I have mixed feelings about this week’s story. Carl is almost like a Jekyll and Hyde character. We have:

Kolchak the Crusader

Boy, does Kolchak have to fight for this story, not only against the (stereotypically) evil oil company, but past the most crooked police Captain he’s ever gone up against. The guy snatches Carl’s camera off his arm, drops it to the ground and smashes it with his foot to keep the photos he took from seeing the light of day. Later, Kolchak submits a voucher for the damage, which the Captain just tosses in the trash. I don’t approve of breaking and entering or theft, but I was delighted when Carl sneaked into the Captain’s office and stole the police photos of the creature. He even hid them well enough so that the Captain didn’t find them when he patted him down. Good for him.

When he goes to talk to a teacher, the poor guy just wants to look at vacation brochures in his free time. Carl listens to the guy’s complaints and realizes he gets little respect in his job, so he asks for his opinion as a “consultant” and then the guy is more than happy to tell him all he needs. Well played and polite.

We even have that seeming “Finale moment” when Carl’s story is about to actually be published! Vincenzo was even high on the story, looking ready to pop a champagne bottle open. It was like Tony and Doug about to be retrieved by the Time Tunnel, or the Robinsons locating Earth. But alas, they then get a message telling them to cancel the story – no real explanation as to who or what killed it. And it’s all over.

Carl tracks down the creature in an underground tunnel from an old closed-down stadium (also solving the mystery of where that image on the DVD menu came from – the one bathed in red where it says “Episode Index” and “Play all”) He even tries to reason with it when he confronts it, feeling that it’s capable of intelligent thought. But he’s the one who turns out to need rescuing this time. He can only comment at the end that those who captured it will try to make it “manageable”, which he clearly thinks won’t work.

But conversely we also have:

Kolchak the Jerk

Early on, Carl arrives at INS. Updyke informs us that he made a deal with Kolchak that he would make phone calls to find the person Mr. K was looking for if he’d in return stop parking in Updyke’s space. Carl breaks his word and parks in Updyke’s spot anyway, but Ron keeps his word and finds the person Kolchak was seeking. But Updyke does inform him if he parks in his spot again, he’ll have his car towed away. So later in the episode Ron keeps that promise. But wait. Kolchak has cleverly had the janitor steal Ron’s keys and park his car in his own spot so it will get towed away instead. Ron can only watch in horror as his own car is towed away. Funny, right? Uh, no it isn’t. So Kolchak can’t be bothered to not park in his colleague’s spot even when he made a specific deal with him that he wouldn’t, but he’s got time to prank his rival by stealing his keys so that he’ll have to watch his own car be towed off and then have to go through the hassle and the cost of getting it back. I don’t know why Updyke has a parking space and Kolchak doesn’t – seniority I would assume, or maybe there’s a charge for a space and Carl is too cheap to pay it. Whatever, parking in someone else’s spot is never cool, and acting like Ron is the villain for threatening to call a tow truck represents a warped sense of values. Kolchak, you are a grade Z jerk, and that’s being polite.

It’s too bad, because this unfunny bit came right after Updyke pulled a clever prank on Carl and Tony by reading them a report about a truckload of exotic animals breaking down, seemingly rendering his story about a strange ape creature solved with a mundane explanation. I remembered the gag from earlier viewings but the first time around I believed him and was wondering what a “piecost” was too. “Abbott and Costello 1946,” declares Tony with a smile and a snarl. Now that was a good gag!

As for the storyline, let’s face it: the idea of frozen cells mutating into something is believable, if they’d gone with a blob or maybe even an insect-like creature, but a fully grown ape-man? And of course, the oil company is made out to be an evil conglomerate. Yes, shame on those nasty oil people, who drill holes into the Earth just so we can have gas to run our cars and oil to heat our homes. And then they have the gall to make a profit doing it! I wonder how they sleep at night.

Even if an oil company did bring a frozen core sample from Alaska that accidentally thawed and turned into something bad, it was an honest mistake. This story treats it like it’s a huge scandal that they’ll do anything to cover up. The most laughable line is when their PR man says that if oil goes to $5 a gallon, he can handle it. And if there’s a huge oil spill and tons of animals are covered with oil sludge, he can handle that. But he can’t handle a freak accident that no one could have possibly foreseen; no, that’s beyond his comprehension. Early on, Carl even tries to make it seem like doing research and development is somehow a bad thing because they might actually make a buck off of it. Does he do his own job for free? Isn’t he trying to help his newspaper make a profit?

