User Reviews

This is a story fit for a 5-year old. The rest of us would be wise to skip it.

We begin with Binghamton and Carpenter sneaking into Binghamton's quarters with a case of champagne bottles the Binghamton is going to place in his new wall safe-right from Ft. Knox. As he is sliding each of the bottles inside the safe, we switch to see that right outside is Gruber & Co. sliding those very bottles out into their thieving hands, as they have used a blowtorch to open a hole in the back of the safe.

The next morning Binghamton is steamed about his champagne being stolen, of course, certain it was McHale's men. He learns that Elroy has just received 3 months back pay and he appropriates it for a trap to lure McHale and men so he can court martial them for grand larceny-telling Elroy he'll get his money back at the trial.

McHale and his crew have another luau planned, apparently on the far side of their island, that includes the stolen champagne. Binghamton and Carpy go to McHale's Island to set their trap. Now they don't specify what they had planned, but when they find nobody around, Binghamton slips the money partly sticking outside his wallet, leaving it on a small table outside one of the huts.

At their party, as McHale and the others go off to get the girls, Parker is confronted with an alligator. From the movements of the gator, I think anyone age 6 or up would know that it wasn't a real alligator, but that's not my beef with this episode.

The gator likes Mr. Parker's peanut butter sandwich-homemade peanut butter mailed from Chagrin Falls by Chuck's mother. The gator appears to also like Chuck. The men return to their quarters, leaving the gator, whom Chuck christened "Sidney" behind. They think.

Somehow the gator gets back first and he picks up Binghamton's wallet. The gator walked off with the wallet, partially sticking out of his mouth. Later, the gator enters Chuck's hut just as our ensign was writing his mother about the new friend he made today.

Chuck pets his new pet and finds the wallet, specifically taking out of it Binghamton's ID card. Thinking Sidney ate the captain, he rushes out to get the skipper. McHale and the crew attempt to return to find the alligator and are stopped by SPs and Binghamton and Carpenter, arresting Chuck for stealing his wallet and the $900.

Now Binghamton does let Chuck lead him to his hut, but the gator is gone. We skip ahead to court martial day, with the crew trying hard to find Sidney. They finally do and are stunned to learn the wallet is now sitting on the bottom of the gator's big mouth, still intact. Sidney won't let anyone else get too close to him, nobody but Chuck, so since they can't bring Parker to the gator, they'll have to take the gator to the trial. With a peanut butter sandwich on the end of a string, they get the gator to follow them onto the 73 and eventually into the room where the court martial is being held. I don't guess I'll be spoiling anything by revealing that Chuck got off when the gator opened his mouth and showed the wallet-that Chuck retrieved from his new "buddy."

Before Sidney and friends arrived, we saw what was supposed to be a zany, wild trial, but was instead the stupidest trial I ever saw.

Binghamton acted as prosecutor, and he mostly just called Parker stupid and a crook, sticking his finger in Chuck's face and physically attacking him on several occasions. Parker objected to Binghamton calling Sidney stupid, not to being called stupid himself. At one point the chief judge of the three-man panel climbed onto his table as he tried to wrestle Binghamton away from Parker. In any real trial, Binghamton would have been charged for physically attacking the defendant/witness.

His only evidence was that ID card. He lamented that Parker was the only one he could charge since he was the only one with his ID card. No mention was made of the fact that the money had not been found anywhere.

Which leads to another stupid portion of this episode: Binghamton's timing was terrible. He and his police squad arrived to arrest the men only minutes after they returned to their base. Had the alligator not picked up the wallet earlier, the men may or may not have even found Binghamton's wallet by that point. Had they returned and found the wallet, suspiciously sitting on a table, with money sticking out of it, McHale would have immediately smelled a trap and would likely have said, "Boys, we're not going to touch it. We're going to phone the captain and tell him what we found, and on his direction, we'll return it."

For Binghamton to have charged them with theft moments after they discovered the wallet, would never have worked unless he concocted some story about them getting the wallet someplace else.

But it was the captain's behavior at the court martial that bothered me most. He told people to shut up, attempted to deny an objection, when it wasn't up to him, and when McHale appeared telling the court he had a witness for Mr. Parker, Binghamton told him to be quiet and leave the court room-again, when he wasn't running the show.

For Binghamton to have done it right, he'd have to reveal to the court that his wallet was purposely left as a trap. If the boys found it, they would need reasonable time to return the wallet and money-possession moments after finding it does not constitute theft of any kind.

The other part I don't like is Gruber stealing valuable champagne from the captain-again. Had he been portrayed in this series as taking one bottle when the crew had a special occasion-Christy's wedding, etc.-that would have been one thing. But Gruber and his friends are seen taking large amounts of valuable supplies from Binghamton just for personal use. He really was a thief.

Between Binghamton's intended entrapment, Gruber's serious theft, and the comical phony alligator, this episode was bad. With Binghamton crazily kicking and striking Parker while in court, this episode was surely as bad as any in this series. I have to give it a score of one out of ten.

I wrote about a five-year-old to begin this review. I think a typical 6-year-old would laugh-even in the mid-60s-at the comical fake alligator. He/she would also realize that whatever they do in a courtroom, they don't call defendants names or swing at them with their arms or kick them. By the age of 7, viewers would know Parker can't be convicted of the theft since they never found any of the money on him, nor showed that he made any large purchases.

Silly plots are one thing but, as Captain Binghamton would say, "This plot is the Saturday end."