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, we’ve got a special two-hour episode of The Love Boat!
Episodes 8.19 and 8.20 “Scandinavia Cruise: Girl of the Midnight Sun/There’ll Be Some Changes Made/Too Many Isaacs/Mr. Smith Goes to Stockholm”
(Dir by Robert Scheerer, originally aired on February 2nd, 1985)
The Love Boat is going to Oslo and Stockholm!
This is another one of those two-hour episodes that largely served as a travelogue. Let’s just say that there are a lot of scenes of the crew members wandering around Oslo and Stockholm and pointing out all of the historic buildings. That said, there is the usual collection of guest stars.
Jack Klugman plays a man who wants to reduce the size of his nose. He meets and falls for Susannah York. In one of those mix-ups that could only happen on a sitcom, she gets it into her head that he’s going to Sweden to get a sex-change operation, and she makes it her mission to change his mind.
John Davidson plays the vice president of a suntan lotion company who has been tasked with finding a Scandinavian model to pose for the company’s ads. He thinks that he’s found the perfect candidate in Greta (Christopher Norris). How will he react when he discovers that Greta is actually just an American pretending to be Swedish? Do you think they’ll fall in love?
Priscilla Barnes plays a Swedish actress who appears to be fascinated with Gopher. Gopher briefly resigns from the cruise to join her father’s company. Don’t worry, he comes back.
Here’s the thing, though. While all of this is going on, Telly Savalas is playing a mad scientist who has built a robot that looks exactly like Isaac. He has hired Janet Jackson to distract the real Isaac so that the robot Isaac can commit a daring daylight robbery. His plan is for the real Isaac to be arrested. He almost succeeds until the robot Isaac malfunctions in a hallway. “That’s not Isaac!” Doc Bricker says.
Remarkably, Isaac is amazingly untraumatized by all of this. He even pretends to act like a robot after Savalas and Janet Jackson are arrested. The entire crew laughs. It really seems like this story should have left everyone feeling a bit more uneasy than it did.
Still, the Scandinavian countries were lovely to look at, and watching this old episode of The Love Boat on Wednesday helped to distract me from the fact that a political party that doesn’t have the guts to condemn anti-Semitism swept the midterms. That’s really the best thing that a show like this can do. That’s why I love The Love Boat.
