Who's the Boss?: The Anniversary Show

Who's the Boss?: The Anniversary Show
ABC
May 6, 1986
Sitcom
DVD
B+

Fraser, Guylas, and Sternin wrote this episode that is and isn't a game-changer.  It's the second anniversary of when Tony and Sam moved in.  (Was that in the spring?)  To celebrate, Angela wants to cook dinner for everyone.  But Sam's drill team will be out of town, and Jonathan decides to go on a coed camping trip.  (Keri Houlihan returns as Jenny Wittener, whom Jonathan clearly has a crush on by now.)  At the last minute, Mona bails to go to a clambake.  So now it's just Tony and Angela.  They're more relaxed than in "Dinner for Two," when they didn't really know each other well.

But as the evening goes on, they end up tiptoeing around their feelings for each other.  He suggests they take the champagne over to the fireplace and discuss it, but then he gets a pain in his side.  She thinks her cooking has poisoned him, and when Mona Three's-Companily overhears them when she enters the kitchen, she misunderstands why Tony is moaning Angela's name.

It turns out that Tony's appendix has burst.  Before he's wheeled into surgery, he tells Angela he wants her to raise Sam if anything happens to him.  She says she would be honored.  And then, as he's very groggy, he tells her he loves her.  She's stunned but he passes out before she can find out how he means it.  She'll spend the rest of the episode, and much of the next five years, trying to figure it out, when Tony himself isn't sure.

When she talks to her mother the next morning, it moves from 3'sC farce to an honest examination of Angela's feelings, although she does feel somewhat uncomfortable about Mona's prying.  Mona suggests it might be really good between Angela and Tony, but Angela is afraid to bring the subject up.  Even when she visits Tony later that day, neither of them can directly talk about his confession, which was unconscious in many senses.

I particularly like the use of silences in this episode: awkward, meaningful, and otherwise.  It's very much an episode about what's said and unsaid.  However, it is a frustrating episode, in light of the long wait ahead of us.  It should've closed out the season, but unfortunately it was followed by the first of three or four backdoor pilots that did not spin-off successfully from WtB.  (Well, Paper Dolls aired, but anyway, we'll get to that later.)