Saturday Morning Cult-TV Blogging: Korg, 70,000 B.C.: "The Web"

In “The Web,” it is a “new day in Korg Valley.”  The family is back home at their old cave, and hunting is once again good.

While Mara (Naomi Pollack) and the children gather fruits and berries, however, a bear attacks Korg (Jim Malinda), Bok (Bill Ewing) and Tane (Christopher Man) in the cave. 

Worse, this bear is the one that originally lived in the cave, and feels territorial about it.

Trapped in the cave, Korg gets an idea from a spider he sees on a rock. He will build a web -- a net -- to trap the predator in their home.

“The Web” is not one of the better episodes of Korg, 70,000 BC.  It’s a little bit of a retread of “Trapped,” another episode in which family members are trapped for a long time inside their cave.

Secondly, no explanation is given for the family’s return from the beach to the cave after “The Moving Rock” and “The Beach People.”  Were they just on vacation?

Thirdly, it would take a long time to fashion a large net out of the skins and hides that Korg and the others have access to inside the cave.  And even after fashioning such a net, it would not look as neat and well-made as the net prop looks in the episode itself. Basically, Korg just presents a perfectly stitched, perfectly designed and sewn net with which to trap the bear.

Finally, the episode ends with Korg deciding it is best to let the bear keep the cave, since it was the bear’s cave originally.  His family took it from the bear.

That’s a pretty big decision, isn’t it?

First, it means the family will have nowhere to spend the night.  Secondly, it means that everything in the cave that Korg’s family didn’t carry out is now lost to it.  And thirdly, how will the poor bear get out of the net and survive, if the Korg family doesn’t help it?

A larger point to consider is that the very next episode, “The Picture Maker,” finds the Korg family back living in the same damn cave.  So what happened to the bear? What happened to Korg’s decision to give up the cave?

Yeah.  This episode has some problems. Talk about a tangled "web."

Next Week: “The Picture Maker.”