User Reviews

I am really torn about this one. When I saw Carol Lynley's name I knew it was going to be another snooze-fest. The woman always made terrible acting choices, like standing there and looking like an unbothered lump when the bad guy hurts someone she cares about (and this happens here, all over again), much like with Stephanie Powers in Hart to Hart. I get that it's in the script...but do something! If only with your eyes, your rhythm, your body language. But nope.

Lynley had always these stupid airs about her, this stupid agape mouth expression that made for terrible acting. I finally placed it here: her rhythms were all off. When she should have been aghast, outraged, she always acted "stunned" and "frozen in place" with no emotions, as if scared by imaginary bombs going off all around her. (It never fails: she did this in every single TV show she guest-starred in! Watch for that, the next time you see her, and you'll see what I mean!) Ok, so I really can't stand her, because of her poor acting choices and brash personality, which totally mired her obvious beauty.

The guy I thought was Peter Lawford. Turns out, there was a clone for him, complete with the bushy eyebrows, dark stare and the turtlenecks! I must correct the person who said that this was a goof because they speak Spanish here but Guadeloupe is a French island! True that, but, as Mr. Roarke pronounced it in the intro, they were recreating Guadalupe island, off the coast of Baja California. (Didn't that guy see all the Mexican flags in the plaza!?) I didn't know it existed myself either, but thankfully I have fingers, so I Googled it right off the bat!

The other story didn't fare much better. I'm more than half-way through the story, and I'm wondering: did they make this one on purpose to cause people to feel bad? Did they really think depressing their audiences by shaming the lead characters was worth watching? Did some 70s pervert type this out to titillate men with a humiliation fetish?! Whatever it be, this story went from bad to worse when the idiot children of one of the Vaudeville men arrived.

And I mean: HOW many times did they serve us this flop of a storyline? I have lost count of how many idiot Vaudeville fantasies they penned and made us sit through! Really, Aaron Spelling-Leonard Goldberg? You couldn't take a hint, or get it off your systems, the first time you made such a terrible, terrible episode? You had to rehash this again & again?! (I think this is the 3rd Vaudeville fantasy by old folks that I've seen so far! And believe you me: I have always loved old folks and stories about them, ever since a little kid. So this isn't ageism on my part!) Thankfully for me, they didn't use the pitiful "Fantasy Island Theater" this time; they did this act at the Tiki bar & grill.

Highlights of the show: Carol Lynley looking absolutely gorgeous in a dusty-orange column dress complete with matching belt buckle: it featured a black butterfly in an orange background, encased in lucite. (I hope they allowed her to keep this dress for her personal wardrobe!) Tattoo in a slate blue chauffeur's costume, albeit all disheveled.

I must say that I got so engrossed in being disappointed by this episode, that both stories denouements were completely unexpected for me. They should have been predictable, but it wasn't the Peter Lawford look-alike's fantasy (that we knew of) so I figured that was that, for him! And I felt really sorry for the man with the dumb adult children, who evidently were both raging at losing $20,000 off of their inheritance! (The fantasies prices here are dropped again: it was $50K in the pilot episode!)

All in all, both endings elevate these 2 corny stories quite a bit. (If only they'd have provided David Birney's character with the same courtesy!) But because of stories like his, I didn't expect much by the end. It is worth watching for the endings only. (But you must be dragged through the lengthy boredom and humiliation of the full 45-some minutes before finding redemption, for it to really lift your spirits up!) Because of that, this episode, for me, is hard to rate, maybe a 6 or a 7 out of 10 stars; and not sure how I feel about it: glad I watched it for the ending rewards, but pity that they couldn't have properly entertained us during the entire show! But yes: damn if I didn't completely love both endings! The Tattoo-Roarke banter, I didn't find amusing, this time. Your mileage may vary.

You probably won't recall much of this episode if you saw it years ago, as nothing of consequence really happens, although it's certainly not all bad. In a rare occurrence, both endings were much better that the stories themselves, but I still wouldn't recommend either of them. There's the typical boring "stars" such as Phil Silvers, Carol Lynley, Stuart Whitman, and John Fiedler, and one story has 2 men trying to recapture the magic of a vaudeville act, and the other has a boring woman trying once again to hook up with a boring man, who turns out to be a spy. How riveting! Lynley and Whitman have about as much chemistry as milk and gasoline; Silvers and Phil Harris were better together, even though they bombed on their act. I don't have the energy to type much more about this mediocre episode, but both endings make it slightly watchable, as I said above.