User Reviews

Brilliant casting of Mr Quigley (Burt Mustin) and Jo (Ruth McDevitt). Loved them on Leave It to Beaver, and The Andy Griffith Show. We see Archie's intense fear of aging. Interesting writer's angle how seniors were having a hard time financially basically thrown to the wolves. Archie comes across cold, and very unsympathetic. One of the series' best lines at the very end delivered by Burt Mustin to Archie.

Edith meets an elderly man who ran away from an old folks home and invites him to the Bunker home.

Burt Mustin is a great scene steal-er as Justin Quigley. Archie gets a taste of what awaits him in old age. The funniest scene is when Archie describes a nightmare he has that night. He dreams he is an old man with a white beard who is looking for Mike and Gloria's house but all the signs are in Polish! When he finds their house, he sees that they have children, two little twin Meatheads with long hair and mustaches!

This is a good episode, especially for its time-- except for one thing I note. It's likely to inevitable Norman Lear's method of getting his own political message in. In the discussion between Archie and Mike in the kitchen, Archie, upon Mike's charges of near-poverty level existence for those who rely on Social Security, says "(President) Nixon got them a 5% increase (in ss)," to which Mike retorts "While groceries went up 20%!?" That misrepresents how SS benefits were determined-- which was by congressional actions until 1975, when the SS Administration could affirm automatic cost of living adjustments (COLA's). So Nixon is thrown in as having achieved a SS increase, but a puny one compared to inflation, while it was Congress, which was made up of 2/3 Democrats at that time, that passed the increase. The president could recommend, but not enact, any such thing. So it was a swipe at Nixon, and silence about the Democratic Congress that did what is being criticized, even ridiculed, in rhetoric. And there was not 20% inflation overall, but I don't know if that figure wasn't true for groceries only. To sum up, this show, and his others, were Lear's means of pushing his left wing political agenda in a subtle way, and this episode is good evidence.