Season 7 Episode 24: Old Insurance Dodge

The Dodge is stolen, and Al’s grief lasts about as long as it takes the family to work out that the insurance company owes them twenty-five thousand dollars. From there the episode becomes a sustained piece of fraud. The claim is inflated with increasingly implausible contents said to have been in the trunk, and while it is processing, Al discovers that car dealerships will let a man take a vehicle out for an extended test drive without much scrutiny. So he borrows cars. Good ones. The show gives him a Lincoln Town Car and a drive through downtown Chicago scored to Chuck Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go,” and an earlier sequence in a rental car arrives to the Hallelujah chorus. Kelly’s contribution to the scheme is the funniest thing in the episode: having read that a Mercedes costs fifty K, she volunteers that she has been collecting the letter K from the notes the school sends home about her, and proposes that Bud harvest more from the newspaper. Then the police call. The Dodge has been found. The trunk is unopened, which means every item on the claim is demonstrably still inside it, and the twenty-five thousand dollars evaporates. Al’s speech about why he is glad to have the car back is one of the warmest things the character ever says, and he immediately takes it back. It is one of the best Dodge episodes the show made, and the Dodge had carried a lot of episodes by this point.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: May 9, 1993
• Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 24
• Overall episode number: 155
• Written by: Larry Jacobson
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: April 16, 1993
• Production note: On the original broadcast the credits carried a scene of Kelly on the phone to a car salesman learning what a Mercedes costs. Later prints freeze it as a still with the dialogue played over the top.
• Title note: A pun on Al’s car and on what the family is attempting to pull.

Guest Cast

• Rob LaBelle as Joe Orton
• Dan Tullis Jr. as the policeman

A Veritable Cornucopia of K’s

Kelly’s K-collecting scheme is one of the best sustained jokes the character ever got, mostly because she is proud of it and because the specific source of her K supply is the letters the school has been sending home about her. Her follow-up suggestion for where Bud can find more, and his contribution to the list, extends it past the point where it should stop working and it keeps working. Her closing summary of the operation is the line.

The test drive material is the episode’s engine and the music does the heavy lifting. The Hallelujah chorus over Al in his first borrowed car is the show treating a rental sedan as a religious experience, and the Chuck Berry number over the Town Car sequence was, coincidentally, recorded in Chicago.

Al’s closing speech is the real payoff. He explains that he is glad the Dodge was found because it is his and he hates change, compares losing it to losing a member of the family, extends the comparison to trading Peg in on a newer model, and arrives, with visible reluctance, at the admission that she is the one he wants. Then he asks her not to touch him. It is the series’ entire theory of marriage in about forty seconds.

A long-running piece of trivia the episode does nothing to address: Al’s car is not actually a Dodge. It is a Plymouth Duster, with Duster badges visible on the fenders in plenty of episodes.

Famous Quotes

• Jefferson, returning salvaged property: “Hey, look what we found in the garbage!” Al: “NELLYBELLE, MY 8 TRACK!”
• Marcy, reading the recovered tapes aloud: “‘Meet the Four Seasons’… ‘Meet the Supremes’… and ‘The Four Seasons Meet The Supremes’.”
• Kelly, on financing: “We can get a Mercedes for 50 K’s. You don’t even need money. I happen to have some spare K’s from those letters they sent home from school saying, ‘Kelly is an idiot’. Who’s the idiot now?”
• Kelly, surveying the supply: “Wow. What a veritable cornucopia of K’s.”
• Al, on getting the car back: “Sure the first few rides would be nice and everything, but in the long run… and this, Peg, is what depresses me everyday… I realize that… you’re the one I want.” Then, as she moves in: “I wish you wouldn’t touch me, though, Peg!”

Notes

• Peg reveals that Al once claimed to have chickenpox in an attempt to get out of their wedding.
• Kelly says she feels as though she was practically born in the car, and Peg confirms she was certainly conceived in it, which matches “Rain Girl” and “Requiem for a Chevyweight.”
• Al’s request for Grey Poupon from the car beside him during a test drive is a reference to the Dijon mustard commercials, a gag Wayne’s World had used the year before.
• A Groundhog Day poster is visible behind him in that scene, which is the second Columbia release the season has worked into a background.
• Goofs: Al tells the police the Dodge is a 1974 model despite having owned it in high school in 1966, and the downtown Chicago driving sequence has a California hillside visible through the window.