Blu-Ray/TV Series Review: Baywatch Hawaii: Season 2

 

The 22-episode second season of Baywatch Hawaii aired during the 2000-2001 TV season. As was the case for the entire run of the Baywatch franchise, there was a lot of turnover in the cast, the biggest being David Hasselhoff leaving the show (he was still listed as an executive producer). The other cast members who left after season one were Simmone Jade Mckinnon, Dawn Masterson, Michael Newman, and Brooke Burns. Burns would, however, make a couple of appearances in season two as a guest star. This season, the additions to the cast were Brandie Roderick (who was at the height of her Playboy modeling fame), Charlie Brumbly, and Alicia Rickter. Krista Allen was promoted to series regular, and Jason Mamoa, Stacy Kamano, Michael Bergin, and Jason Brooks all returned as series regulars. The series did get a couple of recognizable guest stars this season. Daisy Fuentes, still popular from her MTV days, guest starred in one episode, and Pat Morita (from the Karate Kid movies) played a major recurring role. 

The Blu-Ray set is a four-disc German import set. So, if you get this, you will need a Blu-Ray player capable of playing European (Region 2) discs. The menus and episode titles are in German, and the audio track defaults to German, but you can switch to the English language track in the disc menu. There are no captions, but there are some extras on the discs. Those include standard definition versions of each episode, and on the final disc, promotional trailers for many episodes, a promotion reel for the series, and a photo gallery. You can play the remastered episodes in a play-all mode or one at a time. If you stop in the play-all mode and turn off your player, it will not resume where you left off. While the show's first season could conceivably be considered the 10th season of Baywatch, this season was its own thing and was mostly bad. The writers totally ignored the cliffhanger that ended season 10, the storylines were all over the place, the character of Zack was irritating, and some episodes were aired in an order that made no sense. For example, an engagement party occurred two episodes before the proposal. On top of all that, it was given a finale that felt like part 1 of a two-part series finale, but instead of another episode, it just stopped without wrapping up any character arcs. The writers would have been better off resolving the cliffhanger in the Hawaiian Wedding TV movie and skipping this mess of a season. If you want to see how it played out just to finish the show, it is a trainwreck, but you are not missing anything notable if you just skip it.