That link just gives me my local schedule (due to cookies, I guess), which doesn't list
Kolchak.
How odd... They're jumping forward 13 episodes ahead of where they should be this week... and right before it,
Columbo is jumping ahead 10 episodes from where it should be. I wonder why. Oh, I get it! It must be a Valentine's Day theme, because the
Columbo episode involves Faye Dunaway trying to romance Columbo to throw off his investigation, and "The Youth Killer" is about an evil dating service. Looking over the schedule, all of today's episodes seem romance-themed. I guess that's why they broke the sequence.
So anyway, here's my review for that one:
“The Youth Killer”: Amusing to see Cathy Lee Crosby playing a figure from Greek mythology just a year after she played a version of Wonder Woman. Anyway, I doubt that the historical Helen of Troy, if any, would’ve looked remotely like Crosby, since she would’ve been from the Eastern Mediterranean. (Though it’s an interesting coincidence that Helen’s assumed surname here, Surtees, is pronounced like the surname of Marina Sirtis, who would later become known for playing a character named Troi.)
Also, if Helen’s restored youth only lasted a day or two before she needed to kill someone else, how come the rash of unexplained old-people deaths only started now? In past episodes (and the second movie), they’ve justified it in terms of the killer needing to sacrifice a set number of people at a set interval, but there was no such justification here, so it didn’t hold up. Also, on top of the coincidence of Kolchak just happening to be assigned to a swinging-singles story that leads him by chance to a supernatural killing spree, why would a crime reporter like Kolchak be assigned to do a swinging-singles story in the first place? (Okay, better him than Ron or Emily, but they can’t be the only reporters at INS.)
Finally having a police contact willing to be friendly to Kolchak was a nice change, but Dwayne Hickman was quite dull in the role. Anyway, it further underscored how Kolchak is the author of his own problems; Orkin was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but Kolchak blew it by stealing evidence and breaking into an apartment and then not even doing a competent job of hiding the fact from Orkin.
By the way, one of the two young men filling out applications when Kolchak was trying to get an interview at the dating service was Reb Brown, who would play Captain America in two 1979 TV movies. So this episode features both Wonder Woman and Captain America, but it’s the lame versions of both.
