King of the Rocket Men, Chapters Ten to Twelve (Fred C. Brannon, 1949)

 Chapter Ten: The Deadly Fog

...and we get another turn by our old friend the reprise reprieve, as the recap shows us that as Rocket Man shuttles into Durken's decimator death trap, he regains his consciousness and footing enough to leap to safety between Durken taking a dive and the bomb-clock striking ten and taking the truck to bits.  I know it's a trope I need to deal with and get over, but grrrr.

Shrugging off his umpteenth near death experience, Jeff abandons pursuit of the three fugitives (say, that would make a good name for a movie!) and junior birdmans his way back to the cave lab, whereupon he's surprised mid-unmaking by Burt; the wary PR guru making a very gee-whiz "So you were the Rocket Man all the time!" exclamation upon discovering confirmation of the totally bleeding obvious.  Jeff decides to fill Winslow in, prompting a clip show flashback montage from previous chapters of the serial.  This is very much 'The One With The Backstory Of Rocket Man' in Friends parlance, King providing brief bits of narration over the older footage and prompting variations of "So that's what happened!" from Burt as he's gradually brought up to speed.  Practical and probably necessary as a glimpsed once to probably never be seen again part of a thirteen-week run in the pre-video age, but not the best episode to sit through when watching the serial in quicker succession.

The duo do though come to the conclusion that Dr Vulcan is definitely a choice between Professor Bryant (I. Stanford Jolley) and Dr Graffner (Marshall Bradford), and that the villain has been seated at their conference table alongside them the whole time, being part of all their top secret discussions and planning.  Realising that either of their eminent suspects is more than capable of shielding the thromium waves of the decimator and therefore making it impossible to track, they know that time is of the essence in capturing the real Vulcan before he can utilise the device.  Meanwhile, the sinister Vulcan plots in the shadows and informs Durken that he plans to deal with Jeff King once and for all and has to this end arranged for King to take a trip into town on a decoy rendezvous.  As King takes a taxi for his appointment at the Oasis Hotel with Professor Moore on"a matter of vital importance" the cab driver henchman leaps from the moving vehicle, leaving King locked inside as Vulcan taunts him via the radio speaker that he is guiding the car via remote control - as the car fills with clouds of gas - on Jeff's "last ride" and that "even the Rocket Man cannot help you now"...

Chapter Eleven: Secret of Dr Vulcan

...and the reprise reprieve strikes yet again, as we are shown this time how after Jeff had turned down an offer from Glenda and Burt to drive him to his destination Ms Thomas had glanced back to see the cab driver's dive and the pair raced back to their car to take off in hot pursuit of the hackney cab of death.  As the fumes consume Jeff to his doom, Glenda pulls her car alongside the taxi long enough for burly Burt to take the leap between moving vehicles, gain access to the driver's seat and pull over.  As the gasping and coughing King is pulled from the "gas chamber on wheels" as Glenda so colourfully puts it, the consternated Vulcan and Durken watch on as Jeff asserts that their cunning opponent may have finally overplayed his hand - he recognised the smell of the gas as Fuminol: a rocket fuel that will lead them to whomever placed an order for the substance and thus trace Dr Vulcan.  Durken is duly dispatched by his dire director to the Hunter Chemicals factory in order to get there before the heroic trio and destroy all records of the Fuminol purchase order.

As Jeff, Glenda and Burt arrive at the Hunter plant, they are just in the nick of time to catch Durken and a confederate about to leave - leading to the regulation two-fisted punch up that quickly becomes a gunfight.  In the yards of a chemical plant, firing bullets from behind and towards various crates and canisters.  man, these guys really are harbouring a wish for self-immolation.  Good thing Glenda decided to stay in the safety of her car.

Realising that they can't make it back to their own getaway car, Durken and his henchdude decide to hijack the nearest truck and make a break for it with an uninvited passenger as Burt makes his second heroic traffic leap of the day and boards the back of the lorry as the villains pull away and leaving Jeff and Glenda to resort to a vehicular pursuit.  As they race to catch up, though, Burt is swiftly overpowered and Durken lights the incriminating purchase papers on fire before untrussing the canvas roof of the truck so that it flies off in the window and blows onto the windscreen of Glenda's car - blinding her and King and causing the car to veer over the side of the road and into the river below...

