NOW FEATURING...YOU'VE BEEN DISCONNECTED

[lm]

I feel for Gilligan when he has to go down into the lagoon so many times to search for the cable; I believe him, I don't think it's down there either!

Gilligan seems overly fascinated with the rubber, I think.

Would the Skipper really think the telephone wires worked according to national colors? He seems to be a little more educated than that!

Why is Gilligan smiling after he knocks into Maryann and also knocks almost all her clothes off the line? OK. Some people think Gilligan is stupid but even if you are of that persuasion, you'd have to admit that he usually reacts with some degree of dismay or fear after one of his accidents that hurts someone else.

I love when the Skipper says, "Be quiet, they're trying to rob a bank!" to Gilligan. What??? As if Gilligan is interrupting something honorable!

I love the title of this episode!

I love the joke with Gilligan and Thirston about "Do you know there's a telephone down by the lagoon?" where Thirston thinks it's a song.

I like the way Lovey rushes in when she hears Ginger screaming--it's nice.

That's a great joke about not having the exact change for the phone call--something we've all had to deal with and that seems, according to this, to be one of the inescapable plagues of humanity, no matter where you are!

I'm kind of lo-tech but I never got the thing about dialing "incomplete calls"--what was the reason for that?

I think Gilligan was unfairly punished for wrapping the wires up in the rubber--he thought he was doing something good--would all of us have reasoned otherwise?

[callensensei]

Originally Posted by lm

I feel for Gilligan when he has to go down into the lagoon so many times to search for the cable; I believe him, I don't think it's down there either!

Since he's searched for it - what, sixty something times? (Hey - one for our numbers game, coming up!) and not found it, I agree. Once again it seems as though the castaways are taking out their frustration of a failed rescue attempt on Gilligan, when he wasn't responsible. This kind of scapegoating happens uncomfortably often on the show.

Originally Posted by lm

I love when the Skipper says, "Be quiet, they're trying to rob a bank!" to Gilligan. What??? As if Gilligan is interrupting something honorable!

I think the Skipper means, "Be quiet. I want to hear their plans." He knows the robbers can't hear them; there's no microphone on the island end. I like how the honest Skipper immediately wants to thwart them!

Say: here is where we learn that the Skipper is fluent in Hawaiian, as well as some of the dialects. That makes perfect sense, since he's lived in the area for so long. But then why isn't he the one who communicates with the natives, rather than the Professor?

In this episode, Lovey says she can speak fluent French and Italian. In a later episode, she says she can't speak French. I suppose if you don't use it, you lose it. Coaching Gilligan as Charles Boyer was about the only practice she ever got.

Originally Posted by lm

I like the way Lovey rushes in when she hears Ginger screaming--it's nice.!

Yes, it's sweet the way they look out for one another.

Ginger mentions quite a few of Gilligan's blunders here. Some people may think it's mean of her (and Gilligan certainly isn't impressed) but she doesn't seem angry about the mishaps. She actually seems to think they're hilarious. And what a great jumping off point for fanfics! It's not often that we get to hear about things that happened in between the episodes we saw.

Originally Posted by lm

I think Gilligan was unfairly punished for wrapping the wires up in the rubber--he thought he was doing something good--would all of us have reasoned otherwise?

I agree completely. See my first point above. The Skipper actually had the best idea: burn the casing off, shove the cable back into the water and let the phone company come to repair the broken cable. The Professor's idea had a fundamental flaw: who would believe it was the long-lost castaways from the Minnow phoning if they claimed they were on an uncharted island that has no phone? They run into the same problem of credability later when sending messages by carrier pigeon.

I assume that the Professor's dialing mechanism was so primitive that the castaways couldn't tell what numbers they were actually dialing, so they were making completely random calls, many to foreign, non-English speaking countries. Otherwise, they could simply have called their own families and been sure of rescue.