MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*
While I don't plan to review all 11 seasons of MARRIED WITH, I would like to get a fair sampling of the outstanding episodes, even when they're outstandingly bad. Yet even though this is one of the few I'd rate as "poor," it's still fairly entertaining just for the sake of seeing the classic characters doing their things.
"Twisted" seems like it was concocted after someone fed the writers improv lines: "Bundys. Twister in Chicago. Wizard of Oz-- GO." The story, such as it is, starts with Bud planning to trick a girl named Ariel into sex by faking a big storm, because Ariel supposedly gets turned on by danger. But once he's got her down in his basement hideaway, a real twister hits Chicago. This means that all the Bundys, plus Marcy and Jefferson, end up down in the basement to cramp Bud's style. The one marvelous element here is the twister, which like the one in WIZARD OF OZ seems to possess a weird capacity to transport people to other locales. Al's at the shoe store, being annoyed by the customary fat lady customer, when the twister picks both of them up and conveniently dumps them in Al's back yard, where they crash atop Peg for the sake of a "house falling on a Wicked Witch" joke. (Peg calls the collision a "threesome," though the fat woman just wanders off and is seen no more.) Later the same twister grabs up Kelly when she's out looking for Toto-- I mean Lucky-- and the episode winds up showing Kelly in a faux-Dorothy outfit talking to a Scarecrow about her experiences with a certain Wizard. Given the huge distance between innocent Dorothy and round-heeled Kelly, I think the writers could have done better.
We never do find out if Ariel gets turned on by danger. But, in what seems like a recycling of a schtick from THE CAMPING SHOW, both Peg and Marcy become vagina-monsters in the face of peril and essentially ravish their respective husbands. Cute, but we've been there before. Actually, Al, Jefferson and Bud get off pretty light in the female-violence department-- each of them gets slapped just once or twice by a woman-- and Bud's biggest headache comes when his father and Jefferson try to use him as a battering ram to open a door. The family-dysfunction jokes are even weaker than the Oz references, and the disjointed story ends (not counting the last Oz bit with Kelly) when Al and Jefferson use a secret tunnel and somehow travel all the way to the Jiggly Room to escape their wives. (However, later that same season Peg will destroy even that pathetic refuge in "Live Nude Peg").All in all, "Twisted" is an odd episode with which to launch the show's last season.
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