Rescue from Gilligan's Island, Dawn Wells, Jim Backus, Natalie Schafer, Russell Johnson, Bob Denver, Alan Hale Jr., Judith Baldwin, 1978 Courtesy the Everett Collection ...

Gilligan is a cosmic impediment to freedom, a force of nature that, by his very construction, keeps his compatriots locked forever in Hell. The cycle of "Gilligan's Island" is depressing and futile.

And it wasn't the one CBS wanted, either. According to Mark, Schwartz imagined Gilligan's Island as a humorous microcosm of American society in 1964.