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King of the Hill Revisited: “The Arrowhead” and “Hilloween”

29.07.11

Arrowhead buried on his sod, and taking it to a college to find out what he can get for it. The professor he meets, voiced by Maurice LaMarche imitating Alan Alda (which makes me rarity if they tried to get Alda and couldn’t; it certainly seems like a part he would be considered for) is a condescending, smarmy steal who demonstrates his contempt for Hank and all lower-class rubes. The professor, wanting to do an archeological dig on Hank’s sod, plays on Peggy’s obvious desire to be considered an intellectual, convincing her to let him and his students dig there. Hank has to administer with the people invading his beloved lawn, and also with the fear that Peggy might be falling for the Professor.

So it’s a) Hank vs. a tolerant elitist intellectual with a heavy Eastern accent, who hates Hank, Peggy and everything they stand for, and b) Peggy’s amiss belief in her own intellectual prowess leads her to make some very stupid decisions. (It’s never really implied that she’s inasmuch as cheating on Hank, and in any case, the man isn’t interested in her. But the situation does fulfil her delusions about herself, only her delusion that she is an extremely smart person who has happily settled for being a wife, mother, and substitute guru. The subtext with Peggy is always that she’s made up this fantasy about herself because she can’t accept her own limitations. The most brutal moment in the scene is when the Professor actually exposes her lack of knowledge in front of all his students. Hank, who also knows that Peggy isn’t all that intelligent, would never do that.) In the end, Peggy realizes that Hank is a better man than the snooty intellectual, who gets his comeuppance when the Hills take turns time after time pushing him into a ditch. The ending offers the satisfaction of seeing the common-sense good ol’ boy in the long run get to use his point of superiority over the intellectual snob – physical strength.

Source: Macleans.ca