Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing the original Love Boat, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1986!  The series can be streamed on Paramount Plus!

This week’s cruise is actually a pretty good one.

Episode 3.22 “Not So Fast, Gopher/Haven’t We Met Before?/Seoul Mates”

(Dir by Gordon Farr, originally aired on February 9th, 1980)

This week’s episode opens with Gopher in a panic.  His mother, Roz (Ethel Merman), is going to be on the cruise.  It’s her first big trip after the death of Gopher’s father and Gopher wants her to have fun because she’s been so depressed.  However, when Roz boards the ship, Gopher is stunned to see her laughing, singing, and hanging out with a male passenger named Lyle (Gene Rayburn).  Roz seems so happy that Gopher starts to worry that she didn’t love his father.

Of course, the opposite is true.  Roz is miserable but she doesn’t want Gopher to know how sad she’s feeling.  She doesn’t want Gopher to worry about her and she also doesn’t want to make Gopher feel any worse about losing his father.

This storyline handled loss and sadness with an intelligence and a maturity that I don’t think most people would ever expect to see on the show like The Love Boat, with both Fred Grandy and Ethel Merman giving sensitive performances as two people struggling to come to terms with their grief.  Gopher comes to realize that he’s been focusing on Roz’s grief so he’ll have an excuse to not think about his own and Roz comes to realize that she’s been doing the same thing to Gopher.

Now, of course, this is still The Love Boat so, of course, Roz ends up performing during the ship’s Passenger Talent Show.  And, yes, Gopher doe show up at the last minute and, in order to let her know that he now understands her feelings, sings a duet with her.  It’s a bit of goofy ending for an otherwise poignant story but, in its way, it definitely works.  It’s a sweet scene.

The Gopher/Roz storyline is so poignant and so well-handled that it pretty much overshadows everything else that happens on the boat.

Korean comic Jimmy Kim (Johnny Yune) finds romance with a reporter named Kendall Park (Momo Yashima) but Kendall is offended by Jimmy’s act (which is full of jokes about life in Korea).  However, after Roz talks about how much she enjoyed Jimmy’s humor, Kendall  changes her mind and she and Jimmy leave the ship as a couple.  This was an interesting story to watch and consider in the midst of our current, scolding, “That’s not funny” culture of 2023.  If anything, it showed that debates about what one can or should joke about are hardly new to this century.  But it just felt strange that it took a white woman appreciating Jimmy’s humor for Kendall to no longer be offended by jokes about Korea.  If anything it would seem that Roz saying that she enjoyed hearing jokes about Korea would leave Kendall feeling even more offended by Jimmy’s act.  I’m just glad that all of this didn’t lead to Captain Stubing doing his “I see you’ve been reading about your history” speech again.

Meanwhile, four blue collars friends board the ship.  Three of them (played by the Hudson Brothers) announce that they’re going to pretend to be wealthy professionals.  However, Paul Stockwood (Nicholas Hammond) announces that he is not going to pretend to be anything than the waiter that he is.  That’s before Paul realizes that the wealthy Leila Stanhope (Haley Mills) is on the boat.  Paul has waited on Leila several times at the Manhattan restaurant in which he works.  When Leila tells Paul that he seems familiar, Paul lies and says that he’s a wealthy writer.

It all seems to be working well, until Paul decides to bring Leila breakfast.  The sight of Paul carrying a tray of food is all it takes for Leila to remember who he is.  At first, Paul calls Leila a snob and Leila calls Paul a liar.  But then they fall in love anyway, which means that Paul will probably never have to work as a waiter again.  Yay!  Unfortunately, this storyline was hampered by the lack of chemistry between Nicholas Hammond and Hayley Mills.  They were both attractive but they were also difficult to buy as a couple.

Even though two of the storylines were somewhat flawed, the story about Gopher and his mother elevated this entire episode and it made it one of the best episodes of The Love Boat that I’ve watched so far.  This was a cruise to remember!