Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on YouTube.

This week, we begin the third season of Monsters!

Episode 3.1 “Stressed Environment”

(Dir by Jeffrey Wolf, originally aired on September 30th, 1990)

The third season of Monsters starts off with the story of an experiment gone wrong.

For twelve years, Dr. Elizabeth Porter (Carol Lynley) has been experimenting with lab rats, trying to help them evolve into a higher form of intelligence.  Her work is supervised by Dr. Robert Winston (Victor Raider-Wexler) and her assistants are the cowardly Keith (Scott Weir) and Gina (Kathleen McCall).  The episode opens with a lengthy (by Monsters standards) scene of Gina undressing and then putting on her special rat feeding uniform while Keith tries to discreetly watch.  It’s a scene that really has little to do with the rest of the episode but I guess the producers of Monsters decided that the best way to survive to a fourth season would be to appeal to teenage boys.

Anyway, Keith’s crush on Gina comes to naught because Gina is killed while trying to feed the rats.  It turns out that the rats have gotten smart.  They’ve gotten smart enough to build crude spears and crossbows and use them as weapons.  Dr. Winston wants to shut the experiment down.  Keith wants to go home.  Elizabeth, however, wants to protect her rats and see if she can convince them to give up their weapons and live in peace.  Dr. Winston points out that if humans can’t convince their own species to do that, how is Elizabeth going to convince a bunch of rats?

And Dr. Winston has a point.  Elizabeth may think that she has a special bond with the rats but the rats disagree.  Soon, Gina is not the only person to have lost their life to an army of spear-carrying rats.  The episode ends with Keith as the sole survivor and his ultimate fate is still up in the air.  The rats are angry, ruthless, and armed.

And cute!

Seriously, this episode probably might have been more effective if the rats themselves have been a bit more frightening but it wouldn’t have been as much fun.  As it is, the use of crude puppets actually made the rats look kind of adorable, especially when they were holding their little spears and setting up their little crossbows.  Of course, one reason why I found the rats to be cute is because I’m used to CGI.  I take CGI for granted.  This episode was made when special effects people still had to use puppets for their monsters and, as a result, the rats don’t really look like rats.  They’re so fake-looking that it’s hard not to like them.  They’re a throw-back to a simpler and more innocent time.

This was actually a pretty entertaining episode and a great way to start season 3!  I appreciated that this episode of Monsters featured actual monsters.  After the uneven batch of episodes that finished up the second season of this show, it’s nice to season 3 starting off on the right foot.