On a positive note, the costume for the creature isn’t half-bad. It almost looks like some sort of ape-man mutation, particularly in the confrontation scene. In some of the earlier scenes, the face looked plastic and too light, but it actually looked better in the close-ups for a change. On the negative side, we are told the creature ripped someone’s arm off on the first attack and ripped another man’s leg off later. But when the woman victim is found in the tunnels she looks barely scathed; if she had opened her eyes and stood up, it might have seemed reasonable. And after Kolchak is attacked, except for the noticeable scratches on his face, he looks hardly the worse for wear. When he gets up and walks off, his suit has nary a tear in it, even though this powerful creature was attacking him.

It’s still an interesting story and it flows rather well. Once again we have great casting. There’s Jamie Farr while he was just beginning to hit it big with MASH. He even gets a guest credit at the beginning of the show. I have to admit the only thing I knew Kate Woodville for was her famous STAR TREK episode where she married Dr. McCoy. I knew John Marley and Pat Harrington and Barbara Rhodes playing the secretary. I even recognized a couple of those oil executives from playing authority figures in other shows from LOST IN SPACE to THE SIXTH SENSE. And lest we forget Richard Bradford as Commander O’Neil and Diana Rigg as Mrs. Peel, whose husband Mr. Peel we finally got to meet. (I would have thought he was younger.) Oh wait, those last two are mad-pacs gag credits for the week. Oh, and it was directed by Robert Scheerer, not Darren McGavin – a triple gag.

Overall I’ll give it 6 core sample buckets, which perhaps in the future will come with their own refrigeration units.

Well, this one's a little better than last week's ep.

So this week, we get a prehistoric ape-man growing from frozen cells found in the arctic. I get the freezer malfunction bit, but not the rapid growth from embryo to adult, especially in a place without that much food for it. But in a series about mythical monsters, I guess a detail like that counts as a mythical aspect more than as a plot hole. Still bothered me.

Delightful guest appearance by Jamie Farr (gag credit, citing where we know him from) as the high school biology teacher Carl consulted re the evolutionary process to search for this possible missing link.

Annoying that he could toss flares into the dark tunnel and see what was there. Seems to me the bright flares would have blinded him to anything in their light.

Fun to see the Kolchak Vs. all authority out to stop him getting his story. Something of a theme within this series. Also liked the comic relief with the coworker. Uncool of Carl to keep taking his parking space, but still funny to see the towing backfire.

7 expensive cameras vandalized just to supress the latent images on the film inside. (I mean really. Couldn't he have just swiped and exposed the film instead?)

Firstly the Mrs Peel gag credit. Did you watch that show? I loved it ,still do, got the whole lot on DVD, did it make it big in America?

This week's episode was quite good, entertaining, if a little far fetched. Ape men created by lab samples is silly, but thought whilst watching it that the lab assistants might have been infected by this pre historic primordial stuff and regressed back to ape creatures. That would have worked better, though Dr Who did a story like that in Inferno, a classic Jon Pertwee episode.

Nice to see Vincenzo actually supporting Karl and even complimenting him on his journalistic skills. 7/10

@HawkMan47 said:

Firstly the Mrs Peel gag credit. Did you watch that show? I loved it ,still do, got the whole lot on DVD, did it make it big in America?

It did. Particularly the Diana Rigg and Linda Thorson episodes, which aired on ABC. Eventually, A&E and the Encore pay service aired the old Honor Blackman episodes. They could only ever find one good copy of an episode from the first season, though. It was a great show - fun and imaginative (though some of the final season episodes did get a little silly); I might even buy the DVDs someday.

@mad-pac said:

Sandra Gould ... Gladys Kravitz

Yet another gag I didn't see, using her famous BEWITCHED role instead of her character name. You really packed in the gags this week. Your salute to April Fool's Day perhaps? Bravo!

@brimfin said:

@mad-pac said:

Sandra Gould ... Gladys Kravitz

Yet another gag I didn't see, using her famous BEWITCHED role instead of her character name. You really packed in the gags this week. Your salute to April Fool's Day perhaps? Bravo!

