Season 7 Episode 1: Magnificent Seven

The season 7 premiere, and the single most argued-about episode in the series. Peg’s cousins Zemus and Ida Mae Wanker turn up at the house with their young son in tow. The boy’s name is Seven. Zemus and Ida Mae are played by Bobcat Goldthwait and Linda Blair, they are recently former nudists, they volunteer that they are swingers with no particular preferences, and shortly after arriving they step out for cigarettes and do not come back. The Bundys have been left with a child. Al’s reaction is immediate and total despair. He tries to give the boy to Marcy, framing the offer as an act of friendship toward a woman he has decided is incapable of having children of her own, and the delivery of that speech earns him the Ten Fingers of Death. Peg, alone in the household, is delighted. She sees Seven as a second chance at mothering, and sets about it by bribing Bud and Kelly with candy to entertain him, which produces the sight of two grown Bundy children singing “Baby Face” to a small boy against their will. Al, displaced from his own bedroom, ends up in Bud’s, where he discovers his son’s magazine collection and then discovers something considerably worse. Whether the addition of Seven was a good idea is a question fans have been answering for thirty years, mostly in the negative. What is not really in dispute is that the episode itself is funny. Goldthwait and Blair are only in it for a few minutes and they make the most of them, and Al’s two scenes, the one with Marcy and the one in Bud’s bedroom, are as good as anything in the seventh season. The character around whom all of it was built is the problem, not the writing in front of him.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: September 13, 1992
• Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 1
• Overall episode number: 132
• Written by: Arthur Silver
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: August 21, 1992
• Production note: Shane Sweet’s debut as Seven. He appeared in twelve episodes across season 7 and then vanished from the series without explanation.
• Production note: Bud’s bedroom is seen for the first time here, established as being across from Al and Peggy’s.
• Title note: A play on the 1960 western The Magnificent Seven and the arrival of the character.

Guest Cast

• Linda Blair as Ida Mae Wanker
• Bobcat Goldthwait as Zemus Wanker
• Shane Sweet as Seven

Enter Seven

Seven is the closest thing this series has to a universally agreed mistake, and the case against him is consistent: a cute kid does not belong in a show built on this kind of humour, and the character was written as though for a different and much gentler sitcom. The show seemed to come to the same conclusion. He appears in twelve episodes of season 7 and is then simply gone, with no departure scene and no line of dialogue acknowledging it, which has become a joke in its own right among fans.

The casting of the parents is better than the character. Linda Blair and Bobcat Goldthwait play Zemus and Ida Mae as cheerfully degenerate in a way that makes abandoning a child on a relative’s couch feel like a logical next step rather than a plot contrivance. Goldthwait is also the third Police Academy alumnus to appear on this show, after Bubba Smith and Tim Kazurinsky.

Goldthwait went on to voice Mr. Floppy on Unhappily Ever After, a WB sitcom co-created by Ron Leavitt and Arthur Silver, who wrote this episode. Both men left Married with Children at the end of season 7, and the show they made next was close enough in shape to this one to draw comment for its entire four-year run.

Al’s pitch to Marcy is one of the most elaborately insulting speeches he ever delivers, built as a favour from one friend to another, and Marcy’s response, strangling him while shouting that she does have breasts, is the correct one. Jefferson’s confirmation from the sidelines is the button.

Famous Quotes

• Al, on being told the cousins went out for cigarettes: “And you let them go? That has to be the dumbest move in history! No, the second dumbest. The first dumbest had to be when I answered your phone call the day after we had sex.”
• Al, a moment later: “Peg, you just let these people stick us with their kid! OH, MY GOD! I’VE GOT ANOTHER CHILD!”
• Marcy, responding to Al’s generous offer: “Oh, Al, I couldn’t possibly accept anything from you. Instead, let me give you something… TEN FINGERS OF DEATH!”
• Marcy, after being pulled off him: “…And I have breasts, damn it!” Jefferson: “She really does Al. You just can’t see them.”
• Al, in his son’s bedroom with the lights out: “Oh, God look at my life! I’m sitting in my own son’s wet spot!”

Notes

• Al calls Zemus and Ida Mae “the Kettles,” after Ma and Pa Kettle.
• Kelly states that Bud is nineteen, which does not work against “Rites of Passage” nine months earlier, where he turned eighteen.
• Bud tells Seven about having broken up with Cindy Crawford.
• Kelly suggests Bud hang a Blossom calendar, continuing a running season 6 joke.
• The “Wags the Perplexed Pup” poster in Bud’s room is reused later as part of the Hooter Kit Bud receives in Al’s dream in season 7’s “Christmas.”
• Bud and Kelly are made to perform Al Jolson’s “Baby Face” for Seven’s entertainment.