return to the island of misfit toys

kolchak: the night stalker -- episode 3: they have been, they are, they will be

gather round children and let me tell you a tale of the great beyond. the tale of things both known and unknown. a tale of things that are imagined, hoped for, and feared all at once. i tell a tale of carl kolchak and his fanciful investigations into darkest chicago.

but first ... a premise. for that we turn to the lincoln park zoo where a hungry cheetah is awaiting feeding time. however instead of predator, this time the big cat would be prey.

scaredy cat

(real talk: i don't know what on earth the director did to this cheetah, but that thing looked legit scared. that's probably the reason they shot the scene through the bars of the cage. probably don't need a frightened cheetah running loose on a tv shoot. i'm probably going to get an angry tweet from someone at peta now.) 

back at independent news service, the man whose reporting tactics through two episodes had posed only slightly less danger to the windy city than mrs. o'leary's cow was back on the street with nary a care in the world. indeed, it was the day of the first game of the 1974 world series with the hometown cubs hosting the boston red sox (*insert laugh track*). and kolchak was bound and determined to relieve ron updyke (he's back! and he's the sports editor?) of one ticket to said game, which he does after some mild intimidation.

okay, let's stop again. i promise this post won't be filled with asides, but there were some things early in the episode that got my attention. 

as nearly anyone who was breathing american air as recently as last october can tell you, the chicago cubs hadn't won a world series since 1908. and plenty of those same folks could tell you that the cubbies hadn't sniffed the fall classic since 1945. understanding that this episode had long been written before the 1974 baseball season had concluded, i was curious if the cubs had actually been in the hunt that year.

they were not.

of course, our dear kolchak won't have the luxury of taking in a day game at the friendly confines. that's because tony vincenzo -- ever the shrewd motivator -- whets kolchak's reporter's whistle with tales of dead animals at the zoo. not wanting monique (she's back!) to take the assignment, our dashing reporter dashes off. 

your move, santa ana winds...

on his way to the zoo, a dispatch comes in over the scanner about an officer down at nearby raydyne electronics. like a live-action version of billy from the family circus, kolchak detours to check out the hubbub. and boy, is there a lot of hubbub. walls being busted out, cops flying about. and all because of a mysterious wind. not your normal chicago wind. nay, friends. this was a mighty wind. a wind strong enough to toss grown men over the tops of patrol cars. things settle just in time for all witnesses to see multiple pallets of lead ingots vanish into thin air, which no one will admit to having seen. what kolchak does see is a group of serious looking men in suits briefly talking with captain quill before driving off in a sedan.

hmmmm...

no matter. for now, it's off to the zoo to check on the menagerie of mortified mammals. in the past few days, a leopard, cheetah, and panda had all died of heart attacks. somewhere in there a vandal also snuck in and spray painted an elephant gold ... which gives me grave concerns about the competence of the people in charge of this zoo.

what really piques kolchak's curiosity is the black, sticky goo he finds in the missing cheetah's cage. it leads him to track down the caller to a local talk radio show who had complained of a similar substance on his front lawn. this neighbor (a busybody dick van patten hopped up on richard simmons juice), relays every bit of gossip from his block -- including the stereo theft of the guy next door. alas, kolchak gets his hands on more of the gunk to see if it matches with the original sample.

good news, everyone ... it's a match!

turns out that the stuff is a mixture of hydrochloric acid and acetone combining to form a weird digestive fluid. at least, that's the working theory of dr. bess winestock -- whom i could never figure out if she was working for the police or the zoo. anyway, bess surmises that someone sucked the marrow out of the bones of the dead zoo critters then barfed up this black goo. 

if i keep eating something and it makes me yak every time, i'm probably going to stop eating that thing. which is probably why humans haven't evolved as a species. stupid us.

at the latest police news conference, kolchak arrives late (per usual) and throws incongruous questions at captain quill about puncture marks in dead men's bodies and vanishing lead ingots. after a blatant denial by the captain, kolchak follows up with a word salad that begins with the theft of electronic equipment from three unrelated randos and ends with a comparison of diamonds to bone marrow.

we interrupt this recap for "wait ... what's happening here?"

wtf, kolchak?

