Five Unanswered Questions from Gilligan's Island
As someone who loves classic movies and classic television, it shouldn't be a surprise to learn I've seen every episode of Gilligan's Island at least a couple dozen times and the made-for-TV movies based on the series at least a half dozen. While I will stop short of saying I can recite the episodes word-from-word, I can recall most details from those episodes without seeing them.
Anyone who knows the show also knows it was cancelled after just three seasons and less than 100 episodes, forcing it to rely on the movies, which were made more than a decade later, to bring closure. That may or may not be the reason the series/movies left quite a few unanswered questions.
Here are five that have always nagged at me:
Was Ginger (Tina Louise) psychic? I am asking this question based solely on the episode "Ship Ahoax" which features Ginger pretending to be a psychic at the Professor's (Russell Johnson) request to fend off island madness only to have her predictions come true twice, the first when she predicted a rescue effort and the second when she stated when a ship would arrive at the island.
The easy argument would be to say no, she wasn't because it was never brought up again. However, since nobody knew her second prediction was spot-on because she told them she was a fake, there was no reason to explore it in any detail. Perhaps, had her gift been recognized, she would have gotten them off the island a lot sooner.
Why did the military never visit the island in person? The island might have been uncharted, but the United States military clearly knew it was there because they tried to blow it up in "X Marks the Spot." Even if they thought it was unoccupied (and I still find it hard to believe they didn't see the huts when they did their aerial survey), you would think they would have taken an interest in it when their Cold War spies learned the Soviets were taking an interest in later episodes.
Where did the Jungle Boy (Kurt Russell) come from? He obviously had to have parents, and he must have gotten on the island somehow, but his pre-island history is never addressed though it is likely safe to assume he wasn't part of any of the native tribes and had arrived on the island prior to someone teaching him how to speak.
Another curiosity about him - he presumably lived on the island at the same time as Wrongway Feldman (Hans Conried) but they either never met each other, or Feldman just chose not to mention it.
Speaking of Wrongway Feldman, how did he get back to the island? The whole reason the castaways weren't rescued in the first episode featuring him is he made it to New York but, because he was a notoriously bad navigator, hence the name, couldn't give people directions back to the island. Yet, 19 episodes later, in "The Return of Wrongway Feldman," he purposely flies back to the island to escape civilization.
Had he made it back to the island by accident, it would be a different story. The fact that wasn't the case raises some questions about why he purposely didn't send help.
What happened to Eva Grubb (Louise)? There were doppelgangers for three of the characters on the series, Gilligan's (Bob Denver) was a Soviet spy who went back home. Mr. Howell's (Jim Backus) was exposed as an imposter before he arrived on the island and presumably was arrested, went into hiding or drown after swimming away from the island.
And then there was Ginger's duplicate, Eva Grubb, who left the island on her boat intending to take over Ginger's glamorous life when she got back to the United States, only to never be mentioned again.
I think it is reasonably safe to assume her plan didn't work out since there is no mention of her in Rescue from Gilligan's Island and Ginger was still known to be missing at sea. That only deepens the mystery though because if she didn't follow through with her plan, what did she do? Did she even make it back home? I guess we'll never know.
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Here are some similar entries:
Five Television Characters Who Should Have a Prequel Series
Gilligan's Island: Five Times Gilligan Wasn't the One at Fault
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