Baywatch - Season 02, Episode 22 - Summer of '85

Another Baywatch review just a day later, it's quite unlike me. Yesterday when I was looking up Shauni's father name, I accidentally saw that my concerns were unfounded, she is in fact in season 3. This means I'm sure Eddie is as well. I'd better not spend too much time writing this one, I spent way too much time on here yesterday.

I'm adding this later, I did, in fact, spend hours on it again.

 Thoughts on the Title

With a title like 'Summer of '85' I thought it was going to be a flashback episode, how would that work though? Perhaps it would be focused around Ben, there's been an episode or two before with Ben flashbacks but they were only 'B' or 'C' plots. Ben is barely in the show though so I knew it was unlikely, he's never the focus. I'm glad though because who cares about Ben? I don't really know why he's even in the show and from accidentally seeing some pictures of season 3, he's still in it. To be fair, the reason why I don't care about him is most likely just because he doesn't get much screen time. He'd be more interesting if they'd built up the character. Evidently I don't think Ben shows up once in this episode.

Synopsis

Shauni and Eddie go to see a fortune teller who informs them that Eddie is going to meet his first true love, much to both of their dismay. Eddie is bothered by this but he doesn't believe in fortune telling anyway. Shauni is put out by the prediction and is jealous when Eddie seems interested in some other woman, however this turns into concern for Eddie's safely when she returns to the fortune teller to find out more. She then goes on to investigate and warn Eddie.

Thoughts on Summer of '85

Here we have the final episode of season 2 and it doesn't feel like a finale at all. I thought they were going to go for an action packed disaster type thing like they did at the end of season 1, oh boy, that feels like it was long ago now. Not only is this a rare one plot only shindig but it's also the second Eddie and Shauni one in a row, I think this is the first time it's happened, ever. Eddie gets more time in the lime light than in 'Game of Chance' though, so that part is reversed.

My guess is that Summer of '85 isn't a popular episode but I quite liked it, however my favourite characters are Eddie and Shauni so of course I'm going to like it. However they'd have a run for their money if Craig Pomeroy was still on the show. I realised that the episode was pretty good when I paused to check my phone, only to find that there was only ten minutes left. Unlike yesterday. I'm going to make some bullet points;

- They do something sort of clever - The fortune teller tells us that Eddie is going to meet his first true love, which leads us to believe that he doesn't love Shauni and that they'll split up. They also seem to believe this. The thing is, Eddie then does meet his first true love, that being Rosalind from seven years ago. You get it? Eddie's first true love was in the past, she was only the first.

- Eddie kisses Rosalind on the lips, it's just a peck but I feel like this doesn't fit with Eddie's character being devoted to Shauni. I don't think the writers intended it to be cheating but it did come off as that.

- At the end, Eddie says to Rosalind "The only thing I kept from that summer was my baseball". This is most likely a sly way of telling us that he lost his virginity to her. It's very subtle and not like Baywatch at all, my guess is that they sneaked it in. Oh yes did I forget to mention that? They sleep together and Rosalind is an older woman. This fact is handled very well and very maturely, better than TV shows would handle it today.

- Some of the acting in this episode is a bit dodgy, especially the guy playing as young Eddie. Rosalind also is a bit bad. You might be thinking that all Baywatch acting is bad but it's usually just fine.

- Speaking of "young Eddie", that actor didn't look much like Eddie, he actually looked a little taller.

- Mitch doesn't appear at all, this is unusual. His son doesn't either but that's not as uncommon.

- This may devalue this episode by pointing it out but... it's a bit like 'If Looks Could Kill' from earlier on in the season. However it involves different characters and the Femme fatale turns out to be innocent. Also in that old one we knew the Femme fatale was a murderer from the start.

Not Really About This Episode, More About Harvey and the End of His Run

- For some reason Harvey goes to the fortune teller with Shauni later on, the fortune teller randomly tells him that 2 is an unlucky number for him. I thought this was going to lead to Harvey's death, since this is the last time he's in the show. But no, he slips and breaks two ribs in the small action sequence at the end, he's perfectly fine, of course. This means I'm sure they'll drop some random line in season 3 explaining why Harvey left, it'll just be something like "He got a better job somewhere else". Harvey is barely in this episode so the breaking his ribs thing seemed totally pointless.

