Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip…
As all properly educated science fiction fans know, Russell Johnson, a.k.a., “The Professor,” is the only actor who appears in both the 1955 Universal Pictures science fiction classic, This Island Earth—
and on Gilligan’s Island.
Not only that, but in both roles, he played essentially the same character. Which of course led me to begin to wonder: what if he wasn’t acting?
What if it was all true?
What if both stories are true and connected?
I’ve long felt that the true story of Gilligan’s Island was that Mr. Howell was, yes, indeed a millionaire, but also a criminal mastermind, who only feigned idiocy to allay suspicions and who had deliberately engineered the shipwreck in order to fake his own death and hide out from the law until the statute of limitations expired. In that case Ginger was obviously his mistress, The Professor his willing henchman, The Skipper and Gilligan just hapless dupes, and Mary Ann yet another poor girl from the Midwest who’d gone to Hawaii to have fun and disappeared without a trace, as happens all too often. The one I never quite figured out was Mrs. Howell. Why did Mr. Howell keep her alive, when it would have been so easy for him to have arranged for her to drown in the shipwreck? What power did that daft old biddy have over him?
Never mind that now. The connection to This Island Earth suddenly opened up a whole new line of thought for me. The Professor appeared to have been killed while escaping from the Metalunans in This Island Earth. But…
What if he’d survived?
What if he was still alive and in hiding 10 years later?
What if the Metalunans weren’t all defeated and destroyed?
Is that really The Professor? We know the Metalunans had an advanced biological super-science that enabled them to create useful clones and mutants to order.
(Though apparently not to pronounce the word “mutant” in a way that makes sense to any native speaker of English.)
What if they had used their super-science to resurrect The Professor or replace him with a sinister alien duplicate?
What if Gilligan’s Island is actually the story of... ?
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Me being me, the idea quickly began to seem both hilarious and fascinating. What is the story that fills in the blank? Why, what a great idea for a Friday Challenge! Better yet, what a great idea for the first-ever combined Friday Challenge and Pete Wood Challenge!
I immediately broached the idea to Pete Wood. To say his response was cool is an understatement. Personally, he was far more interested in the question of how Khan managed to escape from the detonation of the Genesis torpedo on board the Reliant and travel back through time to end up owning Fantasy Island. The more I discussed the idea with other people…
The clearer it became to me that yes, this might be an amusing concept, but the actual execution of it would be a hell of a lot of work. And it’s not as if I have a shortage of things demanding my time and attention these days.
In the end, then, I decided that we’ll just have to leave those poor seven stranded castaways trapped on their lonely island, without a single luxury, like Robinson Caruso, as primitive as can be, acting out their meaningless absurdist microcosmic dramas and all the while blithely unaware of the horrors the Metalunans are wreaking on humanity as they conquer the rest of the world.
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P.S. Be sure to come back on Sunday, when SHOWCASE presents, “Castaways,” by Pete Wood!
8 comments:
There are many unanswered questions. Like, why did Spock travel back to the 1970s and help the body snatchers take over California? But, you dodged my Khan question so I guess that will remain unanswered as well.
By the way, we also know the Professor had developed a time machine. Don't believe me? He used it in the Twilight Zone. Twice.
Why did Spock help the body snatchers? That's obvious: professional courtesy. Vulcans, body snatchers, they're probably related on his paternal grandmother's side. How did you think the Vulcan mind-meld worked? The same way the body snatchers absorb their victim's minds, only with a lighter touch.
Back to the island: the Professor was clearly hiding something from his boss. His time machine would have allowed Mr. Howell to slip past the statute of limitations and stay younger, so clearly the millionaire didn't know about that option. Was the professor using all those dollars to finance a scheme while the Howells were "lost" and their money in some kind of trust? The real professor would be back on the mainland, while his clone kept the castaways entertained.
I really think this is a scheme of Mrs. Howell. She could plot this with the professor, send their clones to be "lost", and she would inherit and be able to use her new wealth to fund his research and her own luxury. What better revenge on her cheating husband and his mistress?
The Professor escapes the Metalunans at some point, and hides in a trailer park. After getting married to cover his tracks, his life spirals into a vicious cycle of alcohol and beating his step son. That is, until the Metalunans use the local children to find him. (The Space Children, 1958).
So, if we consider a time-machine free sequence, the Professor escaped the children and ended up on the desert island. That would be a better hiding place: no children, really hard to find (apparently, since they were there for years), and these rich folks and a movie star to distract attention away from him.
It seems that he tried to come back, but ended up fleeing back to the island in the 1970s. Were the aliens still after him? He met ALF in 1987, and another alien, Meego, ran into him in 1997.
Was he an innocent, fleeing a gang of alien stalkers, or was he bringing all this down upon himself somehow? Why do they have to check in on him every 10 years?
It's possible that the Metalunans spotted the Professor boarding the Minnow and tried to kill him once more. They could have used their Barotron ray to create a low pressure system around the craft, conjuring up a tropical storm. Once they had him trapped on the isle, it was no problem to keep an eye on him. Just send an occasional alien to check up and make sure he keeps finding his way back there whenever his dangerous mind plots an escape to the main land. The fact that the Howells were somehow involved... I suspect it's too much to be a coincidence.
I imagine Leonard Nimoy got a decent paycheck for playing spock as well as in the Body Snatchers?
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