Season 6 Episode 14: The Mystery of Skull Island

Two plots, and the one that gets quoted is the board game. Peg and the Darcys have produced a relationship game called Ethical Dilemma, and Al has been conscripted into playing it. The game requires participants to answer questions about their feelings, which for Al is a form of torture, and the sessions go on for days. One prompt asks him to say what he cares about, and what comes out is a poem. Another produces Marcy’s story about her childhood dog Winkums, a story that reduces her to sobbing and whose actual ending the audience never hears, because Al has stopped listening and drifted into a daydream about his high school friends inviting him out on a Friday night with a keg in the back of the car. Peg, during her turn, nominates an old boyfriend named Jimmy as the man she would have a sleazy affair with. Meanwhile Bud has met Kara, who is beautiful, who finds his Grandmaster B persona compelling, and who is interested exclusively in men who do dangerous things. Her previous boyfriend bored her because all they did was make love. Bud, after an internal monologue in which he firmly and repeatedly rules out skydiving, looks at Kara once more and signs up. The skydiving instructor is played by Danny Lee Clark, better known at the time as Nitro from American Gladiators, and the episode ends with Bud going out of the airplane whether he likes it or not.The two halves never meet, which is fine, because both of them are about the same thing: a Bundy man doing something he has no interest in doing because a woman has made it unavoidable.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: January 5, 1992
• Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 14
• Overall episode number: 119
• Written by: Kevin Curran
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: December 13, 1991
• Production note: The last episode of the series filmed in 1991 and the first to air in 1992.
• Production note: The airplane set and Bud’s jumpsuit had previously been used on the ABC sitcom Free Spirit, in an episode with a near-identical skydiving premise.
• Title note: Skull Island is King Kong’s home.

Guest Cast

• Bobbie Phillips as Kara
• Danny Lee Clark as Biff

Ethical Dilemma

Al’s “I Care” poem is the single most quoted thing in the episode and deserves to be. It scans, it rhymes, it covers jiggling hooters, nickels found on the ground, a purring Mustang engine, a bathroom that is not his wife’s, a pitcher on the mound, and a wife underground, and it finishes with a direct threat to everyone still at the table. It is a complete summary of Al Bundy’s value system delivered in eight lines under duress.

The Winkums story is a good example of how this show handled Marcy. The joke is not the dog’s fate, which is never disclosed. The joke is that Marcy is genuinely distraught and Al has simply gone somewhere else in his head, and what he has gone to is a memory of being nineteen with a keg in the car.

Bobbie Phillips had already played a different one of Bud’s conquests earlier in the same season, as Jill in “If Al Had a Hammer,” who also fell for the Grandmaster B routine. Danny Lee Clark was Nitro on American Gladiators, which was at its peak in 1992.

The Free Spirit connection is a nice piece of studio archaeology. That show was produced by the same companies that handled this one in its early seasons, and MWC writer-producer Richard Gurman was its executive producer, which explains how an entire airplane interior and a jumpsuit ended up getting a second life here.

Famous Quotes

• Al, answering a prompt about what he cares about: “When hooters jiggle around and I find nickels on the ground, I care. When a Mustang engine purrs and the bathroom is not hers, I care. When the pitcher’s on the mound and the wife is underground, I care. But when I’ve been playing this for days, I will kill anyone who stays. I swear.”
• Kara, on her ex: “My last boyfriend was so boring. All we did was make love.” Bud: “What a loser.”
• Bud, in voiceover, deciding: “Oh, I’m definitely not doing this. No way, no how, never. Not for anything. Oh man! Look at those hooters!… I’m doing it!”
• Al, consoling his son after a breakup: “Remember, it gets better each time, as long as it’s never with the same woman.”
• Kelly, on a celebrity encounter at the mall: “Some geezer rock star steps on my foot. You know, that Springsteen guy.” Al: “The Boss?” Kelly: “I don’t think so, Daddy. His wife seemed to be the one in charge.”

Notes

• Peg reveals that Al has a birthmark on his bottom shaped like Woody Allen.
• Peg names Jimmy as the man she would have an affair with. He had appeared in person back in season 2’s “How Do You Spell Revenge?“
• Al’s shoe store monologue this week involves a customer in a Blossom hat shopping for a Crosby, Stills & Nash reunion, his suggestion of a recyclable paper bag, and the subsequent mace.
• Michael McManus, who had played Puggy Weaver in season 5’s “Peggy Turns 300,” appears here as the pilot.
• The skydiving sequence has Bud screaming and then holding a conversation in free fall, which is not how free fall works.
• Al goes out of the plane himself with neither a jumpsuit nor a parachute, a detail the next episode quietly ignores.