So far this revival season has approached Peggy and Connie primarily as extensions of Hank and Bobby’s stories: Peggy as Hank’s “therapist” while he acclimates to retirement via various side gigs (chore chimp, AYSO ref), and Connie as Bobby’s great lost love friend reentering his life in adulthood. Both have had some fun and funny moments along the way, but their emotions have mostly taken a back seat to Hank and Bobby’s. “Peggy’s Fadeout” continues that trend to a degree, with Peggy and Connie’s storylines still directly connected to male characters — not just Hank and Bobby, but also Bill and Chane, respectively — but it does so while prioritizing each woman’s feelings about not just those men, but the choices they’ve made in their own lives.

Some of Peggy’s choices over the years have made her a contender for the title of King of the Hill’s most hated character, but there are also plenty of people, myself included, who love and even occasionally admire her high self-esteem (slash narcissism) and unwavering confidence (slash delusion). She is the walking, talking antithesis of imposter syndrome, and as imposter syndrome incarnate, Bill is naturally drawn to (slash obsessed with) her. King of the Hill has played with this toxic combo before, usually as a means of making Peggy eat some humble pie — see: season four’s “Bill of Sales.” But given how often the show leans on Peggy punching down at Bill for comedy — see also: the episode right before this one — it’s a neat reversal to see him used here to help build our girl back up, albeit in his own extremely misguided way.

The episode opens on an inversion of the beginning of “Chore Money, Chore Problems,” with Hank relaxing and watching reality TV (those stupid Property Twins “would be better off installing sleeves on their shirts”) while Peggy wrestles with having nothing to occupy her time. Heimlich Community College has rejected her application for Budget and Finance director on the grounds that experience haggling in Saudi-eye Arabi-eyen flea markets is not the same as a master’s in economics, forcing Peggy to admit her career in academia is over. Reasonable minds could argue that it was over well before this point, but even Peggy’s unreasonable mind has to acknowledge it when faced with evidence of her friends’ own flourishing careers: Nancy with Selling Arlen, Minh with a lifestyle blog that Peggy immediately unsubscribes from. Later, she tells a battery-organizing Hank that she feels like everyone is doing bigger and better things with their lives … even Bill. That’s as sure a sign as any that she’s in a bad place.

As Hank reminds Peggy, “Bill’s not doing better anything,” and that may be broadly true, but he’s certainly doing better than he was in the season premiere. “Peggy’s Fadeout” adds some welcome context for how Bill came to be the shut-in we encountered there, as well as for his rapid offscreen recovery, by introducing Lucas, Isaiah, and Ernie, the friends Bill says he made while Hank was away, and whom Boomhauer and Dale consider a fiction they’re done entertaining. (“Even if they’re fake, I cannot live in a world where Bill has more friends than me.”) But as Hank learns when he follows Bill to North Arlen and discovers him working in a Black barbershop, not only are “the fellas” real, losing them when Covid hit and shut down the shop is the reason Bill spiraled so hard. Now that he’s back up and out of the house, he’s reconnected with them and seems happier than ever, and he owes that to Hank.

Of course, he owes him more than just that, given that Bill has offloaded his own pitiful personality onto Hank, who the fellas are glad to see up and around after “BD” helped him through his “severe bouts with weight gain, loneliness, and depression.” Even worse, he’s also claimed Peggy as his wife, complete with Photoshopped wedding pictures and backstory involving their Mexican vacation home and adoption of “little Bobito.” (He’s touched.) Bill’s panicked explanation to Hank that the lie is what gave him the confidence to make new friends is weirdly sweet — “Who wouldn’t like the kind of man who was able to get Peggy?” — but it’s undermined by his refusal to come clean to the fellas, even in the face of a threatened ass-kicking from Hank. Being fake-married to Peggy really has boosted his confidence.

That turns out to also be true for Peggy, not someone historically in need of a confidence boost. But right now, the fantasy of “Black Barbershop Peggy” is just the delusion she needs to lift her out of her retirement funk. At first, she resists Hank’s insistence that she put a stop to it, briefly bonding with Bill over their shared vision for Black Barbershop Peggy’s continuing adventures in mountain-climbing and kite-surfing; but once Bill pulls the fantasy too hard toward his own more physical imaginings, she, too, demands that he put an end to the charade. And he does, in characteristically cowardly fashion, unspooling another lie about Peggy dying that comes back to bite him when the Black Barbershop Community shows up at his house to help him grieve. (He didn’t realize that all communities do this, because a lot of bad stuff has happened to him before and no one ever brought him food.)

