Kolchak: The Night Stalker 1.13 – Primal Scream

Score another one for Marie tonight. She correctly spotted that the old tunnel set from this episode’s climax is the same sewer set from “The Spanish Moss Murders,” mildly redressed, with a lot less water running through it, and radically relit in the bright red of some flares. I didn’t notice it at all, which pleased her that she caught a production thing that I missed. On the other hand, she was a lot less taken with the very, very silly science in this story. Our old pal Doctor Science was not impressed.

This is the second episode in a row where the monsters are humans. A lab accident with some millions-of-years-old cells found frozen in the Arctic has resulted in the cells doing a real leap of faith into some prehistoric, carnivorous hominids that hunt at night. The story, by David Chase and Bill S. Ballinger, is about the unscrupulous corporation that is keeping a lid on it, with the police willingly assisting in the coverup. Barbara Rhoades and Jamie Farr have small parts in the episode, which I really enjoyed, regardless of how far-fetched the premise was.

And our son? After bravely facing down the rakshasha in “Horror in the Heights,” which everybody says is one of the scariest Kolchaks, this one left him a mess, pronouncing it both creepy and terrifying. The biggest hide-behind-his-blanket moment comes when Carl realizes that the oil company has another prehistoric ape-creature growing in a small tank, a pink, slimy embryo in a big, fat thermos. That’s fair; that shot was a little icky.

The Ghost Busters 1.7 – A Worthless Gauze

So a reader asked which Ghost Buster is Daniel’s favorite, and the answer, of course, is Tracy. This time, Tracy is practicing to be a stage magician, which is awfully convenient, in that kids’ TV way, because the ghost of the Egyptian Queen Faroh is looking for an immortal magician called Simious, who looks like an ape. He’s supposed to have the secret of immortality.

I’ve described some of Tracy’s oddball stunts, which Spencer and Kong see with their own eyes but never seem to acknowledge, as “magic.” This gets paid off this time, as Tracy is practicing the “cut a rope in two and pull it back out as one” trick. He drops the two halves in his hat, and then levitates out a trumpet, to which several colored handkerchiefs are tied, and finally the two halves, tied together. Kong sneers that he can’t do magic despite what he’s just witnessed, because the halves are tied.

Even though he laughed through the entire episode, Daniel insisted that the best part of the episode by far was the final gag, in which Tracy’s stage magic goes awry and he makes himself and Spencer disappear completely, somewhat ruining their intended surprise entrance to Kong’s birthday party. For whatever reason, the sight of the office door opening and closing by itself was his favorite among more than a dozen gags, although the message from Zero self, and the subsequent self-destruction, got a mention as well. He loves it “when Tracy makes an explosion!”

Faroh is played by Barbara Rhoades, who spent decades doing dozens of these taped-in-a-day roles, appearing in very small parts in pretty much everything, including four separate characters in four separate episodes of McMillan and Wife. She seems to have retired after a run of twenty episodes of the soap opera One Life to Live in 2011.

Queen Faroh’s mummy – she has to have a mummy – has the most peculiar superpower. Apparently, anybody he touches turns into a mummy as well. I scratched my head, trying to remember whether I’d ever heard of such a thing in fiction, until Tracy hands the mummy a flower and it instantly dies. Kong calls that – that! – mummification. I think “turns into a mummy” was an awkward compromise offered when CBS’s Broadcast Standard department told them they couldn’t use words like “kills.”