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 tries to change a young man’s life.

Episode 2.6 “Point Attack”

(Dir by Alan Myerson, originally aired on October 21st, 1991)

Cort returns!

When the syndicated version of Baywatch first aired, John D. Cort (John Allen Nelson) was among the first season cast members who were no longer on the beach.  His absence was not addressed.  With this episode, we learn that he’s been in either South America, Kuwait, or Asia.  No one’s sure.  To me, it sounds like Cort’s a drug smugler.

Anyway, Cort shows up on the beach, just in time to help Eddie break up a gang fight!  Eddie, remembering his own tough past in Philadelphia, arranges for the gang members to become a part of W.A.T.A.R., a lifeguard-run program for troubled youths. This the second episode of Baywatch’s second season to feature a gang subplot.  It’s hard not to notice that whenever anyone who isn’t white shows up on this show, they’re always portrayed as being 1) poor and 2) affiliated with a gang.

Eddie hopes that he can convince gang leader Memo (Richard Coca) to change his ways.  Unfortunately, Memo’s father (Danny Trejo) wants his son to follow in his footsteps as a gang member.

When told that Memo is facing jail, his father says that’s no big deal and adds, “I did time!”

“So did I,” Eddie replies.

Eddie — do you really want to challenge Danny Trejo on the subject of prison?

On the one hand, it’s always good to see Danny Trejo and there’s a definite authenticity to his performance that the rest of this episode lacks.  At the same time, having Trejo around makes it all the more clear just how miscast Billy Warlock was a former juvenile delinquent-turned-lifeguard.  Watching this episode, I could buy Billy Warlock as someone who could save me if I was drowning.  (Thanks, Billy!)  But seeing him a graduate of the hard streets of Philadelphia?  That was a step too far.

As for the rest of this episode, Cort is far less of a rogue in this episode and he even helps out with the W.A.T.A.R. program.  (If anything John Allen Nelson seems to get all the lines that would usually have gone to David Hasselhoff, who is barely in this episode.)  When Eddie catches Memo trying to steal from the locker room, there’s a chase scene that goes on for so long that I was literally wondering if Eddie and Memo were eventually going to end up back at Baywatch Headquarters.  I’m all for a good action scene but this chase went on for so long that it verged on parody and left me wondering if maybe the show’s director realized, at the last minute, that the episode needed padding.

Unfortunately, Danny Trejo and David Hasselhoff don’t share any scenes in this episode.  As mentioned earlier, the Hoff is barely in it!  That seems like a missed opportunity to me.