Season 8 Episode 8: Scared Single

Al hires a summer assistant at the shoe store, a Polk High graduate named Aaron Mitchell, and discovers something he has never encountered before: a young man who regards Al Bundy as a hero. Aaron knows about the four touchdowns. He also knows about the four holes Al drilled into the wall of the girls’ locker room, and holds both achievements in roughly equal esteem. For a few scenes Al gets to be revered, and it is genuinely touching in the way only this show could make it. Then Aaron announces that he is getting married, and Al’s entire demeanour changes, because he now has a mission. He takes the boy to the mall lounge, the bench area where husbands sit while their wives shop, and conducts a tour. The lost souls, the meek, the miserable, the married, and then the lowest tier of all, the men relegated to holding their wives’ handbags. Al narrates each case history. He leads the assembled men in a song. The whole sequence is the fullest expression of the show’s central joke that the series ever staged, and it is played dead straight. Running alongside it, Kelly has taken a faceful of pesticide while filming a Verminator commercial and spends the episode in a chemical fog, unresponsive on the couch. It is one of the strongest episodes of the season and one of the few that gives Al an audience who takes him seriously, which is also what makes the ending land: he spends the whole episode trying to save a young man from the life he has, and the reason he bothers is that Aaron is the first person in years to look at him and see something worth being.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: November 7, 1993
• Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 8
• Overall episode number: 165
• Written by: Katherine Green
• Directed by: Sam W. Orender
• Taped: October 15, 1993
• Production note: The first appearance of Aaron Mitchell, who recurs through season 8.
• Title note: Al had wished for a “Scared Single” programme back in season 6’s “Rites of Passage.” The show remembered and built an episode on it.

Guest Cast

• Hill Harper as Aaron Mitchell
• Rose Jackson as Angie
• Tami Roman as Meg (credited as Tami Akbar)
• Joe Bob Briggs as Billy Ray Wetnap (credited as John Bloom)
• Mary-Pat Green as Marge
• Melissa Behr as Heidi
• Tara Karsian as the woman at the store
• Joe Ochman as the guy
• Jeff Heston as the emaciated man

The Mall Lounge

The mall lounge tour is the best extended sequence in season 8. The staging is a row of benches occupied by silent men holding shopping bags and purses, and Al works along it like a docent, explaining each man’s circumstances. The one weeping into a handkerchief has a wife shopping at Victoria’s Secret. Two others, Burt and Carson, have an empty seat between them that Al accounts for. It ends with the whole group singing the Marrying Man’s Fight Song.

Hill Harper is very good as Aaron, and his first exchange with Al is the episode’s warmest moment. On learning who he is talking to, he says he thought Al had died in Vietnam, and Al’s reply, that he started that rumour himself and in fact died at home, a victim of Agent Red, is as efficient a summary of the character as exists.

The episode also drops a significant piece of backstory without ceremony. Al explains that he had a college scholarship and lost it, partly to a broken leg in a Polk High game and partly because Peggy’s water broke, which means she was pregnant with Kelly while they were both still in high school. The series had circled this for years without stating it.

Rose Jackson, who plays Angie, is married in real life to series co-creator Michael G. Moye. Mary-Pat Green’s Marge, who enters the store with a single line about needing shoes, became a recurring joke across seasons 9 and 10, usually delivering some version of the same line to Al or to Griff.

Famous Quotes

• Al, greeting his medicated daughter: “Isn’t that cute? I used to call her Pumpkin, now she is one.”
• Aaron: “Al Bundy?! All State Al Bundy? I thought you died in ‘Nam!” Al: “Actually I started that rumor. Yeah, see I died here at home. Victim of ‘Agent Red’.”
• Aaron, on why he admires him: “That and the four holes you drilled into the walls of the girls’ locker room.” Al: “For years, I didn’t think women had heads!”
• Al, beginning the tour: “There they are, son. The lost souls. The meek, the miserable, the married. And over here are the lowest of the lows: The ones relegated to holding their wives’ purses.”
• Al, on the man in tears: “His wife is shopping at Victoria’s Secret. She tried on a garter belt last week… they haven’t seen it since!”

Notes

• Aaron and Al sing the Polk High anthem together on discovering they are both Panthers.
• Jefferson turns up at Gary’s Shoes trying to apply for a job, which means he has lost the bartending job from season 7’s “Al on the Rocks.” The episode offers a strong hint as to why, when Marcy intervenes the moment he starts helping an attractive customer.
• A Rudy poster is visible in the mall lounge, another TriStar release from the studio that made this series.
• Several men in the lounge are holding bags from The Sharper Infant, the shop invented back in season 6.
• A goof: in the opening scene Kelly is sealed in a glass case full of insects, and when she holds her sign against the glass it becomes clear that some of the bugs are on the outside.