Just seeing the name of the second story of this episode says to me Jack Laird and I already get a bit upset with it. Maybe I should give it a chance. I mean, there’s only a few episodes left. Actually, this was the last episode that ever aired on May 27, 1973. There are two more episodes that only played in syndication.

“Hatred Onto Death” was directed by Gerald Perry Finnerman (who mostly worked as a cinematographer and directed this tale and two other TV episodes, one of Moonlighting which he shot 58 episodes of and another of Salvage 1) and written by Halsted Welles (3:10 to Yuma) from a story by Milton Geiger.

Grant (Steve Forrest, Greg Savitt!) and Ruth Wilson (Dina Merrill) come upon a captured gorilla in Africa. Grant and the animal instantly hate each other and just the opposite, Ruth and the gorilla sense something in one another. He brings it back to America to study, despite his wife begging him to set it free.

As he studies the animal at his museum, a colleague named Dr. Ramirez (Fernando Lamas) tells him that he believes that at one point, Grant and the gorilla were enemies. Maybe in another life, they battled before. Ruth tells the gorilla a story of two of his kind battling over a woman. It goes wild and she releases it. This allows Grant to fight his enemy once more.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so down on the Jack Laird story because this story is really bad. Maybe he can save this episode.

This is how Night Gallery ended its network TV life. With a Jack Laird two-minute blackout sketch called “How to Cure the Common Vampire.”

Directed and written by Laird, it stars Richard Deacon as the Man with the Mallet and Johnny Brown as the Man with the Stake. It has no good joke and is as pointless as you thought it would be.

Look, I love Night Gallery. But perhaps with all the issues of season three, it was best that it died when it did. That’s so hard to admit.

But hey — two more episodes coming! Maybe those will be good.