A bomber crew of six men are being led through the woods by our heroes as this episode opens. They just bailed out of their plane and are being led to Stalag 13-except the men cannot find the correct tree stump used as their tunnel entrance. They do manage but shortly after arriving inside the camp, Major Hochstetter and men arrive, ready to tear up the camp searching for the bombing crew.
Hogan has his men begin a fake tunnel so Hochstetter will find it before any of their real tunnels, and this part of the plan works. But Hochstetter gets Klink to transfer everyone out of Hogan's barracks so they can plug up the tunnel they discovered. Hogan calmly tells the panicky leader of the bomber group that moving to another barracks is no problem because they have a tunnel to every building in the camp except one.
Of course, in the next scene we get the expected news that they have indeed been moved to the one building without a tunnel. Somehow, the six "unofficial" prisoners have been allowed to mix in with the regulars in their new barracks. The mission for Hogan & Co. is to get these men back into the tunnel until Hochstetter and his men leave the area so they can exit and contact the Underground to get back to England.
From a comment by Carter about building snowmen back in his previously never mentioned home town of Bullfrog, North Dakota (and never mentioned again) Hogan comes up with a plan to have his men dig a new tunnel to connect to the regular ones, underneath a snowman they are allowed to build outside that new barracks. The viewer sees a typical 3-ball snowman except that the largest one, the bottom is a hallow ball with a door and the bombers come out of the barracks one at a time and slip into the base of the snowman and down into the tunnel.
Except on the last one, Sgt. Schultz sees part of the man's body and decides he has to report it. Hochstetter is still with Klink and now he will be investigating this snowman. So Hogan tells his men to move it a few feet over from where it connects to the tunnel, carefully measuring with his foot to have it placed in a spot said to be "the only place in camp that isn't right over one of their tunnels. They somehow have enough time, even though Klink and Hochstetter come at once on the alert from Schultz.
Hochstetter sees the door in the bottom ball of the snowman right away and he opens it, declares that it is a tunnel and slides inside, only to have the snowman collapse around him. Finding no tunnel, he admits defeat, and pulls his men away from the camp. Thus the six men can get through to the Underground and back to England.
From start to finish, this is one of the series' weakest episodes. The humor is almost solely confined to a bunch of snow around the major, and later Klink. The drama is almost nonexistent. Hogan and his men try to hide six men inside their camp until they can leave and meet with the Underground to return home. That's it.
Now we understand that in many episodes in this series, there is often a plot hole or two, things that you have to ignore in order to enjoy the show. But here, virtually nothing makes any sense. Starting with focusing on one of the series' long-running unrealistic notions that Hogan and his men can have this tunnel exit (almost always referred to as the "emergency tunnel" even though it is clearly the one they use almost all the time) through a tree stump just outside the camp, and none of the Germans who ever search around for missing prisoners or espionage activity ever notice footprints or a path leading to or from this tunnel. They never notice that it is the only tree stump in the forest that doesn't have a coating of snow on top. They never notice piles of snow where snow would fall from it whenever the stump door opens in the winter. In this episode we draw attention to this odd stump, by having our Heroes temporarily unable to locate the stump because it is covered with the recent snow. Then they find it, and somehow all the German patrols looking for those airmen can't notice the irregularities in this one stump-really?
Hochstetter tells Klink that he suspects Hogan is smuggling outside prisoners into Stalag 13, yet he nor Klink are unable to notice that suddenly there are half a dozen extra men in Hogan's barracks?
How on earth do the men make this snowman that is a typical-looking man-size figure, with a bottom ball that is only a shell-totally hollow inside? Hollow inside, yet sturdy enough for two regular snowballs on top of it? And somehow they could build this in the compound, using tools that the German guards wouldn't see, and be able to dig out enough dirt to go down to connect with another tunnel, and remove the dirt-all without any guard seeing something odd. They were shown with buckets full of dirt with a bit of a snow covering, taking them into their barracks where they disposed of the dirt, but it didn't make any sense that they could be doing all this digging and not be seen by one guard or another.
There was one scene that had nothing to do with the plot, yet it also made no sense. Just as Schultz was passing by in the background, not close to the snowman, Carter and Newkirk start a fake argument about who is going to put the face on the snowman. Schultz comes up to stop the arguing, and he plays Solomon in settling thing. They thank him and he moves on. Like so much of this whole episode, it seems like filler material, just to fill out the necessary time for the episode.
Then they somehow moved the snowman-try this sometime next winter; moving a large snowman several feet without the thing coming apart. They left the new tunnel entrance and in just a matter of a couple of minutes were able to plug up the hole and smooth over the opening so nobody would see anything odd or fall into the hole.
I found Hochstetter to be less funny than in any other episode. He never did his "Bahhhh" or "What is this man doing here?" bits. When they found the fake new tunnel in the regular barracks, there was no punishment handed out, they just transferred the men so the Germans could cement over the new tunnel opening.
When the series started, Hogan and his men were mostly just involved with helping prisoners who escaped from other camps to hide out temporarily in their huge underground tunnels, and then help them sneak away to Underground contacts to get back to the Allied forces. By season three, we are expecting more sabotage or other complicated maneuvers. In this one, the dramatic part of the show has the simplest of activity, all done in a totally unbelievable manner, with very few funny lines and only a couple of good sight gags. I cannot give it higher than a 4 out of 10.
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