- Speaking of Harvey, the episode starts with him watching some sexy woman on the beach. His proclivity for women was a trait that only came up a few times in his run even though I felt that they originally wanted to lean into it more. I remember the only time I thought Harvey was going to be interesting was early on, where they painted him as being unable to get a girlfriend. He was flirty but no one was ever interested. He seemed kind of sad and lonely, but this was only a small part of a single episode and they never went back to it. R.I.P Harvey, I'll miss you... kinda. The season 1 characters we lost were a bigger hit to me.

And that's the end of my review! Wow.

Baywatch - Season 02, Episode 21 - Game of Chance

Firstly, Some Random Thoughts on Baywatch

- The Baywatch.fandom.com site is often disappointing with how little it has on it, also the episodes section is in alphabetical order, not number order, which is silly. All of this is further evidence of how very few care about this show, which is understandable. I'm just weird.

Game of Chance

What is this, an actual review?! Shocking! I'm going to do it, finally.

Game of Chance is the twenty first episode of season 2, so one away from the end of the season. I was a little more lax with avoiding spoilers back when I started watching Baywatch a month or two ago, so I did see that at least two of main characters, namely Eddie and Shauni, leave around this time. I read that they leave in season 3 but I can't remember if they meant at the end of season 3 or at the beginning. So there is a chance that after 'Game of Chance', I only get to see my favourite characters one more time. I'm pretty sure they are also in season 3, though. That fact still irks me though, I'm not sure if I'll still enjoy the show afterwards. Not just because of their departure but because it'll mean almost all season 1's cast will be gone by then. Anyway, let's talk about the actual episode.

The Review

We start with the 'B' plot which focuses on Mitch and Harvey teaming up, a rare thing in the show and possibly the only time it happened. It's almost definitely the last, since Harvey leaves the show in the next episode. I've mostly avoided looking up spoilers for this show but after Harvey barely showed up in his debut season, I looked it up. Since I guessed he wouldn't be in it for long and decided I wouldn't feel sad seeing him go. Now don't get me wrong, I don't dislike him, he's just middle of the road. Harvey is a one note character - He's the comic relief guy.

Mitch comes to get Harvey off a boat where he's gambling lots of money on a card game, why, you may ask. Harvey was half an hour late for his shift, you see. Harvey convinces Mitch to let him finish his last game since he's going to win big, he does but some dude in a hockey mask and a shotgun turns up and robs them all. Harvey later references Jason from the Friday the 13th movies when describing the criminal.

Mitch and Harvey investigate the crime for rest of their story, it's pretty good but it's a short and simple one. I think most episodes start off with the 'A' plot but this turns out to be the shorter 'B' plot for Game of Chance, despite it being what the title is referring to. It ends with a pretty good chase sequence which features a car boat hybrid, I feel like this story almost focuses around this vehicle because of how cool it is. Which I'm alright with. This plot ends the episode with a reference to Knight Rider which I was pleasantly surprised with. In case you don't know, Mitch is played by the actor who starred in Knight Rider, another very popular, very old show.

In classic Ben fashion, he is in one scene for a few seconds and that's it. Harvey's problems with money was a trait of his that was brought up early in the season and then rarely mentioned again.

The 'A' plot is all about Shauni and Eddie even though it's not as action orientated as the other one. Basically it's about Shauni's father, Robert McClain, not accepting Eddie, he wants his daughter to be with a man who's got a better job. By the end of it, Eddie, of course, rescues Shauni's sister from drowning. The ever terrifying, most dangerous villain in Baywatch is water, by the way. This is one of the swimming pool episodes, so keeping away the beach won't help.

It's surprising that Robert felt this way, since there was an earlier episode where he felt the same way about Shauni, he wanted her to get a job he felt was better than life guarding. In fact I think that was the first episode he was in. Shauni rescues someone in that older episode and Robert see's that being a life guard is important because... ya know, you save lives. Come to think of it, the premises of these episodes are very similar, they are executed differently though, in their defence. There is one difference though - Robert still doesn't like Eddie at the end, which was odd. Because of this, Shauni moves out to go live with Eddie. Perhaps episode orders were moved around a bit because there's at least one earlier episode where Shauni says she's already living with Eddie.

