Episode 205--"no promises"

Writer Liberty Godshall Director Ken Olin Air Date 1/10/89, 8/15/89 Guest Star

Charles Cioffi as James Warren; Betsy Blair as Marjorie Ann Warren; Hayley Carr as young Ellyn

Synopsis

Ellyn's parents get divorced.

Summary

Ellyn's Dad calls and wants to go to lunch, which makes her intensely suspicious as he's a high-powered stockbroker type. They have a very interesting, distant relationship. After their lunch, as they are leaving, her father drops the news that he and her mother are getting a divorce. Ellyn goes to visit her mother and, as leaving the house, has a flashback to a scene from childhood in which her father was extremely intent with her, coaching her on a speech, and then distant as soon as it was over.

Michael runs into Ellyn as she's returning a video and they talk about parental divorce while sitting in the car. Ellyn and Woodman have an interesting conversation while at dinner at Hope and Michael's about her inability to take a compliment. Later, while going through her old things in her room with Hope, Ellyn and her mother have a tense exchange about how her father taught her to ride a bike and let her fall over.

Ellyn goes to meet her father for their dinner date at his hotel and discovers it's actually a cocktail party for his business associates. She stays for a while, but finally has it out with him on the patio and tells him how wrong he was to use her to make him look like a good family man. He comes by her apartment later and somehow it comes out that it was actually her mother's idea to get a divorce. Ellyn goes to see her mother and talk about why she married her father. Ellyn ends up crying as her mother sits a few inches away.

Upon return to the apartment. Woodman is making a casserole for her and somehow in the process the oven catches on fire, the extinguisher misfires, they get into a fight, Ellyn throws the extinguisher at him, and they eventually make up.

Notes

• Ellyn is 33
• Ellyn's parents are 60 and married 40 years
• The Warren house is a mansion
• Michael was 16 when his dad split
• Grendel appears
• Nancy's father is dead
• Ellyn's Dad once nearly ran over Hope who was making out with Billy Peterson in the driveway
• Ellyn's Dad calls her Lynny. He also has an ulcer
• Hope is slightly morning sick
• Woodman plays harmonica
• Opener clips of Ellyn when door opens and her collapsing in a chair

Goofs

Michael specifically states that his father left when he was 16 which directly contradicts prior statements that he left at 19.

Quotes

--"Will you and Michael be my parents?" --Ellyn

--"Aren't we already?" --Hope

"We got Alien the other night and fell asleep before the thing came out of its stomach." --Michael

Analysis

• In the end, as Woodman and Ellyn are holding each other in the ruin of the burnt kitchen, it seems that they fall into a pattern of swaying that could be considered a slow dance of sorts. Yet in the previous scene, Ellyn's mother warned her against marrying "good dancers" (popular, flashy boys) in favor of the quiet nerd types. Woodman could certainly qualify as a nerd type, but is there anything more to the dancing parallels?

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