The heroes arm up and head to the greenhouse, knowing that the Thing is lurking somewhere in the area. They yank open the door to go inside, and the towering Thing is standing right there in the doorway.
The heroes are confronted by the Thing in a dark and claustrophobic room, and they manage to douse it with kerosene and set it ablaze; it continues to rampage around unimpeded, spreading flames everywhere.
Before that, a ticking geiger counter announces the Thing's approach. Everyone frantically runs around the room trying to prepare while the geiger counts higher and higher as the alien gets closer and closer...
Barnes is sitting alone with the ice-encased Thing behind him (while, unbeknownst to him, the ice steadily melts). Then he reaches for some coffee and a shadow falls over him...
The moment the characters realize that the heat has been turned off. It starts off as a funny scene with everyone talking at cross purposes, then they realize how cold it is, and that no heat is coming in. And they're at the North Pole.
The death of the "Thing" itself, in a way. While clearly dangerous, you almost pity the alien as he's clearly in agony as he dies from the surge of electricity.
The climax of the first story features what, if developed a little better, would be a truly terrifying scenario. A small crew stranded aboard a crippled submarine, with the Thing blocking any escape, and any obvious methods of dealing with it off the table since a fire would rapidly use up all the remaining air, and an explosion would likely cause the submarine's already-damaged hull to collapse.
Pablo's assimilation by the Sheep-Thing in Climate of Fear. While trying to salvage useful meat from some sheep that the crazed MacReady shot dead, he casually goes to pet one of the surviving sheep, only for its wool to suddenly jump out and engulf his arm. We next see him attached to a roughly 15-foot high monster by his arm, and over the space of just a page is fully absorbed into its body, leaving only his head and left arm visible. Finally, when the creatures (the Sheep-Thing having split into two smaller Things in the meantime) are torched, a human mouth emerges from its body and calls for help in Pablo's voice before the creature dies. Whether this last action was the last bit of Pablo trying to save himself or a trick by the Thing (since at that point Pablo's head had shot out a long barbed tongue to infect another Argentinian), it's chilling and the aforementioned uncertainty works in favor of the Nightmare Fuel.
Agapito's near-assimilation later in the same story. He goes to shake the hand of his second-in-command Ramon, who turns out to be a Thing and rapidly starts assimilating Agapito through his arm... only for Agapito to save himself by slicing it off with a machete. On the next panel we see Agapito bleeding profusely from his severed arm, which is Thing-ified and still attached to Ramon, and then things go From Bad to Worse when the base's other personnel emerge and it turns out that with the exception of MacReady and Dr. Viale (who are not present), everyone else is now a Thing.
What happens to Pablo and Agapito also serves to demonstrate how truly dangerous even the slightest mistake when dealing with a Thing can be. All it takes is some unthinking gesture such as petting an infected animal or shaking the hand of an infected person, and before you know it, the Thing's flesh is fusing with your own, dooming you unless you have something immediately to hand that lets you pull an Amputation Stops Spread.
MacReady: "Childs, you don't understand, I'm Human! The Blood sample you got from me must have been infected somehow! Childs: "I know" MacReady: "You... know?" Childs: "Of course Mac, I infected it!"
While the impact is lessened by how badly the comic butchers the rules of how the Thing works, Eternal Vows does show the nightmarish scenario of the Thing being loose in a civilian setting, with the Things having enough numbers on their side that they don't even have to bother with stealthy infections and can go for brute force. MacReady is also having to torch people who have only just been infected and not yet fully transformed into Things, something which horrifies even the hardened Detective Rowan, who eventually ends up having to shoot himself to avoid infection.
Questionable Research is the only story in the entire Thing franchise, including the films, the video game and the other comics, to include what must be the true nightmare scenario of anyone faced with the Thing... namely, one of their loved ones being infected. Even more than that, it seems to end with the worst case scenario: the Thing escaping into the wild, without anything to keep it in check. While Climate of Fear and Eternal Vows had this setup, neither of them did anything with it, nor made the apocalyptic conclusion that Questionable Research did.