Almost all of this plot takes place at Shauni's parents fancy house, other parts aren't important to the story and I think they're all montages. I like them but it's been a while since I've seen montages in Baywatch that pretty much have nothing to do with the story. They could be taken out and you'd still understand what's going on, this plot would probably be the same length as the 'B' one if they were deleted. I'm just pointing that out, I'm not saying that they should have been.

The most random, completely unattached montage is Shauni riding a horse on the beach, sometimes shes even laying backwards on it. The other montage is Shauni and her sister shopping for clothes, Shauni even looks at the camera one time which I don't think I've seen since a fantasy scene way back in season 1. These parts of the episodes are great, Shauni probably gets the most screen time so I'd say this is essentially a Shauni episode. A rarity. I guess these montages could be filler but at the time, the creators of this show probably were always looking for excuses to shoot Erika Eleniak looking gorgeous. Every time I see montages though, I wonder what the original music for them was. I'm watching the remasters which changed some of the music.

Overall this was a good episode, not the best but pretty good, having it focus on Eddie and Shauni is a plus for me. There's been quite a few good episodes in a row here.

Catch up and Baywatch

Intro

I plan on not spending too much time on this post but I'll probably end up writing loads, as usual. I also haven't thought this through at all, so it might be even more random than usual. I also would like to start writing on here more often, so not taking too much time on this entry would be a good idea. What I mean is that I should pass myself.

I probably say something like this in almost every entry - Wow, it's been seven months since my past post already?! That's crazy. I'd like to read over the last post at some point, I did skim the titles, looks like I mention Dead by Daylight. I've still been playing it but for the last month or so, not so much. I kinda feel like it would be good if I almost completely stop playing it and, like I think I mentioned in my last post, start playing other games instead. Namely retro comes. I see I mentioned Road Rash 2 last time, I'd forgotten about that. Some months ago I did play some Gremlins 2 on the NES but not loads, relatively speaking. It was the beginning of my plans to re-visit the first games I remember playing, these plans have been a failure so far. So the record, since I've re-forgotten this in the past, the other game I wanted to re-visit is Cloud Kingdoms on the Atari ST. This time around it took quite some time to figure out what this game was called. I also found out that it was definitely the Atari ST version that I played and that my memory of having another games console / computer before the Atari ST might be incorrect. It might be a false memory. There's a vague memory of playing a game on cassette that looked a bit like Space Invaders (though more sophisticated) but perhaps it was on a different platform, such as Atari ST or PC. I still haven't figure out what game that was and I did a lot of digging online trying to find out what cassette based platform I had. There's not that many and I watched videos of many games on them, none of them rang a bell at all. The closest I got was the Amstrad CPC but I watched a lot of game footage and none of it looked familiar, I even played it a tiny bit via my DE10-Nano (MiSTer Porject).

Writing about why I might write about Baywatch

Anyway, I could say far more about all the other stuff I've been doing or thinking about but that's not what I came here for. I came here mostly to write about Baywatch, to perhaps start a journey of regularly writing about Baywatch... this is very unlikely to happen, haha. My mission to review episodes of Buffy and Angel (or was it just Angel?) some years ago didn't last month and that show was shorter and better than Baywatch... I feel bad for saying 'better' because I love Baywatch at the moment, which I will explain later here or in a post another day.

So... Baywatch... I'd like to do a far longer introductions to Baywatch and a summary of the show but I'll try to keep this one short and do the proper one another day. This is because I think it's best I use this time today to start reviewing episodes, namely the episode that's freshest in my mind. Unfortunately I'm starting at the tail end of season 2, perhaps I'll go back and re-watch the older ones so I can review them. This is unlikely though since this show has eleven seasons, I think, not including small spin-offs. Also, if I do write more reviews, I might delete them from here in the future and move them to a place where more people will see them. Umm... no one will see them here and to be honest who cares about Baywatch anyway? Even moving the reviews will make little difference, I don't think they'd get many views even on somewhere like IMDB. Side note - I tried to find Baywatch reviews, they are all terrible or really short or don't exist. So at the moment, I'm just writing about Baywatch for myself... for some reason.

