Title: How to Marry a Mailman
Directed by: James Burrows
Written by: Brian Pollack and Mert Rich
Air Date: October 19, 1989
Previous: A Bar Is Born
Next: The Two Faces of Norm
Guest Starring: Bebe Neuwirth, Annie Golden, Roger Rees
"How to Marry a Mailman" is the 4th episode of the eighth season of Cheers.
Maggie's back! Maggie O'Keefe, briefly Cliff's girlfriend in Season 7 episode "Please Mr. Postman", writes him from Canada and says she misses him. She comes back from Canada, asks if she can be Cliff's girl, and just like that, they're dating again!
Only Cliff goes blind. Specifically, he goes blind whenever he's in Maggie's presence. The same thing happened back in high school, it seems, when a girl asked him to go steady. With Maggie scheduled to come to his apartment that very night, Cliff asks Sam to come over and help him, if he has another case of hysterical blindness.
In the B-plot, after Rebecca gets into a fender-bender with a plastic surgeon, she gets an offer of one free plastic surgery procedure. The gang is full of ideas.
Tropes:
- Bland-Name Product: Carla is in the habit of watching a show called "Criminals At Large" which is obviously a goof on America's Most Wanted.
- Cassandra Truth: Lilith doesn't believe Frasier when he fills her in on who Maggie is.Lilith: If you don't want to tell me, that's fine. You don't have to make stuff up.
- Foreshadowing: Cliff's tale of how he suffered hysterical blindness when Wendy Beamon asked him out in high school is obviously foreshadowing for Cliff going blind a little bit later, when Margaret shows up at the bar and asks if she can be his girl.
- Girlfriend in Canada: Cliff has one! Maggie writes to him and tells him that Canadian men just don't measure up, so she's coming back to Boston to see him.
- Here We Go Again!: At the end, Cliff's managed to lick his hysterical blindness... now, all he has to deal with is hysterical paralysis.
- Male Gaze: Sweet and innocent Woody is apparently in the habit of gazing at Rebecca's breasts, as revealed when he suggests she have some sort of breast augmentation.Rebecca: I've already had the surgery performed on an outgoing basis.
Woody: Already? Wow, they look great!
Rebecca: Woody, he didn't work on my breasts!
Woody: Well then, why do they look so much perkier?
Rebecca: (irritated, sarcastic) Thank you.
Woody: No, thank you. - Rooting for the Empire: In-universe, with Carla (unsurprisingly), who doesn't get why the cops on "Criminals at Large" are chasing after the suspect for what she did.
- Series Continuity Error: The series would start verging on Negative Continuity when it came to Cliff's love life or lack thereof. In this episode we learn that Cliff goes blind when he starts going steady with a woman—which doesn't really explain why he didn't go blind the first time he dated Maggie, or when he was dating sexy Madeline in Season 5's "Dog Bites Cliff", or when he was dating Carla's sister Annette in Season Two's "Little Sister Don't Cha".
- Shout-Out: In order to "prove" he can still see perfectly, Cliff puts an object on the floor of his apartment and "finds" it to demonstrate, a la The Great Escape.
- Temporary Blindness: Cliff has an attack of hysterical blindness after he and Maggie decide to live together. Apparently it happened before in high school.