...and just when I'm about to sigh and moan about yet another cliffhanger followed by a "but you didn't see this!" resolution, that isn't the end of the episode, and we see King and Ms Thomas swimming to the surface and safety.  Elsewhere, Vulcan receives the glad tidings that the papers have been disposed of, but also the news that his lackeys have Burt Winslow captive.  Spurning the request that Burt be dispatched, Vulcan seems delighted and remarks that he could be of great use as live bait for King, and contacts Jeff with the offer of a meeting if he values his friend's life.  Placing the hog-tied and gagged Burt in a room, the door of which his been rigged with machinery to deliver a massive volt shocking surprise to anyone who enters via that portal, Vulcan and his goons await King's arrival.  But Jeff has donned the rocket suit in order to jet to the assignation early, and enters in through the window (intruder window!) to be confronted by the villain face to face.  As Bryant gloats that he took the name of Vulcan to symbolise his dreams of conquest through "the power of steel" he forces our hero at gunpoint back towards the electrified entrance... 

Last Chapter: Wave of Disaster

...and just as he is about to step between the electrical arc machines, Burt manages to use his freed feet to kick the unnamed (his shirt may even be red for the all the monochrome film tells me) co-henchmen straight past him into the sparks of death, allowing him to leap to safety.  Untying Burt as Vulcan and Durken flee the scene, Jeff determines to alert the authorities as to Bryant's identity and get them to put out a dragnet (Dunn-de-dun-dun - just the facts, ma'am) and Burt informs him that he overheard their plans to utilise the decimator in some fantastical supervillain extortion plot involving the city of New York.  Ransacking the place, they find a receipt for a plane ticket bought by Bryant direct to the city that never sleeps and fear that they may already be too late.

Repairing to Science Associates' administration building, the pair along with Glenda discover that the diabolical duo took off in a small plane heading for the Big Apple, and determine that the authorities there must be warned, and that they might just make it there ahead of the villains using an airliner.  Soaring into NYC, they convince the chairman of the civil defence committee to heed their dire warnings about a weapon that can reduce mountains of stone into running rivers of molten lava just as Dr Vulcan's ransom demand over the city for one beellion dollars (honestly, post-Austin Powers, is there any other way to be able to hear a line like that?) arrives.  Refusing to give in to the blackmail demands of a madman, the councilman determines to wield the entire police force to discover Vulcan's lair.

Landing on his secret hideaway on Fisherman's Island, 300 miles out from New York harbour, Bryant/Vulcan trains the decimator upon the undersea geological faultline between the island and the city, ready to unleash the molten fury of the ocean bed if his demand is not met by 2 P.M.  As time ticks, the police sweep of the city has failed to find any trace and - his ransom unpaid - Vulcan fires the device.  As the resultant underwater earthquake sends a tsunami rolling inland, the panicking authorities order an emergency evacuation of the city, directing the fleeing inhabitants to head to the Westchester hills.  As the incoming wave of destruction causes first the shoreline and then the city's mighty skyscrapers to buckle and fall in an impressive model effects sequence*, Jeff determines Vulcan's likely location upon the island and dons the rocket pack to jet there ahead of the fleet of bomber planes dispatched in a last-ditch attempt to destroy the decimating device.  Taking out first the villains and then the machine (with his trusty ray gun), King takes off again just in time as Vulcan's lair is blown to smithereens and flies from the exploding wreckage back towards the major city whose shoreline and skyline has, like the sky that Ben E. King looked upon, crumbled and fallen into the sea.  Which is a bit bleak, really. 

*A note on the NYC destruction sequences: this was footage originally filmed back in 1933 for the Pre-Code RKO disaster film Deluge.  Republic had purchased the footage (not the entire movie, just the model effects sequences) for use in their own works, and the scenes were incorporated into the self-explanatory 1939 movie S.O.S. Tidal Wave as well as the 1941 serial Dick Tracy vs Crime Inc and eventually this serial.  Not many years later, Deluge was considered a lost film and these effects sequences were all that remained.  Happily though for those of us who mourn the very existence of the concept of lost films, an Italian-dubbed print of the picture was discovered in the 1980s in the basement of a house belonging to Italian exploitation film director Luigi Cozzi.  The subsequent subtitled re-release would have been marvel enough, but as recently as 2016 a nitrate negative of the film with its original English language soundtrack was located in France and the movie was fully restored and released the following year.  Now there's a happy ending.