when i was 11, my family and i visited mount rushmore. turns out that we were in town at the same time as the sturgis motorcycle rally. which my parents were totally unaware of. i don't really remember much about that part of the trip but i don't think my folks were too keen on having their 11-year old son and 6-year old daughter hanging out with bikers.

so anyway, this week's episode is about bikers.

like the one who burst from rita baker's garage in the middle of the night, waking a poor insomniac woman from the small piece of sleep she was able to grab. or like the headless dude who ran down poor cab driver joe morton at the end of a long shift.

yep. i said headless.

where there's suspicious death, there's carl kolchak. he arrives on the scene of the morton murder to find the victim beheaded and wearing a shredded bullet-proof vest. there's talk of swords and motorcycles. these are indeed heady days.

let's take a moment to point and laugh at a "headless" motorcycle rider that looks like he was designed and built by a high school drama class.

***points and laughs***

that felt fun, didn't it? okay. let's continue.

interested in learning more about the motorcycle involved, kolchak talks to a motorcycle dealer to help in identifying the type of bike. between feckless sales attempts, the man tells kolchak that the bike that left the tire marks in question hadn't been seen on the road in about 20 years. then he has a wwii flashback. i'm not sure if it was supposed to be poignant or comical. it was like watching the don draper/dick whitman conundrum as reenacted by thurston howell iii. 

i know the whole "hasn't been seen in 20 years" thing is supposed to make it sound spooky, but is it really so implausible that a 20-year old motorcycle could still be running? i drive the same boxy scion that i've had for 11 years. this doesn't seem all that weird to me. but what do i know? i write about fake football for a living.

you know who would probably know about motorcycles? henry "studs" spake, a workaday jamoke was working at night and nearly was run down by a headless biker with a sword. thank goodness that studs could climb a telephone pole or he might have ended up several inches shorter. everyone has a day to die. this was not his.

back at the i.n.s. offices, tony vincenzo is dealing with the effects of an ulcer. i could just write that "tony works with carl kolchak," which is essentially the same thing. several days after the morton murder, kolchak hasn't written a story. this development isn't doing much for tony's gastrointestinal situation.

one thing the reporter has done is learn about the existence of a witness to the morton killing. it's a mister cahill, who's doing some unwanted time in a psych ward. cahill says he saw the headless man attack morton. then implores kolchak to believe that he is sane.

(brother, if you knew who you were talking to, you'd know that you have a more than willing audience.)

cahill also mentioned that morton was a biker back in the day and our headless horseman was atop the same type of machine the dead cabbie rode. which is a fairly astute observation when you consider he was watching A HEADLESS MAN CHOP HIS FRIEND IN HALF WITH A SWORD!

kolchak hits up the cops for information but the latest in a string of rotating c.p.d. police captains has decided he's going to be a hardass about releasing info to reporters. if a hard head makes for a soft behind, then the opposite must also be true. kolchak runs a basic ruse by creating a false story of morton being the heir to a copper fortune who just happened to fall in with the wrong crowd.

the cop responds by spilling all sorts of info about morton. idiot. stuff like studs spake used to run the joker biker gang back in the day and is still in a motorcycle club. or that morton was married to a woman named lila, who was also in the gang along with her sister coral.

(the leaks are coming from inside the building!)

with that lead, kolchak stops by morton's wake to talk to the ol' gang. studs talks about having seen a ghost and something about "things not staying buried." as you can imagine, the rest of the gang treats his story with care and sympatHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA!!!!!!

but for real, studs says he visited a local cemetery and things were missing that should have still been buried. not cool, bro. not cool. lila morton isn't much help. she claims not to know anything but talks about stuff from 20 years ago. before giving up the entire game, lila plays the grieving widow act, rambling on about her husband singing along to old buddy holly records and shooing kolchak away.

that means its time to visit the ol' warehouse and impound lot where all of this trouble allegedly began. not only is kolchak sneaking around there, so is studs. most of it outside of the sight of a feckless security guard who looks like a poor cousin to the maytag man. 

i mean, seriously. this guy is guarding a county warehouse but yells that he's going to call the cops when he discovers spake sneaking around. what good are you?

what the cops can't stop, a headless motorcycle-riding swordsman can. ol' headless rolls up, slices up studs, leaps over a cop car and escapes. vroom, vroom!

a little research turns up the death of harold "swordman" baker -- one wonders how he might have earned that nickname -- who was part of the joker motorcycle club and decapitated in 1956. i mean, if there was ever a prime candidate for a man to spend the afterlife as a sword-wielding, moto-riding revenge artiste, he'd be the one. sort of like blaming this guy for the st. louis cardinals getting caught up in a hacking scheme.

where does one turn when one needs information on how to do away with headless murdering spectres? i honestly don't know. but kolchak went to a museum. couldn't hurt, i guess. he talkes to a museum director in the midst of setting up an exhibit on the reign of terror, complete with almost-working guillotine.

the conversation devolves into stories of wives' tales and how to dispatch with headless ghosts. the trick is to put bury the body and the head together. you should remember this information for when it becomes necessary in your everyday life. old parisians be knowing.

that information would have come in handy for coral, sister of lila. maybe then the headless swordsman wouldn't have run her down on a dark chicago street and turned her from a one-piece into a two-piece.

kolchak goes to visit lila. lila has wised up and is attempting to skip town, for whatever good that will do against the undead. before she goes, she tells kolchak all about the baker's death was an accident and how studs, joe and turk pelletier set up a booby trap and ... oops! baker's head pops off.

that's one hell of a prank.

to compound matters, turk pelletier decided it would be fun to carry baker's head around in a canister. turk pelletier and i have wildly different ideas of "fun". baker's ghost didn't think it was too fun, either because he offed turk not long thereafter.

but apparently studs spake was a scholar on french superstitions from the renaissance. he reunited baker's head and body, which calmed things down. until the cook county warehouse was shuffled around to make room for condos. it's a classic story of head meets body, head loses body, head gets reunited with body, head loses body again to make room for upscale apartments.

it must not have been that hard to find baker's head because kolchak did it in several minutes after a cursory search back at the county warehouse. good thing he found it just as the undead body comes through with sword a-swinging and tailpipes a-firing. so how does carl kolchak deal with this menace on wheels?

does he chant some ancient magic words? attack it with a magic sword? pour sugar in the motorcycle's gas tank?

nope.

he throws the skull at it and hits it in the chest.

...

....

.....

there was an epilogue to this story. but i don't remember what it was. it doesn't matter. nothing matters.

reporter's notebook

is it not possible for carl to ever write an initial story then follow it up? must everything be a blockbuster? i used to think tony was bad at his job. now i'm casting glances askew at kolchak.

updyke update: he's wordless wallpaper.

a week after a jamie farr cameo, we get a larry linville cameo. three years into m.a.s.h. and every t.v. show wanted a piece, i guess. i have no other real commentary on that.

quote of the week

"you look like the 3rd runner up in a spike jones dress-alike contest." - neil at the coroner's office

this episode had a sicker fashion burn than an episode centered entirely around fashion.

next week on kolchak: the night stalker:  kolchak believes a female demon is responsible for the rash of young male heart attack victims on a college campus.