  1. in the first couple of episodes, my journalistic senses were offended at the way the police treated kolchak. occasionally, the reporter might find himself getting too close to the action, but it was in pursuit of the truth. huzzah! by this episode and after he challenged the captain with that jumbled mess of a question using the brazen guts of a drunken burglar, i'm starting to understand why the cops don't want him around.
  2. captain quill says there will be no questions. right before taking questions. from the last person he wants to answer questions from.
  3. he then refers to raydyne electronics as being "involved in some very classified work on missile guidance systems. we're talking about national security, ladies and gentlemen." so the feds are cool with a local police captain just blabbing about classified work in a general police briefing? who needs edward snowden when you have captain quill?
  4. did you know that peter hudson died at al & fred's tv repair shop? of course you didn't. because no one seemed to care that an underemployed man out on parole was apparently killed by a gust of wind inside an electronics store. you'd think that would rate a little higher than someone stealing a zenith.

this has been "wait ... what's happening here?' we now return you to the rest of the recap.

nevertheless, kolchak persisted. one useful piece of info from the briefing was that the watches of everyone at raydyne that day had stopped. kolchak, the science chap concludes that it had to be an electromagnetic pulse putting a halt to time.

smelling marrow in the water, he pays a visit to gordy the ghoul, hoping to get the inside scoop on the autopsy of the dead raydyne security guard. after some finagling, our intrepid reporter learns that the true facts of the coroner's report are being covered up. the guard didn't die of a heart attack. instead, he'd had his bone marrow sucked out.

the invisible, supernatural, bone marrow-sucking demon chupacabra eats humans too!

0_0

now comes the part of the episode where kolchak's coworkers let him down. after chasing leads, he returns to the office only to discover that both monique and tony have given all of his background info away to a group of serious looking men in suits.

tony folds. again.

i'm starting to think this show ended because it was implausible. not the stories of supernatural creatures murdering ordinary citizens. but because who would believe a news service could stay in business if it continually bowed to the slightest pressure of any sort? please, tony vincenzo, for the love of all ink-stained wretches everywhere ... please pursue a story!

after tony unwittingly suggests that this whole thing could have something to do with a ufo, kolchak picks up the trail once again. this time it leads from an alien abduction support group (where one woman's story sounds suspiciously like attempted date rape) to the home of leon van heusen: tv repairman, extraterrestrial enthusiast, and creator of mathmatico -- "a universal language" that's made up as far as i can tell.

not that any of it matters since leon is now dead. dead by the same gust of wind that ended peter hudson. the same wind that blew cops around a parking lot like flotsam on the open sea. what the wind didnt blow away was a tape recording of van heusen welcoming someone to earth. someone ... or something? probably something. otherwise kolchak might have to look for an actual murderer. which he doesn't seem interested in.

i'm going to be honest, the rest of the episode is a mess. this is the first episode in which we don't see the monster. instead, the alien (aliens? i have no idea how many there are.) is represented by wind. so there's no clue about where the critter is, whether it's big, small, meek, aggressive ... anything. 

kolchak bounces between a couple of theories on how to stop the visitor. all of them center around the flash on his kodak instamatic 100. eventually, he stumbles upon an alien spacecraft hidden in a park. he has one last run-in with the alien and repels it with his good ol' flashcube before it hops in the ship and disappears.

worst. fight. ever.

Really. That's how it ends. Watch.

the postscript is that vegetation no longer grows in a "saucer-shaped" spot in the park. and that the city is going to fill in the area with concrete. i don't think of it as a cover-up in the conspiratorial sense. more of a cover-up in the "that brown spot in the grass looks ugly. let's do something about it" sense. and it appears that once again, kolchak has skated on any real run-ins with john q. law. lucky us.

in the end, he proposes that chicago was just a rest stop on the intergalactic highway. who hasn't stopped for repairs, directions and a chance to snack on the local population? see you, space cowboy...

reporter's notebook

before you ask ... yep, still dark.

the cubs lose game 1 of the series in what we're told is the fastest game in world series history. i tried to find what the record for fastest game in series history was, but couldn't come up with anything. maybe if i cared to give more than a cursory google search. i don't. but if anyone knows, please enlighten me.

kolchak says he'll catch up on the game via the "sports tv recap". tee hee. nowadays it seems unfathomable to wait all day for sports highlights. it actually wasn't all that long ago that it was a thing.

captain quill is the third police captain kolchak deals with in three episodes. i get that chicago is a big city, but this seems like an unusual amount of turnover. considering i felt like quill was drunk and slurring his words, i wouldn't expect to see him back next week.

kolchak drives a mustang. sweet!

this is the first week where kolchak didn't have his camera broken. instead, the pictures just got screwed up and eventually given to the feds. he never gets his story nor does he produce pictures. how does this man have a job in newspapers?

quote of the week:  

kolchak"... why, you look absolutely radiant. there's only one thing that puts that kind of sparkle in a woman's eye."

bess: "baloney." 

kolchak: "yeah, well some call it that."

kolchak made a sex joke? kolchak made a sex joke.

next week on kolchak: the night stalker: devil worshipers are suspected of several murders, but kolchak believes that a vampire is to blame.