Also Rosetta Stone.

I found it hard to focus on this episode. I'm getting pretty tired of the formula. The episode made even less sense because the monster was a prehistorical caveman or something, and the corporation wanted the media to say it was an ape and other beasts. Not the same thing, but in practical terms, the important thing would be to protect the public, so Kolchak and the corporation could work together making sure the population was safe, and only later try to reveal the truth about the nature of the beast.

I really despised the police captain who broke Kolchak's camera and Kolchak himself for what he did to Updyke. The writers want to show Updike as such a stiff uptight tool, but ended making Kolchak act like a jerk and a vandal. The writers seemed to be under the impression that the audience loves transgressors, and there's nothing more annoying than a workmate who just won't play along and share his stuff, but in fact it is Kolchak that is acting like a bully.

According to my current mood, I think this episode deserves 3 highly distorted world maps in which Greenland inexplicably appears to be bigger than South America, and the Arctic appears as if it were a land mass, which it's not.

About the gag credits, don't you assume I stopped at two or three! The problem is that the cast has quite a few interesting names which are wonderful gag material, but then we watch the episode and most often don't get to notice the mentioned characters, or never get to hear their name spoken. For instance, there's a Dr. Peel (and I think he deserved a sexy Mrs. Peel for company), but who the heck is this Dr. Peel? The doctor that tells Kolchak he can't see the scientist in the hospital room? I don't think they ever mentioned his name except in the credits, so that hurts the joke. Another one is Dr. Fisk, whom I called Dr. Wilson Fisk, who happens to be the villain i Daredevil. But I don't remember any Dr. Fisk in the story.

Same for Rosetta STONE. The name Rosetta is actually part of the real credits, and I just gave her a creative last name, but I don't remember anybody with such a name...

Two famous actors are easily noticed, however. Who could forget the inimitable Mrs. Kravitz, playing a similar version of the role that made her famous? OK, except that Gladys was always curious about what was going on in the Stevens' home, and it was hard to convince her there was nothing out of the ordinary going on there, while Kolchak's landlady was ready to accept the corporation's explanation "If the company said it was an ape, it was an ape. They know what they shot." Mrs. Kravitz would never have swallowed that explanation so easily.

The other famous participation is by Jaime Farr. He really is in the episode, but his character's name, on the other hand...

Finally, I always try to include a tribute to one of our old shows. Can you spot the first person to be eaten by Grendlers? I thought that would be poetic justice for his memory.

Really finally, there's one last gag credit that is rather absurd and would put the action in a whole different direction, but nobody seemed to notice that one, and it's big, so I I hope you cut me some slack because I won't mention it so I can use it again soon!

Sorry for the extreme lateness I've been hosting a friend for the week so Karl had to wait. I shall make up for it by watching the next episode after I'm done writing so I am all ready.

This week felt like a bit of a re-mix of previous episodes there wasn't anything that felt really new. That made it a little hard to get through but I did manage it in one sitting which is better than recent.

I agree with many of the previous comments, Kolchak comes off as an asshole in his actions towards Updike. Generally I really like Kolchak but that is mainly because Darren McGavin is charming and seems so nice. He is a crusader always pushing for the story and he does behave nicely to Ms Emily (but who wouldn't). I wonder how it went down at the time. Is it to show flaws in our hero or are we meant to cheer when he puts the not manly, prissy, by the rules Updike in his place?

I do think that Kolchak's action may just be part of the era along with a few of the other tropes. This is post Watergate TV trust of authority be it governmental, police, business or Mr Scientist.
The regular guy, the little guy is the protagonist. He don't hold to 'dem rules.
It's strange how this would wane into the 80's before rising again for shows like the X-Files in the 90's.

Anyway we get a series of very gruesome murders. Somehow it seemed worse knowing that limbs had been pulled off rather that "ripped apart" as with previous monsters. We get one of the semi-regular scenes as Kolchak is the only reporter asking the questions that need answers at the press junket, which is once again at the crime scene. I've said before but this seems unlikely as they will contaminate the scene plus I don't think I've ever seen printed photos of a crime scene, are press allowed in at all?

