Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Saturdays, I will be reviewing Baywatch, which ran on NBC and then in syndication from 1989 to 2001.  The entire show can be viewed on Tubi.

This week, Eddie’s incompetence continues.

Episode 1.17 “Eclipse”

(Dir by Paul Schneider, originally aired on February 23rd, 1990)

After Kirby (Lance Wilson-White), the lifeguard that Eddie was supposed to be training, mysteriously drowns, Eddie loses his job and is shunned by every lifeguard in California.

Well, that’s what should have happened.  Instead, everyone tells Eddie that it wasn’t his fault and goes out of their way to make sure that Eddie isn’t beating himself up over one unfortunate death.  We don’t actually see Mitch or Captain Thorpe calling up Kirby’s family to offer condolences.  We don’t see Kirby’s funeral or Kirby getting the traditional fallen lifeguard salute.  Kirby?  Who’s Kirby?

Instead, Eddie meets with a psychiatrist (Dr. Joyce Brothers) and later admits that his sister drowned when he was a child and that’s why he feels so guilty about what happened to Kirby.  Everyone is more upset Eddie’s sister than they are Kirby.

Meanwhile, Eddie searches the beach for a ghostly woman in a white nightgown.  Eddie and Craig’s wife, Gina (Holly Gagnier), speculate that the woman is the ghost of someone who burned down the lighthouse decades ago.  Mitch theorizes that the woman is an escaped mental patient.  The woman later turns up on the beach, dead from drowning.  Again, nobody seems to be too upset.  Aren’t these people supposed to be lifeguards?

While this is going on, Hobie discovers that his friend Katie (Hayley Carr) is going to have to euthanize her dog because it bit her family’s landlord.  Katie runs away and Hobie hides both her and the dog at his house.  Mitch is not happy about this but he does agree to adopt the dog so it won’t be killed.  Yay!

This episode was dumb.  Apparently, as long as Eddie’s feeling better, it doesn’t matter that two people drowned.  Stay away from Malibu, folks.