredited, voices the female dog Buck brings home, which means two of the funniest people available in 1991 spend the episode arguing through a pair of sheepdogs.

B.B. King’s appearance as a street musician is brief and entirely unexplained, in the manner of most Married with Children celebrity drop-ins. He is there, he plays, the show moves on.

Al’s cheesecake plot is one of the purest distillations of the character ever written. He is not chasing money or sex or a championship ring. He wants one piece of a specific rancid dessert from one specific restaurant in one specific town in Wisconsin, and the universe will not let him have it. By the time he is sitting on the couch with his arm around the dog explaining how depressed he is, the episode has quietly made its point about what passes for ambition in the Bundy household.

The Wanker County material gives Marcy and Jefferson some of their better lines of the season. Their honeymoon detour produces a story about being fondled at a gas station by something half man and half owl, which Kelly immediately identifies as Cousin Hooty, and Jefferson’s impression of the local trade economy is not kind to Wisconsin.

Famous Quotes

• Al, on discovering that the cheesecake Marcy and Jefferson hauled back from Wisconsin is counterfeit: “This is a horrible hoax! This isn’t an authentic Chuck’s Cheesebowl cherry cheesecake! You went to the wrong place!”
• Marcy, describing the souvenirs of her honeymoon detour through Wanker County: “We must show you the slides of me getting fondled at the gas station by something that was half-man, half-owl.”
• Buck, after Al sits down next to him on the couch, puts an arm around him and begins unburdening himself about the cheesecake: “Ugh, take a shower!”

Notes

• Peggy does not appear in this episode. Al mentions she is off in Wanker County, and she phones the house once while he is busy tracking down the chef.
• Buck is given as nine years old here, which conflicts with the season 8 episode “Assault and Batteries,” where he is ten. Dog years in this house are not an exact science.
• Al works in a round of anti-French sentiment during the search for Hans, which is standard operating procedure for him.
• A continuity slip: after Al slams the door on Marcy and Jefferson and announces he is not paying for a cheesecake, Marcy is still visible through the window watching them.
• Katherine Green wrote this one. She also wrote some of the show’s stronger Peggy-centered episodes, which makes it a little ironic that this is the installment Peggy sits out.