Season 5 Episode 23: Route 666 (1)

The first half of the season 5 finale, and the episode that takes the Bundys out of Chicago entirely. Al has business in Los Angeles, a shoe convention, and his original intention is to go alone. The family talks their way into the trip, and so all four of them load into the car and set off across the country, singing their way through “99 Bottles of Beer” and mangling an old music hall song as they go. Bud wants to visit the Playboy Mansion. Kelly wants to see Garfield’s house, which she believes is a real place one can drive to. The car makes it as far as a nowhere town in New Mexico before it dies, and the Bundys find themselves stranded among a population consisting largely of ancient prospectors, two of whom have been out there so long that neither can remember with certainty which of them is named Zeke. While they wait for Marcy and Jefferson to wire them money, one of the old timers hands Al a map to a gold mine. Al, being Al, does not treat this as the obvious swindle it appears to be. He treats it as the break he has been owed since 1966, gets Jefferson on the phone, and talks him into financing the dig. By the end of the episode the Darcys have driven out to New Mexico and the whole group is panning for gold in the desert, which is where part one stops and leaves everybody.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: April 28, 1991
• Season and episode: Season 5, Episode 23
• Overall episode number: 103
• Written by: Katherine Green
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Production note: Part one of the two part season 5 finale.
• Title note: A play on U.S. Route 66, which actually runs from Chicago to Santa Monica, crossed with 666. There was a real Route 666, but it ran through Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, and it was renumbered as U.S. Route 491 in 2003.

Guest Cast

• John Byner as the prospector
• Carmen Filpi as Codger #1
• Owen Bush as Codger #2
• Michael G. Moye as Young Zeke
• Buddy Matlock as the banjo player

Zeke, Zeke and the Gold Mine

The best running joke in the episode belongs to the two codgers, who have been in that town long enough to lose track of their own names. One greets the other as Zeke, the other replies that he thought the first one was Zeke, and after a long pause the first one allows that maybe he is. It is a two line exchange and it establishes the entire town in about eight seconds.

Young Zeke, incidentally, is played by Michael G. Moye, who co-created the series with Ron Leavitt. He is wearing glasses, and if you look closely you can see the studio lights reflected in them.

John Byner’s prospector is the engine of the plot, and the episode is careful never to settle whether he is a con man or simply a lunatic who happens to own a map. Al does not care either way. The shoe convention has already been established as something he cannot actually attend, since Bud reminds him he was banned for life after an incident in 1987, so a gold mine is a considerable upgrade on his original plans for the trip.

Jefferson agreeing to fund the operation is entirely in character for a man who has never done a day’s work and is always looking for the shortcut. By the time the Darcys arrive and everyone is kneeling in the sand with pans, the episode has set up a cliffhanger that part two has to resolve, and the voiceover over the closing credits asks whether Al will finally be able to afford toilet paper as soft as a mother’s kiss.

Famous Quotes

• The two codgers, establishing their town: “Chill in the air, heh Zeke?” / “I thought you were Zeke.” / “…Maybe I am.”
• Peg, negotiating a tow: “Look, there’s a cool 25 cents for you if you’ll haul our car to a station.” Codger: “Normally, we’d do it for $400. But we’ll do it for $200, if you’ll let us take our picture with you, leopard woman.”
• Peg, taking the compliment: “Oh, Al. These rubes think I’m sexy.”
• Bud, on the itinerary for Los Angeles: “Can we drop in on Hef?”

Notes

• Al mentions that one of the attractions of the shoe convention is the shoe groupies. He eventually gets his chance with one, named Ricki, in “So This is How Sinatra Felt.”
• In the close-up of Al digging through the laundry basket for his lockbox, his Polk High diploma is visible and legible.
• Kelly refers to Marcy by her first name again, as she had in the previous episode and back in season 3’s “The House That Peg Lost.”
• One of the Playboy issues Bud surrenders to Peg is the February 1991 number with Pamela Anderson on the cover. Anderson appears in Al’s dream sequence in the very next episode.
• Another issue in the pile, from February 1989, has Michele Smith on the cover. She had already appeared on the series in season 4’s “Dead Men Don’t Do Aerobics.”
• Jefferson works in a Ricky Schroder reference, which is a small in-joke given that Silver Spoons was co-developed by this show’s own creators.
• A geography goof: a Joshua tree is clearly visible behind the gold panning scene, and Joshua trees do not grow in New Mexico.