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!

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Episode 7.14 “The Last Case/Looking for Mr. Wilson/Love on Strike”

(Dir by Richard A. Wells, originally aired on December 17th, 1983)

This week, an old high school friend of Julie’s is on the cruise.  Whenever anyone from Julie’s past shows up, it means drama.  Five years ago, when Jan Maddox (Jeanine Wilson) told her boyfriend, Michael, that she was pregnant, he ran out on her.  Jan lied to her father, the rigid Colonel Maddox (Claude Akins), and told him that she and Michael had gotten married.  For five years, Jan has been telling her father that she’s married.  When Colonel Maddox boards the ship and meets his grandson Richie (R.J. Williams) for the first time, Jan continues to lie.  She says that Michael got called away on business.

However, when Jan meets a charming single passenger (Tony Dow) and starts to fall for him, she decides to tell her father the truth.

“My grandson is illegitimate?” Maddox says, in a tone more worthy of 1883 than 1983.

Colonel Maddox says that he never wants to see his daughter or his grandson again.  Seriously?  Okay, good riddance.  Colonel Maddox is a terrible person and Jan seems to be doing fine without him.  However, Julie mentions to Maddox that Michael walked out on Jan and now the Colonel is doing the same thing.  And then Richie tracks him down and yells, “You’re a mean old man and I hate you!”  Colonel Maddox sees the error of his ways and that magically fixes everything.  Jan forgives him.  Richie forgives him.  I would not have forgiven him.  Then again, I also wouldn’t have lied about being married in the first place.

While this is going on, Jenny (Didi Conn) boards the ship and spends the cruise harassing her ex-boyfriend (Grant Goodeve) and his new girlfriend (Wendy Schaal).  Jenny boards with two signs, each declaring that her ex is a louse.  She follows him around the ship, chanting about what a louse he is.  When she sees him dancing with his new girlfriend, she grabs a microphone and starts to talk about him to all the other passengers.  Jenny probably should have been taken into custody and kicked off the boat at the next port-of-call.  Instead, everyone acts as if Jenny’s actions are cute.  It’s a weird story.

Finally, a mysterious woman known as the Contessa has disappeared from her cabin.  Stubing convinces an old friend, retired detective Manfred Benusse (John Hillerman), to investigate.  (I would think that the Captain would be required — by law and company policy — to report a missing passenger as soon as it was discovered that she was missing but whatever.)  It turns out that there never was a Contessa.  The whole thing was a set up, engineered by Benusse’s secretary, Liliane Pendergrast (Allyn Ann McLerie).  Lillian didn’t want Benusse to retire and she thought that, if she gave him an unsolvable case, he would change his mind and I presume spend the rest of his days searching for a non-existent human being.  I’m not sure how that would have been a good thing but, once Benusse figures it all out, he falls in love with Ms. Pendergrast.  When you consider the fact that he could have easily been fired if Benusse hadn’t figured out what his secretary was doing, the Captain is surprisingly forgiving.

This was a really weird episode but the detective storyline was kind of charming in its nonsensical way.  Hillerman did such a good job as the detective that it made up for the fact that the other two stories were kind of annoying.  The end result was a pleasant cruise.