This is all several levels of shitty on Bill’s part, and it’s reasonable to want to see him held accountable for his lies as Peggy storms over to tell him off in front of the assembled mourners. But what happens instead is even better, as Bill’s sobbing eulogy for Peggy Dautrive allows him to cover his ass without losing his new friends — because come on, Dale, Bill needs all the friends he can get — and allows Peggy to see in his words the woman she briefly forgot she is: “From Boggle tournaments to beauty pageants, there wasn’t a challenge Peggy couldn’t take on … Although she didn’t succeed at everything, she was always an inspiration.” Satisfied, she leaves the ersatz widower to his lies and the friends they brought him, and carries herself back home like the winner she is (or the ghost of her, to the late-arriving Ernie).

Peggy’s storyline makes this episode feel like a bookend to “Chore Money, Chore Problems,” a role-reversed continuation of Hank and Peggy working through their retirement anxiety, with the added echo of Hank and Bill each appropriating Peggy’s experiences for their own benefit. But the Bobby/Connie side of “Peggy’s Fadeout” also feels like a direct continuation of that fourth episode, in which Bobby had to confront and accept the fact that Connie is dating Chane. Now, he finds out she’s not only dating Chane, at least not in theory. Connie certainly seems confident in her explanation that she and Chane are in an open relationship, and in her insistence to the briefly hopeful Bobby that he isn’t cut out for ethical nonmonogamy: “You’re not ENM material, it’s just not how you’re programmed. You’d end up getting hurt, and I would never do that to you.”

But is Connie really ENM material herself? She’d like to believe so as much as Peggy would like to believe she’s capable of being Black Barbershop Peggy, though given that it’s Connie, her basis for this new identity is much more grounded in reality: As an electrical-mechanical engineering double major, she doesn’t have time for a monogamous relationship, so this works for her. Fair enough, but juggling multiple partners would presumably take up just as much of her precious free time — it certainly seems to be keeping Chane busy — and she already seems to be spending a lot of that hanging out at Bobby and Joseph’s place, just sayin’ …

It’s during one of those visits when we see the cracks in Connie’s façade, the first being the face crack she gives as Willow the would-be grease thief emerges from the bathroom. It’s unclear from Willow’s explanation that she “slept over” after getting sake-drunk with Bobby the extent of what happened between them. (Her sleeping in the bathtub instead of his bed is a clue, though.) But it’s quite clear to Connie, and us, that these two are vibing over their shared skepticism toward both college — “There’s nothing in life that requires a baccalaureate,” says Willow — and ethical nonmonogamy, a.k.a. “just some b.s. college girls say to get side dick.”

The next crack is the one in my damn heart when, seconds after witnessing Connie’s physical discomfort as she hang outs with Bobby, Willow, and Joseph on the balcony, it’s revealed that the apology cookies she sent Bobby went to the wrong apartment, with a note reading, “You’re not ENM material because you’re husband material.” Connie told Bobby that bringing him into her open relationship would only lead to him getting hurt, and she may be right about that, but perhaps she should have put a little more consideration into her own feelings on the matter.

Musings

• Bobby and Dale’s rat-hunting C-plot is mainly a comedic runner, but puts a cute button on the episode’s multiple-partners motif, with “Sexy Rat” luring in both the original rat who invades Robata Chane’s kitchen, and Dale’s biometrically enhanced (with an Apple watch and small explosive) “Judas Rat.” As an added bonus, Dale falls from the ceiling and drops a “sha-sha-shaaa,” both always welcome developments.

• Callback alert: As Peggy is fiddling with her awards shelf, we see two Substitute Teacher of the Year trophies, one from 1997 and one from 1999. The latter has the name “Peggy” written on tape that’s covering the first name of someone else named Hill, a sly nod to “Little Horrors of Shop,” which aired in 1999.

• When Bobby learns that the (not-really) blonde girl Joseph caught Chane making out with is from a sorority that’s on their “preapproved list,” he wonders, “You don’t have a whole fraternity that you …” earning himself a rebuke from Connie for slut-shaming, which is “the single worst thing anyone can do to someone.”

• Brian Robertson stays instigating, even when he doesn’t appear in the episode. First, he broached the homebrew battle in episode two; now, here, Bill tells Hank it was Brian who put him in touch with Lucas in the first place. (It was after Bill was “forced into early retirement,” which sounds like a story for another day.)

• Joseph thinks he can be into ethical nonmomogamy too, if Connie’s interested, which she isn’t.

• Two things to note about Willow: She has the exact hairstyle Hank thinks “looks like fruit,” and she thinks Bobby has great taste in fats and tallows.

 Leave it to Bill and his obsessive fantasies to help Peggy see the best version of herself.