Michael John Meyer – Through the Shattered Lens

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, we start the third season!

Episodes 3.1 and 3.2 “River of No Return”

(Dir by Douglas Schwartz, originally aired on September 14th, 1992)

The third season of Baywatch begins with Mitch learning of the death of his uncle, an eccentric old prospector who always claimed that he was going to find gold. Mitch and Hobie decide to head to Northern California to investigate, and Eddie and Shauni agree to join them. For Eddie, it’s a chance to have one last adventure with Mitch before he heads off to Australia as part of the lifeguard exchange program. For Shauni, it’s a chance to reveal to Eddie that he knocked her up. For the show, it’s a chance to introduce CJ Parker (Pamela Anderson), a river guide who plays the saxophone and who gives good relationship advice.

Yes, this episode was Pamela Anderson’s first appearance on Baywatch. It turns out that, before she was a sax-playing river guide, CJ was a lifeguard, and Mitch would love it if she would return to the beach. Oddly, even though everyone already knows CJ, no one has ever mentioned her before. Considering that she was apparently a legendary lifeguard, you would think that she would have been mentioned in the past.

However, before CJ can return to the beach, she has to help Mitch and the gang find the gold mine that Mitch’s uncle found shortly before he died. Unfortunately, Drew (Bill McKinney) and Lonny (Mickey Jones), two no-good rednecks, also want to find the mine.

Meanwhile, back at the beach, Summer Quinn (Nicole Eggert) and her mother, Jackie (Susan Anton), have moved to Los Angeles to get away from Jackie’s abusive ex, Jed (Geoffrey Scott). Jed follows them but, fortunately, he’s put in his place by Matt Brody (David Charvet), a rich kid who is hoping to become a lifeguard. Like all of the other prospective lifeguards, Matt Brody is curious about “Bobby Quinn,” who is new to California and who was apparently a champion swimmer back in Pennsylvania. At the lifeguard try-out, Summer tells Matt that Summer is just a nickname and her first name is actually Roberta.

This two-part episode largely exists to introduce Pamela Anderson, Nicole Eggert, and David Charvet as regulars. All three of them do pretty well for their first episode. They all seem like they actually want to be there, which is quite a contrast to Billy Warlock and Erika Eleniak, both of whom have subsequently been pretty vocal about not being happy with the direction the show took during the second season. Of course, as soon as Eggert and Charvet show up, it’s easy to see that there’s no longer going to be room for Warlock and Eleniak. So, it’s not a shock when this episode ends with Shauni and Eddie marrying and leaving Baywatch.

This was a good way to start the season. Yes, the whole gold mine thing was a bit silly, but it gave David Hasselhoff a chance to do the earnest action hero thing, and it also introduces Pamela Anderson, who—in this episode at least—comes across as being surprisingly natural and down-to-earth in the role of CJ.

Next week, Matt goes undercover and meets even more new characters!

This week, season 2 comes to an end!

Episode 2.22 “Summer of ’85”

(Dir by Michael Berk, originally aired on May 18th, 1992)

This was the second-season finale, and it is an odd note to end on. David Hasselhoff is billed and never appears. Baywatch without Mitch is already a strange choice for a season finale; making the hour an Eddie-and-Shauni murder-mystery-slash-old-flame reunion makes it stranger. Tom McTigue’s Harvey has a prominent role in this episode but Hasselhoff, the show’s center of gravity is missing, and you feel it.

As for the plot: frustrated by life on a cramped boat and partly at Harvey’s urging, Shauni drags Eddie to a psychic named Rosalind (the one and only Toni Basil!). Eddie is a skeptic. When Rosalind tells him he will soon meet his first true love, Eddie says that Shauni already is. Rosalind disagrees.

Soon afterward, Eddie spots a woman sketching on a sailboat who looks painfully familiar. He is sure she is Lorna Cosgrove (Michelle Rogers). Eddie was fifteen when he first met her while vacationing at a friend’s place on Nantucket. Lorna asked if she could paint him. He agreed. Eventually he lost his virginity to her but, later that night, he saw an older man at her door, got jealous and never spoke to her again.

When Eddie approaches the woman, she denies being Lorna and calls herself Caitlin. The next day, she pays a boy to deliver a copy of the painting to Eddie’s tower. That not only proves she is Lorna; it also proves she was a terrible painter. I have seen motel art more impressive than her portrait of Eddie fishing.

Shauni is suspicious, and with good reason. There is a warrant for Lorna’s arrest. The same night Eddie slept with her, her husband was shot, and Lorna was the prime suspect. Can Eddie prove she is innocent?

That continuity, for those who care about that sort of thing, in this episode is a mess. In “Point of Attack,” Eddie claimed he did not even see the ocean until he was nineteen. The first season established that he was Philadelphia street kid who grew up in the foster system. And yet, in this episode, here he is at fifteen, on Nantucket, fishing, posing, and losing his virginity in a beach house. As well, this episode plants Shauni and Eddie on a houseboat, with Shauni announcing that they have to get an apartment. The previous episode, “Game of Chance,” had just moved her onto that boat after a fight with her father. Earlier in the season, though, the show had already treated them as live-in partners, sometimes in an apartment. Continuity be damned, I guess. It’s almost as if the show’s writers just didn’t care.

In the end, Baywatch without Hasselhoff is pointless. That said, Toni Basil is amusing as Rosalind. This is definitely a case of a performer giving a better performance than the material deserved.

That closes the first syndicated season of Baywatch, and the second season of the series overall. For the most part, season 2 was dumb and fun. The best episodes used Hasselhoff’s innate earnestness. The worst got too cutesy, especially “Now Sit Right Back and You’ll Hear a Tale,” the one where Eddie dreams he is on Gilligan’s Island. Billy Warlock and Erika Eleniak were both adequate as Eddie and Shauni, but neither was happy with the show’s turn once it entered syndication, and that unhappiness often showed.

Next week, we start season 3!