When Roseanne came back for a brand-new season, a lot of things were different. The characters grew up, the politics changed, and oh yeah, Dan didn’t really die in the series finale. It was revealed to be all a product of Roseanne’s fiction writing, and so were several other plot points in the show’s finale.
Vanity Fair points out that Roseanne fixed another problem from the last episode. In the final episode – the one where Roseanne reveals that Dan has died – she also “revealed” that Darlene was really married to Mark, and Becky was really married to David, not the other way around. Roseanne said that in her fictionalized version of events, she switched things, because “In my writing, I did what any good mother would do; I fixed it.”
In the season premiere, we don’t learn for sure what really happened with Darlene and Becky’s spouses, but we get a pretty good idea that the “changes” in the finale were thrown out. We see that Darlene is now a single mother who has moved back in with Roseanne and Dan. And we also see Becky as a widow, arranging to become a surrogate for another couple.
Glenn Quinn, the actor who played Mark, passed away of an accidental drug overdose in 2002, so it’s likely his character has also passed away. On the revival’s premiere, Jackie mentions that Becky’s husband has passed away. “Becky, I’ve known you had a hard time since your husband died,” Jackie says. There’s also a picture of Mark in the Conner family home.
We also know that Johnny Galecki is set to reprise his role as David on the show. In a trailer for the show, David and Darlene appear together: “They kept everything exactly the same as it was when you guys were kids,” David says. “It’s a decorating choice called poverty,” Darlene explains.
So it’s likely that Roseanne’s marriage swap in her fiction writing was just that: fictional. Darlene’s son, Mark, was probably named as a tribute to her late brother-in-law, even though the two didn’t always get along.
Perhaps Roseanne puts it best in this week’s episode, she finds her old writing, which had “killed off” Dan and swapped the couples. “Oh, trash that,” she says. “You know what really would have helped? More bondage and a wizard school.”
