Gilligan's Island

Gilligan's Island (1964)

3 plot holes in show generally - chronological order

(15 votes)

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Plot hole: Many episodes show either visitors on the island swimming away or objects floating away on rafts (a lion, a silent film, etc) that at the end of the episode always make it safely to civilization (as heard on the radio)... yet, none of the castaways ever could swim or leave on a raft to attempt to get off the island and get rescued in the same way.

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Plot hole: On many different occasions, the castaways meet a wide variety of people who say that they have been on the island for either ten or more years thinking they were the only ones on the island before the SS Minnow even arrived. With so many people who had been on the island for such an extended time, it seems kind of strange that none of them had ever met one another.

Show generally

Plot hole: How could it be that every time someone or something was visiting the island during many episodes, they always made it back to civilization by the ending scene (as heard on the radio)? I can understand an actual person, but once anything else (such as a lion, a movie reel on a raft, etc.) leaves the island, it arrives perfectly by just simply slowly floating on the water with no human to guide them. Maybe the one exception could be the robot (programmed by the Professor).

The Sound of Quacking - S1-E8

Visible crew/equipment: During the dream sequence, when Gilligan starts a showdown with Mr. Howell and the Professor, someone's face appears in the window in the background for a second, and it's none of the castaways - someone in the filming crew most likely.

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Eunice Wentworth "Lovey" Howell: Anyone who says money can't buy happiness doesn't know where to shop.

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Erika Tiffany Smith to the Rescue - S2-E15

Question: I'm very confused about the ending. During an interview, the interviewer says that the Navy are unable to find the castaways because Erika's log book is written in English translated from Hungarian. If her log book was translated from Hungarian to English, then how could the Navy be unable to use it to find the island and rescue everybody? She left out latitude and longitude but, there must have been something in the log book to give an idea of where the island was.

Answer: Hungarian-to-English translation aside, Erika's log-book entries were utterly meaningless. When the radio interviewer expresses confusion, Erika even reads entries from the log: "You take a left at a big, beautiful, pink tropical flower, then pull over and park," and "After the storm, we backed up and made a U-turn," etc. Her directions were scatterbrained, to put it nicely. Additionally, Erika's yacht was forced to leave the island during a tropical storm, and they lost their bearings for several days before the Navy found them. Given that Erika was such a scatterbrain, we might also assume that she didn't hire the most competent yacht crew, either.

Charles Austin Miller

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