If The Conners season 4 wants to keep Aldo and Harris together, the series needs to stop ignoring this plotline to incorporate Harris into the family’s weekly adventures. Harris and Darlene’s feud on The Conners season 4 began when Harris decided to move in with her boyfriend Aldo. However, the entire fight seems misjudged now, as Harris still spends as much time with the Conners as ever and has barely mentioned her contentious love interest.
While there is no denying that The Conners struggles to balance its characters and their subplots, Harris and Aldo’s relationship becoming irrelevant to the season’s overarching story is a particularly big problem for the show. A good chunk of The Conners season 4 saw the sitcom spinoff pitting Darlene and Harris against each other as Darlene argued Harris was too immature for such a big life decision, and Harris accused her mother of patronizing her. With this bitter fight lasting so long, it’s anticlimactic and jarring that the subject has seemingly been dropped by the second half of The Conners season 4.
In “Gas Pump, House Dump and Stew Volcano” (season 4, episode 16), Jackie enlists Harris to help her shoot a commercial for the Lunchbox, proving that the character is still always around for her family. This isn’t the first time The Conners brought an absent character back, but the issue here is that Harris never got a chance to be meaningfully absent from the show. For two of her last three appearances, Harris has supposedly been moving stuff from her room to Aldo’s house, even though she didn’t have a lot of belongings to move in the first place. As a result, from her selling Dan’s gun in the shooting episode to helping Darlene uncover Mark’s prescription pill addiction, to co-starring in Jackie’s commercial, it’s pretty transparent that The Conners wants Harris to be available for family stories despite her moving out weeks ago.
Pair this with the fact that Aldo himself hasn’t been seen on The Conners for weeks and the entire plotline seems superfluous and in need of a fix. If The Conners is renewed for season 5, Aldo and Harris must break up (allowing her to move back in with the Conners and thus justifying her constant presence in the home) or Harris needs to put real distance between herself and the eponymous clan. While many viewers would be sad to see less of Darlene’s sardonic daughter, it doesn’t make any sense for Darlene to be feuding with Harris over her life decisions when those decisions don’t appear to have changed her day-to-day life at all.
In this regard, breaking up Harris and Aldo could be the best course for the show. Harris has definitively proven she can live away from the family independently, and The Conners seems unlikely to spend season 5 focusing on her raising Aldo’s three children. Harris selling Dan’s gun in The Conners shooting episode proved she still has a role to play as the rebellious but good-hearted teen of the family, and that role could be reinstated if The Conners addresses her relationship with Aldo instead of trying to ignore it.
