Bring down the water from the stream up in the mountain. Shadouf don't
like it! Doop! Jonas Grumby grumbling in the lower bunk below Gilligan.
Gilligan Jelly Jones. They turned Gilligan into seventy jars of creamy
Gilly Jelly. It was a trick taught by the headhunters on the neighboring
island, with the help of a huge black cauldron from a jungle movie in the
30's — it was right over on the next lot, as a matter of fact. These
kinds of things happen all the time in TV land.

There in the land of airwaves, streaking through space. There in the cold
gulfs between the stars, TV shows continue to develop and improvise
plotlines. For lack of anything better to do. Yes, given quantum
mechanics, even these nuclear interactions are possible somewhere in the
universe. Voyager should be carrying a TV receiver, and then people would
get a hell of a surprise alright.

And they alter even more when they interact with the strange extra-solar
fields of electromagnetism and gravitation. They materialize on
collecting stations near catch-dishes on alien planets (where the aliens
collect radiation like English rain barrels). Gilligan with a space suit
from the Saturday morning show he was on.

There is one problem, however. He's imperfect. His form is patchy and
grotesque. His mind and speech are full of lacunae and badly welded
associations. There has been some adaptation to the local electromagnetic
fields, gravitation and physics, but not enough for a proper evolutionary
synthesis. He's locked away in an asylum on an island in the middle of a
lake in a volcanic caldera.

Gilligan vocalising in the volcano. Lying vocalizations among the
volcani, under alien night skies full of shooting planets. The calls of
hooters and wackdaws penetrate a night blue-black and silvery, dotted
with smoke fires and vales filled with mist. The surface of the lake
roils at 3 am and the local submarine brine colonies extrude arms to
feed.

Turns out this is one of the Channel Islands. Before too long, Gilligan
is sprung by other old TV shows who have lost their identities. There's
one made only of black and white snow, running with shifting, tantalizing
forms that never quite coalesce. Here's an old cowboy, shaking dust off
his chaps, and here's a garbled Sid & Marty Krofffffft dinosaur thing
made of padded orange foam and googly eyes.

The things hunker down in the dark outside the trees. Huddled outside the
circles of campfire light, outside the perimeters of the watchfires, in
the prickly brambles of the spiderweb woods. Forming a plan is
impossible, and Gill is a great liability. He's a gullible gillability. A
terrible gullible liability. In the spiderwebs and the brambles and the
canebrake thickets, he stumbles and bumbles into the brambles. They drag
him out by a skinny sneaker-wearing ankle.