Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing the original Fantasy Island, which ran on ABC from 1977 to 1986.  Almost the entire show is currently streaming is on Youtube, Daily Motion, and a few other sites.

Sorry for the late review!  I’m currently on Vicodin (nothing to worry about) and it set me far behind today.

Episode 4.11 “The Artist And The Lady/Elizabeth’s Baby”

(Dir by Michael Vejar, originally aired on January 17th, 1981)

This week, we have two new fantasies.  One is surprisingly sweet.  The other is about as dumb as can be.

Poor Tattoo!  Because Mr. Roarke is busy with the good fantasy this week, it largely falls on Tattoo to play host for the bad fantasy.  Kermit Dobbs (Don Most) is a nerdy art teacher who wants to be a real artist.  Before leaving to oversee the good fantasy, Roarke gives Dobbs a potion that, when Dobbs drinks it, gives him the talent of Patrick O’Herlihy (Peter Brown), a mad Irish artist who, for some reason, lives in the wilds of Fantasy Island.  What Dobbs doesn’t know that is that the potion not only gives him Patrick’s talent but it also apparently gives him the knowledge of every woman that Patrick has slept with on the island.  When Kermit paints a picture of a Deborah Dare (Michelle Pfeiffer — wait, what!?) and knows just where to place her birthmark, it leads to the men on the Island chasing Kermit into the wilderness.

It’s in the wilds that Kermit meets Patrick and they spend some time drinking and talking about art.  Eventually, Kermit gives up his claim to Patrick’s talent and he leaves the island with Deborah.  Meanwhile, all the men on the Island now want to kill Patrick so I’m not really sure that this qualifies as a good ending.

That was all really stupid, with every actor in the fantasy going overboard with their characters.  Don Most apparently went a week without shaving before appearing on this episode, in an attempt to come across as someone with an artistic soul.  It didn’t work.

The far better fantasy featured Eve Plumb as Elizabeth Blake, a woman who is pregnant and who know that she will probably die in childbirth.  Her fantasy is to have a chance to see what her daughter’s future life will be like.  Though reluctant, Mr. Roarke travels with her to three separate years in the future.  (Interestingly enough, even though they eventually end up traveling 20 years into the future, the world still looks like the 70s.)  At first, Elizabeth is happy to see that her daughter will have an apparently happy childhood but things get progressively darker until finally, Lisa Blake (Alison Arngrim) has run away from home and is working as a prostitute.  Mr. Roarke allows Elizabeth to talk to Lisa (hey!) on the condition that Elizabeth not reveal her identity.  Elizabeth is able to convince Lisa to go back home.

It’s a sweet but rather sad story.  Even as Elizabeth leaves Fantasy Island with the knowledge that she was able to help her daughter, she still leaves with the knowledge that she’s going to die in childbirth.  In the lead role, Eve Plumb is as good as Don Most was bad.

That one good fantasy is so good that it saves the episode.  That bad fantasy is so bad that it keeps this episode from being the classic that it should have been.  Such is life on Fantasy Island.