Dawn Wells' Favorite Gilligan's Island Episode Paid Tribute To Agatha Christie

"Gilligan's Island" was as rigidly formulaic a sitcom as ever existed, and this was very much by design. When Sherwood Schwartz wrote the pilot (in debilitating pain), he envisioned a series that could be enjoyed by all members of the family, provided they weren't too demanding (and this being television in the 1960s, when it came to sitcoms, they generally weren't). The continuing misadventures of the S.S. Minnow's seven castaways were mostly centered on getting off that confounded island in the Pacific Ocean, but sometimes Schwartz and his writers zagged, concocting a story that finds Gilligan and the gang facing some unexpected danger.

The most memorable of these episodes often involved dream sequences, a secret weapon for the show that allowed it to break up the tedium of the island-all-the-time setting. Sometimes they'd wind up in the Old West or some other long-ago, far-flung destination. One such instance found the cast traveling to Jolly Old England in the 1800s to try Gilligan for literally monstrous crimes he believes he might've committed against Mary Ann (Dawn Wells) and Mrs. Howell (Natalie Schafer).

This all went down in an episode inspired by a classic Agatha Christie novel, and it was one of Dawn Wells' favorites.

In "And Then There Were None" (the title of the Agatha Christie novel that partially inspired "Friday the 13th"), Mary Ann, Ginger, and Mrs. Howell all go missing. It's a mystery, one that has the Professor thinking murder, as he hypothesizes that one of the four men has gone crazy and developed a Mr. Hyde personality. Gilligan begins worrying that he's the culprit, and, when he accidentally knocks himself out while in a frenzy, he dreams that he's on trial as Dr. Gilligan being prosecuted by The Professor.

Wells' Mary Ann plays one of Gilligan's defenders in the dream, and the actor loved that she got to go a little "My Fair Lady" with her performance. As she told Forbes in 2016:

"I like the dream sequences most. I kind of did an Eliza Doolittle thing – I don't know if it was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or a courtroom – but in one of them I got to do a wonderful cockney accent. That was the most fun, I think."

It's very much a high school production quality accent, but that's part of what makes the scene such a hoot. After all, no one's looking for period verisimilitude in a dream sequence that culminates with Ginger turning Gilligan into Mr. Hyde by calling out the names of various foods.

Obviously, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for the women's disappearances, but that doesn't stop Gilligan from getting the last laugh by donning a monster mask that he just happened to have handy on the island. "The Dick Van Dyke Show," this was not.