Mini Introduction to Baywatch

I never watched Baywatch in the 90's, I never even accidentally watched a bit of an episode, as far as I can remember. My personality hasn't changed all that much but my mindset was certainly in a very different place back then, I'm not surprised I didn't give the show a second thought. I was probably thinking more about video games and I was perhaps a little too young - I was watching mostly cartoons, films and anime. I didn't even have the hots for Pamela Anderson, I don't remember even thinking about it. Baywatch was something I'd heard about in the background chitter chatter of my life, I heard someone called Pamela Anderson was in it and I quickly ignored it and probably went back to playing Resident Evil. Or went to some arcades. Or most likely continued to develop emotional scaring from bullies and school that crafted my current personality. Maybe some other day I will tell you why I started watching, or maybe not. It's not important or interesting.

Is Baywatch Bad?

Apart from the fact that Baywatch ran for ages and was apparently massively popular, the show is considered trash, even back then, I think. The older I get, the more I realise how subjective everything is. If someone who has never watched TV before was given Baywatch, they would probably love it, in a similar way, I've never watched a show like this before so it is fresh to me. I'm usually into horror, sci-fi, comedy, Japanese anime kinda stuff and surreal things. Baywatch is usually none of these. Also Baywatch is old, like, really old. I'm on season 2 which aired in 1992 and the show finished in 2001 which is twenty two years ago! I was probably working in CeX back then! That may not mean anything to you but that was a big part of my life, it also feels like a life time ago.

The closer I get to the grave, the more I appreciate things, well, least, that's what I've been trying to do. I have been succeeding with this even though it's probably not possible with everything. However it is possible with entertainment since it's just for fun, right? I watch Baywatch and I can see that once upon a time, a lot of people worked hard on this show. Also like I mentioned earlier, it's old, shows like this aren't made anymore... OK, I don't watch that much TV and there's A LOT out there so I don't know that for sure, but one things for sure - Baywatch is set in the 90's and it was made in the 90's, that's not possible anymore, that gives it a unique flavour. Sometimes movies and TV shows are set in the past but no matter how hard they try, they aren't going to be like the real thing.

Is Baywatch sometimes cheesy? Yes. Is it lazy? Yes but rarely (I'll talk about that more another time). It's also quite easy watching though, I consume it when I get up while I consume my breakfast. It's not easy going though, one of the first things I was surprised by was how dramatic it is, people are hurt, people sometimes die and there's sometimes criminals involved. All things I didn't expect, I thought the show was just going to be about beautiful people on the beach. To be fair I hadn't thought about it much before starting the show, of course it's going to have tension and drama. It's still easy watching though since it's a 90's day time TV show, even when serious topics are addressed, they are done in a pretty soft way... for the most part.

All of the above was written two days ago but I didn't post it because for some reason I thought I'd come back to it and write some more. Namely a review of a Baywatch episode and perhaps edit all of this a bit. How silly of me to think this, I should have just made it live (Blogger has a draft option, basically it just automatically saves everything for you before you post it). I'll write the review another day... probably. Although I have already watched one or two more episodes since then.

Destructoid

One last thing before I go - I noticed I mentioned my Destructoid blog in my last post, unsurprisingly I haven't written a second "article" on there since and there's a good chance I never will. It was completely ignored which I'm not surprised by but still, it made me lose interest fast. Also yeah I knoe it was just one post and it was badly written, just like everything else I do. Roughly 5 months later and there was a sudden short fad on Youtube with FGC Youtubers posting their reviews of Street Fighter 6 music, so I was way ahead of curve. Usually they leaned into the idea that the music is bad, so just like me. They have titles like 'Is SF6 Music Really Bad?". Of course they get hundreds of thousands of views and comments while I get zero. Most of them are actually even lower effort than my post, barely saying anything more than "This one is boring" and "Oh this one is kinda fun". It shows that yes, you probably have to put in the time and effort to get popular at first but when you're at the top, you can post any old crap. Minimal effort but you will get attention and then everyone thinks you're smart or entertaining just because you see they're getting attention from thousands, sometimes millions of others.

Wow I sound bitter! I'm not actually that bothered about this and t happened a while ago, typing it all out just makes it sound like I'm more jealous than I really am. Then again typing it out may have revealed my inner feelings for it to myself. Really at the end of the day, it's just that I'm tired of not being good at anything and / or not succeeding at anything. So tired. The idea right now is to give up on it all, I've never left the starting line anyway so I'd probably be happier if I just gave up.