Spoilers below for the Season 5 finale of The Conners, so be warned if you haven’t yet watched!
The Conners spent a lot of Season 5 exploring Darlene and Ben’s complete life reversal as a newly married couple living together, outside of Dan’s house, with Darlene’s professional life shifting around for the betterment of the family. (What show does she think she’s on?) But the season finale focused on two characters who rarely get paired up together narratively — Ames McNamara’s Mark and Jay R. Ferguson’s Ben — while addressing one of the familial elephants (not) in the room: Mark and Harris’ absentee father David Healy. While the episode didn’t get to bring Johnny Galecki back to reprise his Roseanne-originated role, it served as a fitting chapter-closing for the character, whose lingering relationship with Darlene was put to rest back in Season 2. Executive producers Bruce Helford and Dave Caplan even think it worked out better for Mark and Ben that David never popped up.
