Mary Ann Was the Real Villain of Gilligan’s Island, According to One Fan Theory

Gilligan’s Island has generated its fair share of notorious fan theories: The island is purgatory, it’s the same island as Lost, its characters represent the seven deadly sins with Gilligan as Satan, etc. (That last one is endorsed by creator Sherwood Schwartz, although he contends that Gilligan represents sloth in a serious misunderstanding of his own creation.) 

None of them, however, address the obvious question raised by the series: How did the disaster that blew the crew so far off course from a three-hour pleasure cruise even happen? And why couldn’t the Skipper, with a lengthy sailing career under his belt, take steps to prevent such a tragedy? 

According to one fan theory, he was sabotaged, and by the person you’d least expect.

Writing for Medium in 2018, James R. Tramontana points out that Mary Ann Summers, a teenage farm girl from Kansas, had no business traveling alone on a ship otherwise populated by wealthy passengers. Even if she did win the ticket in a contest, how did she get to that “tropical port,” and where were her parents (or aunt and uncle, who it’s suggested she lived with in hints at a seriously troubled home life)? Furthermore, how did she, having lived on a farm her whole life, not see the signs of an impending storm? No matter if the Skipper chose to go all Perfect Storm, she had every chance to nope out of that trip and encourage everyone else to do so as well. Did she have a death wish?

Maybe. 

Again, she doesn’t seem to have had much to go home to, with suspiciously uninvolved but alive parents and a fiance she never mentions until 1978’s Rescue From Gilligan’s Island. She might have been hoping for sweet release from a dead-end life or at least a new one on a deserted island. Tramontana thinks she might have been a Soviet agent sent to keep tabs on the Professor, a curiously overeducated high school science teacher who she quickly bonds with, having schemed to trap him on the island to gain intel on this potential capitalist superweapon.

It seems even more likely, however, than a teacher with too many degrees earning the notice of the KGB that Mary Ann just became obsessed. She was an apparently troubled teenage girl, all alone on the other side of the world, possibly fleeing an unwanted engagement and generally dim future, on a boat with a man who knows just how to connect with such youths who is also, it must be said, one hell of a snack. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that she snapped, kept quiet about the storm, sabotaged the Skipper’s every attempt to avoid it, and then also sabotaged every chance of rescue, allowing poor Gilligan to serve as the scapegoat, all to continue basking in the glow of the Professor.

You know. That, or communism.