Anyone anywhere near my age has always wrestled with that nagging, but ever-important question: if Gilligan and the Skipper were really out for a three-hour tour, then why did the Howells pack a suitcase full of thousand-dollar bills, and what the hell was Ginger doing in an evening gown, what was Mary Ann doing there, and while we’re at it, why did the Professor have so many lab and hand tools with him, and why would he have so much skill with a radio? And another thing: why did Mary Ann, Ginger and especially the Howells have extra clothes? The cruise was supposed to last for three hours. Why, even at that length, didn’t anyone check for a marine weather warning? And if Howell was so rich that he could have his own luxury yacht with a professional captain and crew who made the S.S. Minnow, The Skipper and Gilligan look like the reef bait they were, why the S.S.Minnow?
These burning questions have scorched the lines of the Bell phone system since the first episode premiered. After that, letters poured in to the studios, then, finally, came magazine articles, followed decades later by the internet, where new generations could see the message boards, then, in the end, blogs. It all ends in a whopper of a “conspiracy theory” the like of which makes the General Electric/JFK Assassination theory look like a booger.
It seems that Thurston Howell the Third was a high stakes drug kingpin, and his cash was packed to pay for the sale of high quality heroin and coke. All powder, all pure. The Professor was the quality control expert who would use his chemist equipment to test for purity. Howell packed extra wardrobe in case he was chased by the Coast Guard and had to put ashore and lay low for a while. The Professor also monitored the radio for Coast Guard activity.
Ginger was addicted to both coke and H, one for showtime, one for after, and being successful, could trade sex for discounts on the good stuff straight from the Howells, both of whom she was intimate with. Lovee herself indulged in untrammeled sex orgies and coke, and she founded the original party male strippers. She was a secret honorary member of Skull and Bones, and hid the fact from her disapproving husband. The Skipper and Gilligan knew, of course, so they were under the gun because of Howell. Once stranded, Gilligan played the fool, confounding the Skipper and the Castaways because if they were caught he would have a doctor plead insanity.
As to Mary Ann, just exactly who was she, and what was she doing there?
Well, she was a federal undercover agent on the verge of catching the Howells in the act. It was Ginger who first caught the attention of the Feds, being so obvious about her ambitions in theater, and so loose about her drug habit. Instead of a male agent, who would definitely be noticed if he pried, it was given to Mary Ann to get inside of the Howell Connection. It almost worked.
By the time they were rescued, the Feds no longer had a case against Howell, and his cash alone was worth three times its value as Silver notes. The gang got high, but made the mistake of not checking for purity, and tripped out with horrifying consequences. The poor addled Gilligan even met the Harlem Globetrotters in an endless trip.
Now. If you are puzzled, and have unanswered questions about anything, anything at all, I offer you this comforting tidbit: out there, somewhere, there’s someone who has your answers. Most of us jeer at them. We call them conspiracy theories, but consider this before you jump to conclusions: in a tiny New England town, didn’t Miss Jessica find an awful lot of bodies? That’s because she was a serial killer. Same thing goes for one Leroy Jethro Gibbs; too many dead sailors and Marines kept showing up in his area of operations. Females in his orbit died violently or just vanished. In the end, after failing to fake his own death, he fled to parts north and is still at large, leaving Abby to think that it maybe wasn’t a coincidence that two of his ex-wives and a daughter were shot.
It gets worse. Gilligan was a virgin and an InCel for years. Before the Minnow was lost, he was a serial killer and rapist. His father didn’t know this; if someone had told him, he would have choked to death on a macademia nut. Gilligan’s father was known to go by the aliases “Higgins” and “Robin Masters” and he helped Mike Brady rescue his wife Carol from her kidnapper, who was really in the Air Force but washed out as a pilot after a blonde woman in a pink costume folded her arms and blinked, cursing him. He complained to Major Tony Nelson, to no avail. Nelson was insistent that his wife was not some kind of genie. Doctor Bellows, the Air Force psychiatrist, held the kidnapper in isolation for 16 years, driving him to madness. He caught Sam the Butcher cutting up people for his steak sale and blackmailed him to give up the cash to get a car and kidnap Mrs. Brady.
An extraterrestrial from Mars, whom a reporter claimed was his Uncle Martin, wiggled his pointer finger at him once. He swore in court that the alien had antennae, but in the end, Judge Wapner sentenced him to life without parole.
Gilligan had vanished again. After the castaways were rescued, Vince McMahon helped him escape sex crimes against minors charges by having his personal yacht take the son of a bitch back to his island hideout. Later, he would seek the same refuge. But that’s another story.
Memoirs of an American Asshole 