the beauty of episodic television is that there are no consequences to anything. which is a really odd thing to consider about television nowadays. prestige television has made story results matter. continuity is second only to narrative. 

why did walter white take his watch off and leave it on a pay phone? symbolism? hell no. continuity. vince gilligan can say it's dedication to the details of the story. maybe. or maybe it's because he knew that the internetz would never let him hear the end of it if he let something like that go.

dear reader, our journey through Carl Kolchak's Haunted Chicago will be free of any such pesky headaches. when we last saw our hero, he was shaking off charges of arson and criminal mischief while skating on the real possibility that he may have killed a man. but today is a new day and we have no time for looking back. there are monsters afoot!

did i say monsters? i meant mobsters. the two-bit kind. the kind you find in warehouses counting change on account of the numbers racket they're running. it's not the sort of racket you want a stranger walking in on uninvited. it's even worse when that stranger is unaffected by bullets and has superhuman strength. put a pin in that.

back at the independent news service, it appears that kolchak is back on his normal beat with no more talk of answering the plaintive wails of the readers. instead, tony vincenzo is trying to butter up his star reporter for a tough, but vital assignment: babysitting monique, niece of a rather muckish muckety-muck from new york who has an impact on tony's career prospects.

apparently in 1974, the idea of women reporters was joke-worthy. after poor jane plumm was the butt of numerous fat jokes in the first episode, monique gets portrayed as the know-it-all nitwit. she haughtily spits out her credentials (graduate of the columbia school of journalism!) then nearly walks unwittingly into danger in every situation. fortunately she -- unlike plumm -- lives to see the end of the episode.

the first such dangerous situation was a shootout with mob types at a farm where a pair of outlaw brothers were holed up. kolchak and monique arrive on the scene looking like a hackneyed vaudeville team stumbling into a gang war. after kolchak saves the cub reporter from a heavily-leaded fate, he stuffs her into the trunk of the car under the guise of safety. ol' gullible monique goes along with the scheme.

between monique, vincenzo and ron updyke -- who sat this episode out (maybe he's still recovering from the gruesome murder scenes he witnessed last week) -- there aren't a lot of questioning journalists on this show. it's a wonder any news gets reported in chicago.

in this case, the news is that our bootleg bandit brothers are, as my father would say, d-e-d. but that's not the end of the intrigue. it would be a pretty short and terrible episode if it was. indeed, there was a third body that arrived in the meat wagon. a black man. that information was provided us by "gordy the ghoul", full-time morgue assistant, part-time dead guy lottery organizer. 

but wait, there's more! turns out that our mysterious stiff had been in the morgue last week. except, he was more of a guest than a visitor. if you know what i mean. what i mean is that he was previously deceased. from six shots from a .44 magnum. which drew chicken blood from the body. good times.

that's where things get a little sticky. this mysterious dead black man was shot to death whereas the other three victims in the story were killed by having their spines snapped. 

timeout!

when did regular bullets stop the undead? i mean, this guy is undead, right? that's what we're supposed to believe. suddenly my image of zombies is a lot tamer. regular bullets would probably make the walking dead a lot less tense. at least i think it would. i don't watch the show. anywho...

the mystery corpse has a name. francois edmonds. victim of a growing dispute between "the syndicate" and the black numbers operators. which is either a lazy name for a gang or an absurd hipster afrobeat band.

kolchak inevitably runs afoul of both groups. the latter when he visits a haitian curio shop run by scatman crothers. there he's accosted by a gang of thugs led by huggy bear, i mean antonio fargas, aka bernard "sweetstick" weldon. sweetstick and his goons lean on kolchak while suggesting that nosing around the south side would be hazardous to his health.

he rankles the mob when he's clumsily caught spying on a meeting between sweetstick and mob boss benjamin sposato.

speaking of which ... this was easily the most awkward scene in this episode. part of it was antonio fargas' acting which reminded me of attack of the street pimps.

part of it was sposato talking about "coconuts" as a slur for black people. was that a thing racist people said in the 70s? i don't know what's more offensive -- thinking it's real or made-up. i'm not even offended by it as a slur. i'm offended by it just being lame. 

kolchak saves his skin by informing the mobsters that the man they're after is francois edmonds. and that ol' frank isn't where they last left him. that leads to a trip to the cemetery to find edmonds. which they do. just not in the grave kolchak was forced to dig up. it's then that we get the theory that francois is out to avenge his death by breaking the backs of the men who were responsible for his killing.

almost immediately, edmonds appears shambling through the graveyard and attacks one of the wiseguys, snapping his back before returning to the darkness. the rest of the criminal element flees, leaving kolchak stuck in the hole and dealing with police who somehow happened to show up in that moment.

