EDITOR’S NOTE: This episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker aired on the CBS Late Movie on July 13, 1979; July 31, 1981 and January 29, 1988.

“I don’t know when exactly I was in this office last. In some ways it seems like I never left. But, no, that’s not right. For at least a few days I was away, far away, in the hands of men with no faces and no names. They broke me down, broke my story down, telling me how it hadn’t happened the way I claimed. At least that’s what I think they did between injections. Memories fade fast enough without chemical help. But if I don’t tell this story now, I don’t think I ever will. Now… what was that date?”

That’s the words of Kolchak that start this episode, one that’s perhaps the closest to the show inspired by Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The X-Files.

Mr. R.I.N.G. (Craig R. Baxley) is a robot that we see kill one of his creators, leaving behind his widow (Julie Adams). The other person who made him, Dr. Leslie Dwyer (Corinne Camacho), has survived. She tells Carl that Mr. R.I.N.G. wants to be human — indeed, he makes his own face out of mortician’s wax — and yet he can’t stop wiping out human life, throwing around stuntmen as only a monster of the week on Kolchak can.

R.I.N.G. stands for Robomatic Internalized Nerve Ganglia, and the automaton doesn’t want to kill unless threatened. That said, it’s been threatened several times, and even when it wants to give up peacefully, that doesn’t happen. Man is more warlike than the machine it created to wage battles. The problem is that Dr. Dwyer has Mr. R.I.N.G.’s human characteristics and feelings, but studying the readings of St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle’s Ethics and finding out you’re a weapon can mess up any robot.

Do you know who made Mr. R.I.N.G.? The Tyrell Institute. One imagines that somewhere, Philip K. Dick is laughing. Well, halfway, as his book Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? doesn’t mention Tyrell, but the movie made from the book, Blade Runner, does.

This episode was directed by Gene Levitt, the creator of Fantasy Island and the director of The Phantom of Hollywood. It was written by L. Ford Neale and John Huff, who also wrote The Hunter’s Moon together.