Baywatch - S04E20 and S04E21

S04E20 - The Life You Save

These two are going to be short reviews since we've got a couple of stinkers here, especially this one. I sure did choose a bad time to start writing about Baywatch, the episodes I didn't write about were actually good and sometimes pretty great.

'The Life You Save' is a clip show; an episode that consists of excerpts from previous episodes, which Baywatch has done once before, so far. In its defence, only half of the running time is excerpts, at most. However show this is played out is odd to me, our lifeguards are faced with budget cuts so they have to prove to the government officials that their job is important. "We save lives ya know!" is basically the entire story. Outside of the excerpts from previous episodes, Mitch and the gang spend almost the entire time pitching their importance, which comes across like weird, like they're at a board meeting with a script. I mean, they do have a script and I don't mean because this is a TV show.

Also I thought clip shows were a way to save money, maybe I'm wrong because the episode does start with a newly shot rescue. Plus they bring back some old 'one off' characters who book end the excerpts, which I assume costs money and time. It's kind of interesting to think that these are probably the only actors who wanted to come back, some of them say barely anything by the way. They are just there to say how awesome the lifeguards are for saving their lives. There's even a clip in-which you see Eddie, you even here him speak! You don't see any other ex-Baywatch people though, only the ones that are in the show now. I wonder if they had to ask permission.

It sort of felt like they were promoting the show itself, but I doubt Baywatch was struggling with money at the time. The episode ends with them not getting budget cuts, in fact I think they get even more money than before, which was a bit dumb.

S04E21 - Trading Places

At least this one isn't a clip show but it isn't much more entertaining. I'm really quite tired of crime based episodes even though I must say, they don't seem to do them much anymore. Remember that one when that Japanese dude hated Mitch? They seemed pretty fun back then. I mean, that dude was the guy from the original Mortal Kombat movie to be fair, so he was awesome.

I can't be bothered to say much about 'Trading Places', especially the story, so I'll just say some random things that come to mind:

- The actor who is the criminal was in a previous episode, I'm pretty sure he's supposed to be a different person but he acts just the same. They should have just made him the same dude, why not?

- I am labelling this as the 'Stephanie Empresses Herself' episode. She makes seal noises for way too long as a joke and her Vietnam flashbacks are hilarious. They have generic army music and look like they're from that Cannon Fodder video game. I've rarely laughed so much at a Baywatch episode because it looks like they're going to reveal that Stephanie was in a war and now has P.T.S.D. over helicopters. Imagine if they just dropped that into her back story this late into the show. Luckily it's not that silly, it turns out her father died in a crash, so now I feel like a dick for laughing earlier, haha. She wasn't actually there but I guess you can have P.T.S.D. over anything, I mean, I have it over less serious things. P.T.S.D. has a scale, too, some people will be so traumatised that they'll freeze up, like Stephanie does on the helicopter.

I know the pay off at the end is that she over-comes her fear because she has to rescue Matt, but her training with the Coast Guard clearly didn't help. There's literally a scene where she's learning to fight and she flings someone over who is behind her. But then when the criminal grabs her from behind later on, she shakes herself around like shes trapped in a vice and then gives up. Yes they have guns but at that moment, you can tell shes trying to fight one of them off. In fact Matt is the one who puts up more of a fight, before he is unrealistically beaten and thrown off the boat by a older, less fit looking guy. We've seen Matt fight for longer and take more of a beating than this in previous episodes.

Speaking of Matt... a nit-pick - He is left in the water to die in a net. Steph comes to save him, she takes the net off him easily, I think Matt could have done that earlier himself. Also the idea of being tied up in a net in the sea is terrifying, but it also had floater things on it, so was having the net actually a life-saver?

Steph gets together with the Coast Guard guy at the end, which is a bit surprising since bit-parts like this don't normally carry over to more episodes in Baywatch. I'll be surprised if he vanishes because the show doesn't do that anymore, not with romantic partners. It did at first though - In earlier seasons, Mitch would often seemingly start a relationship which doesn't end at the end of the episode, but then we'd usually never see them again.

Anyway, why am I writing so much about this boring episode. Oh, one last thing - Not much actually happens in Trading Places, there's no 'B' story even though there should have been. There's scenes that linger for way too long, which makes me think they needed to pad it out. There's so many shots of boats and helicopters just moving about.

Anyway bye.