User Reviews

Late one night Gilligan is awakened by the Skipper, who in his dream is reliving the time his ship was near Guadalcanal. In the dream, the Skipper managed to convert the radio into a transmitter.

Meanwhile, the "Vagabond Lady" is completing her around the world solo flight and will pass over the island soon. The Skipper, having remembered his experiences during the war, cannot remember how he managed to convert the radio. So the castaways first try to lull him into sleep, then when that fails, they hypnotize him where he relates how he fixed the transmitter.

Will they contact the "Vagabond Lady" and get rescued? Well, if the answer is "Gilligan screws it up", then you know what happened.

Not quite a clunker, but this episode does have it's flaws. While some of the jokes are okay, the structure of the plot is really off as if this episode was rewritten hurriedly when it was shot. The confusion this creates undercuts the comedy and leaves us with an uninteresting episode with only a few decent laughs.

Highlights include the castaways trying to get the Skipper to go to sleep, a nice scene with Mr. Howell's enormous amount of pills for everything, and a cute bit with Gilligan trying to hang a "Quiet: Do Not Disturb" sign by nailing it to the hut, only to be stopped by the Professor.

Overall, this episode falls flat and just doesn't really work. To be fair, it's possible that this episode was overlong and the cutting took out some important information, which may explain the numerous plot holes.

• The structural flaws in the plot are numerous to say the least. First, the Skipper is trying to remember how he turned a radio into a transmitter (really?), but for no reason this changes about halfway through the episode to the Skipper fixing the transmitter. Second, what exactly powers the transmitter if the batteries (their only set as we learned later in "X Marks the Spot") are in the radio? Third, when the Skipper has his first dream, he's aboard a destroyer that gets strafed when he converts the radio. However, when he's hypnotized he is now in a landing craft ready to hit the beach, which would make him a Marine if this was the US's first landing at Guadalcanal. Fourth, it appears that the castaway's radio is actually picking up the radio signals from the "Vagabond Lady" herself, which is quite unusual for an ordinary radio. Fifth, we hear that the "Vagabond Lady" is flying from Hawaii to San Francisco...which means her flight path is definitely above some major shipping lanes if Gilligan's Island is along the way. Sixth, how does Gilligan know what Gunners Mate Entwistle looks and sounds like? Is he one of the Skipper's buddies or did Gilligan meet him in the navy as well? Seventh, Mr. Howell has pills for everything...except his seasick pills? Really? And finally, why didn't the castaways build a signal fire anyway? Oh well...

• The hut that the Skipper and Gilligan occupy was the supply hut in the previous episode "Voodoo Something to Me".

• Admittedly, my understanding of the confusing "hut" situation of the castaways is from the creator, Sherwood Schwartz. who said that they didn't have the budget in the first season to build the new interior sets for the separate huts. This helps explain the confusing appearance of the larger "community" hut, yet it seems that the castaways have their own huts as we see in the next two seasons.

• You can see the release button that Gilligan hits which dumps out the contents of the transmitter.

• The epilogue scene starts with a piece of footage from halfway through the episode as we see part of Ginger's dress when she was rocking the Skipper to sleep. When Gilligan enters the hut, there is no one but the Skipper present.

In perhaps a tribute to his real life history and roles his late father played, Alan Hale Jr. indicates a past in World War II as the skipper slips into a trance while sleepwalking and ends up reinacting a real life situation where he had to fix a transmitter. Thanks to Gilligan's ill timed fishing, both the radio and the transmitter end up inside other fish, giving a truly memorable visual moment in an otherwise forgettable episode. Perhaps this episode should have been further down the line as it is perhaps too soon to dig so intimately into a major character's past.

This episode is a real shipwreck. It's not that the premise is actually that bad: the Skipper sleepwalks out of his hut and relives a battlefield attack at Guadalcanal and ropes a befuddled Gilligan into his nightmare. Under an imaginary siege, the Skip works on turning the radio into a transmitter with the help of Gilligan's handy tools, but, once he's awakened, he can't remember what he accomplished.

A sleepwalking character is another one of those shopworn conventions, of course, but it feels a little more interesting here because the sleepwalker is the key to a potential rescue. A sense of urgency is added when long distance flyer The Vagabond Lady is headed over the island on her way to San Francisco, and the Skipper has to hit the sack and relive his dream before she flies past. The pressure to save the other castaways weighs so heavily on him that it becomes impossible for him to catch forty winks.

But, despite having an able director in Ida Lupino, there doesn't seem to be a strong hand at the rudder. The pacing feels off, very lackadaisical. There is no sense of urgency. Not one castaway is in a hurry or seems overly concerned that they may miss their chance at rescue.

Worse of all, this is the least funny episode of the first season, if not the entire series. There are very, very few laughs to be had. A lot of time is spent on one gag in which all the castaways slip sedatives into the Skip's soup bowl. The result should be sure fire, but there is very little pay off. The Skip lurches drunkenly for a moment, then passes out in his bowl. That's it. The laugh track may as well be set on snooze.

The Professor resorts to hypnosis to put the big guy out. The Skip works on the transmitter itself this time with Gilligan and the others stepping in as his war buddies. Their imitations of battlefield sounds aren't funny or particularly interesting. Once again, no real payoff.

Even after the Skip has tinkered with the transmitter, it still doesn't work right. He and the Professor essentially give up and retire for the night to leave Gilligan to have a slapstick moment with the radio. Of course, the island's resident Charlie Brown snatches victory from the jaws of defeat, and the only gag in the episode that really works leaves the castaways marooned for another week.

COCONOTES

Mr. Howell's briefcase of pills is more strange than funny. It's not in his character to be insecure or neurotic.

The gag where Gilligan tries to hammer the Do Not Disturb sign is a nice Gilligan logic moment.

Mary Ann does little but stir soup in this one.