Title: Go Make
Directed by: James Burrows
Written by: Dan Staley and Rob Long
Air Date: December 12, 1991
Previous: I'm OK, You're Defective
Next: Don't Shoot...I'm Only the Psychiatrist
Guest Starring: Ric Coy, Sharon Case, Paul Willson
"Go Make" is the 12th episode of the tenth season of Cheers.
Sam and Rebecca have been trying to conceive a child together for several months, and so far have been having no luck. In another attempt, they head to a hotel to see if that will help. While there, they start to imagine what the future might be like. Sam imagines their kid, who he sees as a Sam Junior, is the kid he always wanted, but then starts thinking the kid might turn out just a little criminal due to being raised by parents who didn't love one another, which starts to put Sam off the idea. Meanwhile, Rebecca has a particularly grim vision of the future, where she's in a loveless, moneyless marriage to a serially unfaithful Sam. Her mood is not helped by getting stuck naked in the hotel's halls and meeting a sickeningly cheerful pair of newlyweds.
Meeting back up in their hotel room, Sam and Rebecca come to the same conclusion: It's been a good effort, but they shouldn't really have a kid together. So they don't. In one last daydream, Sam imagines his future son vanishing from existence.
In the B-plot, the gang decides to do the "Polar Bear Challenge", in which they strip to their underwear and run into the ocean in the depths of a Boston winter.
Tropes:
- Anticlimax: The "Sam and Rebecca make a baby" plot that formed the Season 9 quasi-cliffhanger and was the main plot for the first half of Season 10 just...ends, with Sam and Rebecca deciding not to make a baby after all.
- Better as Friends: How the Sam-Rebecca relationship ends up.
- Bratty Half-Pint: Part of what sours Sam on kids. He meets a man in the hotel who's got three kids, all little brats, who viciously insult him and steal his stuff.Father: On my good days, I pray for death.
- Can't Believe I Said That: When Rebecca bursts into the bar and demands Sam sleep with her (since she's ovulating) he tells her "no sex" and "I'm not in the mood." Both times, he's amazed he even said this a second later.
- Continuity Nod: Rebecca and Sam's argument in the bar, and then again in her Imagine Spot, have them devolve into yelling "shut up" at one another the same way she did with her sister Susan.
- Downer Ending: After several months of spirited attempts, Sam and Rebecca decide they shouldn't have a kid after all, when the whole reason they made the decision was fear of dying old, alone and unaccomplished. It's even more of a downer given the real life reasons as to why the plot reaches this conclusion.
- Exact Words: Paul tells the gang about how he used to do the Polar Bear Challenge when he was a kid. It's only after the guys leave Carla thinks to ask where he grew up, which is Honolulu.
- Imagine Spot: For Sam and Rebecca, taking up a good amount of the episode.
- Sam's initially has him and Sam Junior just hanging out, as Junior tells Sam how grateful he is for everything. Then it turns bad, as Sam Junior robs a convenience store and has Sam act as the getaway driver, before firing on the police with hollow point bullets, cackling the whole way about how it's Sam's fault he's turned out a nut.
- Rebecca imagines her and Sam living in a tiny, grungy apartment with no money, and Sam spending all his time sleeping with other women, while being a verbally abusive jerkass.
- Sam then has a third one of him and Sam Junior playing catch, until he decides not to conceive a kid with Rebecca, causing Sammy Junior to fade from existence, only telling Sam "see you in a few years".
- Naked People Trapped Outside: Rebecca, being Rebecca, manages to lock herself out in the hallway while she's nude.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: The reason the Sam and Rebecca plot ends the way it does. The "conceive a child" plot was done because Kirstie Alley had gotten pregnant in real life, but she suffered a miscarriage, so the plot is abandoned.
- Ship Sinking: The last embers of Sam / Rebecca go down in this episode, as the two are forced to realize they don't love one another, and this would be a bad combination. From here on out, they're exclusively friends (and sometimes, even that's a stretch).
- Sickeningly Sweethearts: The married couple Rebecca meets, who've just married but are very much in wuv with one another, to the extent hubby can't even get to the hotel elevator without stopping to use its phone to tell his wife how much he loves her.
- Title Drop: Frasier says "Go make" when giving the room over to Sam and Rebecca.
- With Friends Like These...: Most of the guys chicken out of their Polar Bear Challenge (small wonder, if the episode takes place at the same time it aired, in December). But Frasier didn't. On returning to the bar suffering from extreme cold, he mentions that it felt like someone was shoving him back into the water when he tried getting out.
