There are some scenes in which it's explained but in an indirect way through the dialogue between two people.
First, Dad at the train station when intoxicated cries and calls Colleen "Molly" and McMurphy looks sad and shocked and says, no I'm Colleen daddy.
Then we see dad in his ill and drunken state crying about how little Molly just cried and cried and nobody came (we presume he meant emergency personnel to the car crash). It gives a pretty clear picture that some kind of accident took place and dad was in charge of Molly and he feels horrible guilt over her death. It gives us our first hint of why dad may have descended into alcoholism further than just a penchant for the drink.
He probably was self-medicating his guilt all those years.
Then later the key insight comes from Uncle Connor and McMurphy in her bedroom when they are talking about dad and the accident with Molly. As the poster above said Uncle Connor said there was that little baby crawling around in the front seat and then the car accident happened.
It was so sad to hear Uncle Connor tell McMurphy with great compassion that everybody assumed her dad was drunk--so nobody ever said it out loud.
Family just let it be assumed--which Uncle Connor pointed out probably rightly--that that was the worst blow to her dad. Everybody ASSUMED and nobody even bothered to ask dad if he was drunk--so he could at least say no.
It was an accident but perhaps it was not because he was intoxicated at the wheel. We seen then the weight of that loss of Molly plus the accusatory silence of his family that dad has been carrying all those years.
The whole Molly plot line was so key to me in the whole family dynamic. Dad's drinking. Mom's stoic withdrawal emotionally from her kids.
It shows how tragedies like that in families have far reaching repercussions that we've all probably seen in real life.
And it also shows McMurphy's dad in a different light after that---she tells KC when she's packing to go home that her dad wouldn't acknowledge her when she left for Vietnam and wouldn't drive her to the station and ignored her.
At that moment, we think, what a cold guy.
Then later, after the Molly scenes, we could have more empathy for her poor dad---he'd lost one daughter to a terrible tragedy and now his only daughter left was going to war.
So he just withdrew and couldn't cope with facing it. This is likely because dad himself was a veteran of a terrible episode in world war two--ANZIO. That bit was exchanged when dad tells Connor how they kicked the enemy at Anzio. So her dad knew what war was like--and he was seeing his little Colleen leave for war. No wonder he couldn't cope.
This Molly thing was a perfect example of the brilliant, nuanced writing of the show. They lead us down one path with McMurphy, then she went home and so much was revealed and understood by the viewers after that.
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