yet again, tony vincenzo (this time in his pajamas) is called to police headquarters to bail out his reporter on charges of grave desecration and murder. and hear yet another half-cocked theory about the supernatural. and yet again, vincenzo seems all too ready to discount kolchak's suppositions.

point of order! this is just the second episode, but it seems like this sort of thing happens pretty frequently for kolchak and vincenzo. at what point do you either just go along with guy ... or fire him? newspapers weren't experiencing a financial asphyxiation in 1974. surely there are other reporters out there that would generate significantly less trouble with more actual copy. but what do i know? i write about fake football for a living.

right now you might be asking yourself "self, i wonder what happened to monique?" (you probably really aren't. but play along, k?) the answer to that is ... nothing. not a damn thing. the last we saw of her, she was demanding an apology from kolchak for leaving her in the trunk of his car. since then we've seen hide nor hair of her. presumably she was still in the trunk? the next time we see her, she's standing agape at a murder scene before being shuffled off into a cab bound for new york. maybe to send her back to the columbia school of journalism. that's the best idea i've got.

monique's story was so inconsequential it's almost like the writers needed something to fill an extra five minutes in the episode. godspeed monique, we hardly knew ye.

back to our story ...

after being dismissed from the police station, kolchak pays a visit to mamalois edmonds -- neighborhood voodoo priestess and francois' grandmother. he does his best to try to get the old woman to admit she revived her grandson from the dead while she ducks and dodges the questions like they were the immigration officers she so dreadfully fears. but it's hard to hide being a practitioner of the voodooic arts when you call out to a stranger to have them enter before they even knock on your front door. details.

kolchak hurries out of the house panicked. but not so panicked that he doesn't sneak around to the back to watch mamalois perform a voodoo ceremony apparently aimed at creating more targets for the undead francois. among the names being painted in blood on boards is kolchak's nemesis du jour, police captain winwood ... and kolchak himself!

*insert dramatic chipmunk gif*

kolchak reasons that in order for the zombie to be stopped, someone has to pour salt in its mouth then sew the lips shut. that seems like far more intimate contact than i'd care to have with a zombie. can't we just shoot it in the head from a distance? but kolchak isn't done. seeing winwood's name on one of the wooden planks leads him to surmise that the police captain is both a crooked cop and a murderer.

wait ... what?

to this point winwood has been gruff and short-tempered, but corrupt? and by the logic of having your name painted on a board, wouldn't that make kolchak a murderer, too? (his excuse was that he asks too many questions.) perhaps francois is getting some payback for the man kolchak electrocuted in last week's episode. which would serve him right.

the reporter rushes off to find sposato, assuming he'd be the next victim. the assumption was correct although kolchak was too late. the mob boss and his associates had all been murdered in a dark allley. however, kolchak was in time to see edmonds get away ... by taking a bus. y'know, like zombies are wont to do.

kolchak tracks edmonds to a junkyard, where he lives (?) and decides to perform the ol' salt-n-sew himself. meanwhile across town, mamalois is performing an extra ritual to make extra sure that kolchak gets extra dead. not surprisingly, the zombie wakes up (i didn't know they ever slept) and chases kolchak around only to be hooked by a cable that conveniently doubles as a noose, ending the undead menace's threat.

of course, kolchak's camera gets destroyed, killing any chance of proving winwood was a murderer (huh?). yet somehow, winwood is relieved of duty, mamalois is deported and francois edmonds is buried a third time ... this time with NaCl sewn into his gullet. i mean, okay.

the good news is that an apparent killer is off the street. now if only the police could do something about the menace at the independent news service.

REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK

this continues to be the darkest show i've ever watched. i don't mean in tone. i mean in lighting. with so many scenes shot at night or in dark places, you'd think the producers would have sprung for better lighting. or at least tried to restore the video when it was released digitally...

apparently, there's a union for cemetery workers. i had to look that up. i would never have thought about it were it not for a character that seemed to know an inordinate amount about cemetery worker union bylaws...

the kicker to monique's tale is that her dear old uncle was actually relieved that kolchak put her in a cab to brooklyn since he never wanted her in chicago in the first place. way to support a girl's dreams. also ... is someone going to mail her clothes back to her?

quote of the week: "2:30 a.m., willie pike -- one-time heavyweight contender, now just one heavy pile of lifeless junk." -- kolchak

here's to hoping the writers didn't hurt themselves stretching for that one.

next week on kolchak: the night stalker: an investigation into a series of strange murders leads kolchack to believe that chicago is being visited by unearthly beings.