Then we get Global Chemicals sorry Oceanic International Oil with their very odd map. I know the often seen map of the world is distorted, my own little island comes out bigger than it should, but this seemed really off. I think they have joined together the islands in North Canada but I'm not sure what that huge land mass is east of Greenland.
The head of PR Mr Kitsmiller creates a very poor impression initially. Surely you wouldn't be so rude in his position to answer intercom buzzes about dinner arrangements. After this he seems very charming and puts the best appearance of the company forward. He also speaks like a PR man, "as far as I know there are no serious disagreements". Then he answers the damn intercom again.

We get to see more reasons Tony would be annoyed with Kolchak, he gets so distracted investigating the case that other outlets grab the juicy bits of the story first and then arrives late at the next murder. We do see later Tony really get behind the story when he sees the photo and he admits Kolchak can be one hell of a reporter, so he must publish something, sometime.

There is an odd scene when Kolchak goes back to see Kitsmiller and deals with his secretary. When she stands up Kolchak becomes very uncomfortable. Initially I thought this is because she is quite tall but Kolchak seems to be looking away and using his hat to shield his view of her chest, roving eyes Karl, naughty, naughty.

I'm a bit confused about the monster. Firstly the explanation of how they come about is ridiculous, they observe single celled organisms become multinucleated and reproducing to produce more single cell organisms, ok. When did they take the huge leap to become not only multicellular but a complex organism?

@BobPeters61 wrote - So this week, we get a prehistoric ape-man growing from frozen cells found in the arctic. I get the freezer malfunction bit, but not the rapid growth from embryo to adult, especially in a place without that much food for it. But in a series about mythical monsters, I guess a detail like that counts as a mythical aspect more than as a plot hole. Still bothered me.

Bothers me too Bob, bothers me too

@HawkMan47 wrote - This week's episode was quite good, entertaining, if a little far fetched. Ape men created by lab samples is silly, but thought whilst watching it that the lab assistants might have been infected by this pre historic primordial stuff and regressed back to ape creatures. That would have worked better, though Dr Who did a story like that in Inferno, a classic Jon Pertwee episode.

Indeed. This episode reminded me of another classic Doctor Who episode The Seeds of Doom. Scientists in the Antarctica uncover a pod which infects people and turns them into walking plants called Krynoids, excellent stuff. I love that idea of a remote frozen research base uncovering these things like in The Thing or in the X-Files episode "Ice".

Secondly this creation of a monster must have happened multiple times. The first is shot, I assume the second is the one that re-breaks the window. How did people not find it earlier when a murder happened at the lab or were they trying to breed them the second time?

The final encounter seemed to be at the same location as in episode 9 "The Spanish Moss Murders" except now drained of most of the water. I expected to see the remains of Père Malfait lying around.

So overall a fairly average episode 6 cells that shouldn't be touched, could be dangerous out of 10

Cloister 56- Seeds of Doom indeed a great story. Though rather than turning people into Krynoids the pods were a viable Krynoid awaiting a host to germinate with and to be reborn. A subtle difference I know but when Keeler was taken over and the Krynoid spoke it separated it's identity from Keeler. Sorry for being pedantic.

I remember you I think from the Dr Who board on IMDB, IMDforums is where the old gang are now with a Who franchise board of their own . Also hopefully we'll get more Who fans here in time.

@HawkMan47 That's ok I like pedantic.
If you like Doctor Who then I really recommend the Krynoid Podcast.
They take a classic episode, go through it scene by scene and review it. They are just about to do Inferno as it happens.

I did go on the IMDB boards for Doctor Who a little, I've been posting over on the Doctor Who boards here.
The classic board is very quiet and the nuwho had some life but has got very quiet recently.

@cloister56 said:

@HawkMan47 That's ok I like pedantic.
If you like Doctor Who then I really recommend the Krynoid Podcast.
They take a classic episode, go through it scene by scene and review it. They are just about to do Inferno as it happens.

I did go on the IMDB boards for Doctor Who a little, I've been posting over on the Doctor Who boards here.
The classic board is very quiet and the nuwho had some life but has got very quiet recently.

Actually the beginning of this episode reminded me of Kurt Russell's 1982 movie "The Thing," which takes place in Antarctica, which actually is the correct place to find this kind of stuff because, you know, there is a continent there (though many Northern-Hemisphere storytellers try too hard to make the Arctic relevant), except that the Kolchak doppelganger episode has already been done, so the story went a different way.