Season 8 Episode 24: Assault and Batteries

Al has a broken basement step to fix and a deadline, because Hondo is on television later and he intends to watch it. The flashlight he needs is dead, which starts a chain of events that occupies the whole episode: Peg is sent for D batteries and returns with A batteries, her reasoning about the difference being one of her better moments, and Al is forced to go out himself. The store he ends up in is a supermarket called Sav-Som, and he gets locked inside it after closing. The remainder of the episode is Al trapped in a shut supermarket with his film starting, which the show stages as a sort of odyssey, including a Western fantasy sequence in which the Bundys appear as frontier settlers and Peg contemplates a box with a rabbit on top that she believes will eventually contain small people. Meanwhile Bud and Kelly have decided to throw Buck a birthday party, having found his birth certificate under the couch cushions, and Buck’s view of the celebration is not positive. This went out as part of FOX’s May 1994 sweeps event in anaglyph 3-D, with the viewing glasses handed out free at 7-Eleven. It is a slight episode carried by a gimmick, and the gimmick is the reason to watch it: this is the one Married with Children episode shot to be seen through cardboard glasses. Strip the 3-D away and what is left is a small, well-observed story about a man who wants one thing from his evening and is methodically prevented from having it, which is the engine the series ran on for eleven years.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: May 8, 1994
• Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 24
• Overall episode number: 181
• Written by: Sam W. Orender
• Directed by: David Castro
• Production note: Part of FOX’s May 1994 sweeps event “Fox-O-Rama,” presented in anaglyph 3-D. The glasses were given away at participating 7-Eleven stores.
• Production note: The final appearance of Cheech Marin as the voice of Buck, his third.
• Title note: A play on assault and battery, and on the batteries Al spends the episode hunting.

Guest Cast

• Cheech Marin as the voice of Buck
• Jean Speegle Howard as the old lady
• Jan Hoag as Checker #1
• Brian Reddy as Checker #2
• Cynthia Frost as Customer #1
• Craig Benton as Customer #2
• Biff Yeager as the man
• Gary Simpson as the paramedic

Locked in the Sav-Som

The 3-D presentation is the thing that makes this episode a curiosity. The effects were built into the episode itself, and the closing credits were altered for it: instead of the usual fade, the producer and writer credits zoom toward the viewer. The original broadcast also ended with Al and Peg wearing the glasses and trying to touch the floating text, with Peg eventually giving up and saying she does not get it.

Jean Speegle Howard plays the old lady in the checkout queue. She was Ron Howard’s mother, and both she and her husband Rance appeared on this series, which makes the running Opie jokes in earlier seasons a little funnier in retrospect.

This is the second time Al misses Hondo. The first was back in season 2’s “All in the Family,” and the show treats it as the same magnitude of disaster both times.

Buck’s birthday certificate gives his age as ten, which the fandom has spent decades noting does not work: season 7’s “Christmas” showed him as a puppy in a 1974 flashback, which would make him twenty here. Briards do not generally reach either figure.

The Illinois Lottery logo used between 1990 and 2011 is visible on the wall by the Sav-Som checkout, which is the sort of real-world detail the show did not usually bother with.

Famous Quotes

• Al, testing the flashlight: “Don’t worry, Peg, I’m not gonna be having a good time. I’ll just do what I can in the dark.” Peg: “Oh ho, like during sex?” Al: “No, Peg, I can’t fake fixing a step.”
• Al, inspecting what she brought home: “Peg, these are A’s, I needed D’s.” Peg: “A’s, D’s, what’s the difference?” Al: “They’re too small.” Peg: “Then use a lot of them.”

Notes

• Al confirms the episode is set in May 1994.
• Gary Simpson, the paramedic who takes Jefferson to hospital, had played one of the paramedics working on Dexter a few episodes earlier in “Nooner or Later.”
• A goof: Buck’s birth certificate is found under the couch cushions, but the original couch had burned down a few episodes earlier in “Sofa So Good,” so it cannot have been there long.
• Another: the paramedic arrives after crossing the street in heavy rain and is completely dry apart from some water on his forehead, as is Bud when he comes in from the backyard.