Baywatch - S04E01 - Race Against Time: Part 1 Review

Even though there were things I wanted to say about the rest of season 3, I don't have the energy or time to do so, so I'm going to skip forward to season 4.

Race Against Time: Part 1 Review

The final episode of season 3 was a pretty normal, single part story but season 4 starts off with a two parter. The title doesn't make sense until the end, though I did realise what was going to happen a few minutes before it did.

The 'A' Story

Gayle Buchannon returns to the show for the first time in ages. She's here to visit Mitch and Hobie but doesn't tell them that shes bring along her fiancee, who no one knew existed. This makes her look like a horrible person but to be fair, it's only done because it's a cliche TV show writing thing to do. If Mitch new she had a boyfriend, off camera or from a phone call, and knew that the boyfriend was coming to visit too, then the show couldn't have his and Hobie's shocked reaction at their front door. Mitch also goes through the emotions of sadness, jealously and anger throughout the episode, which would have seen out of place if he already knew about Gayle's fiancee. I mean, they could have still done it, but he wouldn't have been caught off guard and why would he have agreed to let the bloke come over in the first place.

Matt and the 'B' Story

Matt's dad wants to move back to Europe and take Matt with him. I like the Matt Brody character but this story, which gets little screen time in this episode, is such old ground for Baywatch, I kind of can't believe they're doing it. It's only the start of season 4 and they've already done this so many times, the one that sticks out to me though is the Shauni one, of course. Shauni is a character who isn't in the show anymore, she had a rich dad who didn't think her job as a life guard was important and didn't like how little it payed. In fact they did this story for Shauni twice, which made no sense since her dad Shauni save someones life which made him understand the importance of her job. They did that in the first story so it was dumb how he seemed to forget all that in a later episode. I guess some people don't change, or that it's closer to reality, but it was more likely lazy writing.

The scene where Matt argues with his dad also looks exactly like the old one where Shauni talks to her dad, it looks like they're in the same location. They even did a similar story concerning Mitch and his dad. Mitch's dad learns the error of his ways when he witnesses Mitch save someone, if they do that yet again with Matt, I'm going to lose my mind. Ok, ok, I sound like I'm more bothered about all of this than I actually am. At least Matt's actor shows some convincing stress in his scenes. However there is a montage later where he blows off steam by riding his bike. It's fine but the director must have told him to really sell that he's de-stressing, because Matt keeps fist pumping and looking overly happy while riding, it's kinda silly.

Also Matt's dad is played by a different actor which is a shame because the original one was good and seemed to have an interesting personality. This new one seems more generic, however he is older looking which come to think of it, Matt's original dad did seem a bit too young.

The 'C' Story

The 'B' and 'C' stories may get equal screen time, to be fair, so the 'C' story may just be a second 'B' one. Summers mum, Jackie Quinn, wants to move back to where they came from because she can't find a job, Summer would go with her but she doesn't want to, of course. Jackie doesn't want her daughter to be unhappy so she spends all of her savings to open a restaurant, it needs to be refurbished first though.

A little nitpick - The restaurant that Jackie gets, it's first mentioned by Summer. Her mum wants to go get food there and Summer tells her that it closed down, they both say that it's a shame because the it was the best food around. This makes it sound like it recently shut down, but when Jackie goes to take a look, it looks like it's been closed for decades. It's boarded up with ancient looking wood and the windows are thick with dirt, Jackie has to wipe it away to look inside.

Jackie Quinn

Having Jackie pop up in this episode make me realise how long it's been since we've seen her, that's a shame because she's a good character and a good actor. Her and Summers chemistry is great, too.

Summer Quinn

I don't know why I'm sometimes including their full names in these titles, and sometimes not. I haven't got much to say about Summer for this one, she's not in it much. Summer is a character who I thought was going to be in the show a lot from her introduction at the start of season 3, but she really isn't. I also recently saw a picture which looked like it was from season 4 - Matt, who was brought into the show at the same time as Summer, was there but Summer wasn't. By the way it was totally by accident that I saw that, I was watching a Youtube video which had nothing to do with Baywatch but a clip of it popped up for a second. The video was about old video games award shows on TV in the USA. They were talking about a TV channel in the early 2000's so they were showing clips from that channel, I think it was called Spike.tv. Come to think of it, the early 2000's? That is way past season 4 of Baywatch, which was 1993, so perhaps I'm wrong the clip being from season 5. Unless Brody stays in the show for super long, but I doubt it.

C.J.

We see C.J. for a few seconds, she wasn't important in this episode. I was surprised how little she was in season 3, perhaps she'll start turning up on season 4 more often.

Kelly Slater (Slade)

I noticed that Slade is still at the end of the opening sequence but he isn't credited and he's not on screen for as long. I'm not surprised, he was a terrible actor so I'm assuming he's either gone for good, or soon to be taken out of the show. I'm sure they won't make any story out of Summer and Slade breaking up, that's not the Baywatch way. However they might have a single, short line explaining that he moved away, they've certainly done that before.

Gayle

I did spoil things a little for myself a while back, when it comes to this character. I did accidentally see online that this character is in the show very little from around season 2 onwards. I think she's almost entirely gone after this two part story until fight at the end of Baywatch's run.

Gayle was briefly portrait as an antagonist way back in the early days of season 1 but we soon learn that she's an alright person and an alright mum. In 'Face Against Time: Part 1' they decided to forgot all of her progression and make her just like she was in early season 1. It doesn't feel right, it feels out of character now. In fact the story is even a regression back to her original main one, which is that she wants Hobie to leave Baywatch and go live with her far away. This all felt repetitive and silly since they already resolved that story ages ago.

Mitch

David Hasselhoff shows some good acting here, the anger and jealously, mostly played up in a slightly committal way, is fun. He's also sad about Gayle which really came through to me in his performance. 

Hobie

Jeremy Jackson playing as Hobie still irks me a little but you can tell that his acting is slowly getting better, apart from the end of the episode, that is. When the plane starts to show signs that it's going to crash, Hobie's fear is unconvincing. On the other hand, it's not as weird as Gayle's and her fiancee's reactions. They sit there looking barely concerned and just odd, I don't mean it looks like their acting direction was to try to 'try to look calm', I mean they look like they have barely any emotions at all. This is going on while Hobie is still on the phone with Mitch, saying how scared he is, while the other two saying nothing at all and just sort of look at him.

Stephanie Holden

She's in it a bit and as usual does some solid acting, but she's not important to this story, so far. For this one she's mostly used as a sounding board for Mitch's and Brody's drama.