Season 7 Episode 22: ‘Til Death Do Us Part

Word gets around about Al’s performance in the bedroom, and by the time the episode starts it is common knowledge in the neighbourhood and a running joke among people Al has never met. Kelly reports that children settling fights now invoke his name as a measure of speed. Al’s response is to get himself back into shape, and the training montage that follows is scored to “Tuff Enuff,” the cue the show reserves for Al attempting something physical. The regime is punishing and conducted largely in the Bundy basement, which the series shows for the first time here. It also goes badly enough that Al ends up unconscious on the Darcys’ lawn and has to be carried home, which produces the episode’s most memorable and least explicable sequence, involving a flattened squirrel that Marcy identifies by name and then uses as a weapon. Peg, meanwhile, spends the episode managing her husband’s confidence, including a phone call to Marcy conducted within Al’s hearing in which she reports results that have not occurred. Whether the program works is answered in the final act, and for once the show lets Al have the win outright. The episode is unusually small: no guest cast at all beyond Kevin Curran’s voice work for Buck, and nearly all of it inside the house. What it lacks in scale it makes up for in sheer oddity, and the squirrel is the reason anyone remembers it.It is also one of the rare occasions on which the series lets Al succeed at the thing he set out to do, and then moves on without making him pay for it.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: April 25, 1993
• Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 22
• Overall episode number: 153
• Written by: Stacie Lipp
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: March 26, 1993
• Production note: The Bundy basement appears on screen for the first time in this episode.
• Production note: No guest cast beyond Kevin Curran voicing Buck, which makes this one of the smallest episodes of the run.
• Title note: From the wedding vow.

Guest Cast

• Kevin Curran as the voice of Buck

The Zippy Incident

The squirrel sequence is the thing people remember and there is no good way to summarize it. Al is carried in unconscious with a flattened squirrel adhered to his chest, Marcy recognizes it immediately as a creature she was on first-name terms with, peels it off, and then uses the corpse to strike Al repeatedly while making noises on its behalf. Jefferson’s only contribution is to question the identification. It is among the strangest things the series ever did and Amanda Bearse commits to it completely.

The prayer that opens the episode is one of Ed O’Neill’s best pieces of silent comedy, and the timing of Peg’s interruption is perfect. Al’s follow-up, addressed upward rather than to her, does the rest.

Kelly’s report from the Harley shop is a model of how the show built her malapropisms into actual jokes. The subject under discussion among her boyfriend and his friends was campaign finance reform, which led, as she puts it, to a knife fight, and the detail she thinks her father will be proud of is the one that lands.

Peg’s phone call to Marcy is the episode’s quietest good joke. She is boosting her husband’s reputation for an audience of one, and she does it while standing a few feet from him, performing an outcome that the audience has just watched not happen.

Famous Quotes

• Al, in silent prayer: “Oh, Lord… if I ever meant anything to you, please let me fall asleep before she thinks of sex.” Then, as Peg turns toward him: “You are a woman, aren’t ya?!”
• Kelly: “Daddy, do you remember my boyfriend T-Bone?” Al: “No, but he sounds delicious.”
• Kelly, with the news from the Harley shop: “Nowadays when kids fight they say ‘I’m gonna waste you quicker than Al Bundy!’”
• Marcy, delivering Al to his own living room: “We wouldn’t have helped, but he passed out on our lawn. And I would have left him for compost but the flies started gathering.”
• Marcy, identifying the squirrel: “Well, you have to imagine him with blood, bones, and internal organs… SQUIRREL KILLER!… Get him, Zippy!”

Notes

• Kelly spends the episode confusing George Washington with, among others, James Brown, Don Corleone and George Jefferson. She had previously mixed up George Jefferson with Thomas Jefferson back in season 3.
• Peg’s remark about the Polk High principal’s door being open for troubled girls assumes a male principal, which contradicts Mrs. Wicker in season 3 and Mrs. Ravinko in seasons 4 and 5.
• A goof: the toilet paper beside the kitchen phone changes brand, opens itself and then changes back across three consecutive shots.