I have questions about a 47-year-old episode of 'The Love Boat'

Months ago, we noticed The Love Boat was available on Paramount+, and we started watching it from the beginning. Fast forward to now, and our six-year-old, who complains about almost everything (including and especially stuff that we know he already likes), will basically always be fine with us turning on The Love Boat. Which is weird, but we're not often complaining about it. So suffice to say that we've been watching a lot of The Love Boat. And it's totally bizarre in general, but season 2 in particular is where it IMMEDIATELY goes off the rails. (Complimentary.)

A quick aside: as a kid, my family watched The Love Boat every week without fail. I absolutely adored The Love Boat. But in retrospect, it turns out that I remember almost nothing about it beyond the iconic theme song and what the principal male leads (Captain Stubing, Isaac, Gopher and Doc) looked like. I somehow don't even remember My Cruise Director Julie, despite her probably belonging on the Mount Rushmore of Hot '70s/'80s television sitcom ladies, along with Loni Anderson, Suzanne Somers, and Loretta Swit.

The Love Boat is wild just on its surface: an hour-long single-camera dramedy with a laugh track that deals with a weekly cruise from Los Angeles to Mexico and back, wherein passengers check in either looking to find love or (in the case of existing couples) experience romance over the course of a few days, the male staff tries to bang anything that moves, and Julie becomes best friends with some tragic woman before they return to port. The production is also bizarre, as each episode involves three storylines that interweave, but due to the nature of so many guest stars each week (many of them high-profile or very in-demand at the time), each of the three storylines has its own designated writing team and director. Somehow, every episode being produced in three discrete chunks never really appears disjointed, but it's still a really crazy thing to do over the course of 250 episodes.

So taking all of that in mind, the producers decided to say "well you know what, the hell with it, we can do magical realism if we want" beginning in season two. There are episodes that are just fully in line with being normal (in The Love Boat sense), but then there are episodes where, for example, Vincent Price is an "illusionist" who just makes fully impossible things happen, or an episode where Jimmy Walker is a ghost accompanying his widow, and she's the only person who can see or hear him.

Somehow, none of that is as weird or baffling as the two-part Season 2 premiere. Isaac the bartender is on vacation, and he chooses to spend that vacation ... on The Love Boat, trying to impress guest star Lola Falana by pretending to be a millionaire. Captain Stubing chooses to take a small group of passengers and crew to a small, "deserted" island off the coast of Mexico which he claims is one of his favorite little-known spots. While Stubing takes the group in a skiff, guest star Dick Martin (of Laugh-In), playing Deputy Captain Cunningham (never seen before), decides to follow through on his delusions of grandeur by not alerting anyone that the first hurricane in 20 years is approaching, and takes advantage of Stubing's absence by bossing around everyone aboard with great ineptitude.

Stubing alights on the island with Gopher, Doc, Julie, and a gaggle of guest stars: a sweet little old lady who accidentally wound up with Cunningham's ignored hurricane warning, Hugh Hefner's girlfriend Barbi Benton as a woman who was stood up at the alter the previous week and whom no one can stand, and a goofy, UFO-spotting husband whose wife absolutely hates his guts. The gang is only on the island for about 20 minutes when guest star John Astin (television's Gomez Addams and stepfather to Sean Astin) cuts loose their boat and holds them all at gunpoint, displaying the 1970s TV-comedy version of insanity and saying he's keeping them all there because he's been alone on the island for decades and it's his birthday, so he needs them to throw him a surprise party. He leads them all slightly inland, where they see he's built himself a Gilligan's Island-style town with a house and a functioning windmill. Some favorite spot that Captain Stubing knows about!

Back on the ship, Cunningham reacts to Stubing's disappearance with glee, and at Isaac's urging, he moves the Love Boat out to sea to avoid the incoming hurricane. Said hurricane hits the island, and when the group sends Gopher outside(?) to check the roof(??), Gopher is struck by a falling tree and injured. The crazed gunman is the only person who is able to lift the tree and free Gopher, so that's good enough for Stockholm Syndrome to begin to set in. Later, they discover that the man's gun isn't loaded, but that really doesn't matter! Everything he is doing is extremely illegal, even if it is goofy – which Stubing keeps reminding the man of.

And the guy gets sweet on the old lady.

During the storm, Barbi Benton learns how to be empathetic to someone by giving Gopher a cold compress, and the UFO guy manages to convince his wife to love him again by saying that he's been banging a bunch of other women on the side (???) – although he reveals later that he was just lying about the other women so that his wife would be interested in him again (????). Gopher recovers, the storm passes, and a rescue party arrives.

Stubing agrees to let the gunman remain on the island, but the old woman (who it turns out has a terminal illness and six months to live) chooses to stay on the island with the gunman, where she will live out her days with romance.

But no! No! That would be highly illegal! Captain Stubing, you would be extremely liable for leaving one of the passengers on your manifest on an anonymous island with a man who just committed so many crimes. What are you doing?! WHAT IS EVERYONE DOING

Further, when they return to the ship, Cunningham (who reveals that the gunman is probably his long-lost brother) merely quits his job with the cruise line, rather than being arrested or at the very least being immediately hit with a humongous lawsuit for willfully risking the lives of however many people are aboard the Love Boat and another from Princess Cruise Lines for being criminally negligent with their flagship cruise ship. Add to that that there is rarely an episode that goes by where Gopher and THE LITERAL SHIP'S DOCTOR (neither of whom are even the slightest bit attractive, even by 1970s standards) aren't sexually harassing multiple passengers, and I now watch every episode of The Love Boat with the working assumption that all of these people (including Julie, often) should probably be in prison.

Anyway, I need to get back to an episode where Doc has to remove a passenger's spleen while a real doctor talks him through it on speakerphone (and I guess his anonymous nurse is also an anesthesiologist), so I'll just sum up by saying The Love Boat: 10 out of 10, perfect show.