kolchak: the night stalker -- episode 18: the knightly murders
hey. wake up. it's time to do the kolchak thing again. look, we're almost done here so i only need your attention for a few more weeks. then we can all rejoice in the autumnal bacchanalia of footbaw!
in the interim, carl kolchak still has several tales of haunted chicago to regale you with. and this week he's gonna get medieval on your ass.
fair warning: this episode involves knights and i'm a little bit loopy at the moment and have eaten way too much taco meat, so be prepared for a lot of worse-than-normal puns and stupid references to knights of all kind. i accept no blame.
what do leo j. ramutka and rolf danvers have in common? apart from having unnecessarily complex names for two characters who garner barely a combined 30 seconds of screen time and whose importance to the story is only of the most minimal sort, not much. oh. maybe i shoulda said spoiler alert first.
spoiler alert first.
anyway, what leo and rolf have in common is that they are both (spoiler alert) dead. in weird ways. leo was ambushed in his home and impaled with an arrow the size of a grown man's arm, courtesy of a man in a suit of armor. it's hard to come back from that sort of thing.
in the center of it all is police captain vernon rausch, who is a nitwit with a thesaurus. kolchak first refers to him as the "walter cronkite" of police, which ... i don't know what that means. but also ... no. turns out that rausch is just fake deep and his answers go from eloquent to word salad to verbal diarrhea in mere moments. he's actually willing to give kolchak information but gets too lost in the weeds to actually get to the point. tony vincenzo nods knowingly.
about 24 hours later, our knight stalker was at rolf's house standing in the driveway pointing a jousting lance. in a move that has since been studied in darwin awards circles for decades, instead of stopping the car (or even backing up), he drives slowly into the lance -- simultaneously screaming while impaling himself. natural selection is real, rolf.
to no one's surprise (at least if they've watched the first 17 episodes of this show), the cops have little clue of what's going on here. their best guess is that a woman is running around chicago dressed as a british commando and killing with ancient battle weapons. which seems perfectly reasonable for cities like los angeles and new york but totally out of bounds for a good midwestern town like chicago.
have i mentioned that cap'n rausch is a nitwit? because he is. look no further than him rambling on about ice picks or some such nonsense. i imagine him being the man who arrested oswald bates in an epically verbose yet utterly confusing and completely nonsensical showdown. like if bond and blofeld confronted each other after suffering massive head injuries.
in the interest of keeping his own sanity intact, kolchak hightails it out of the police station and visits pop stenvold, erstwhile antique arms dealer and man who believes anyone wants his memoirs ghostwritten by a shabbily-dressed independent news service reporter. his appearance here only serves to confirm that the human-man-arm-sized arrow that did impromptu open heart surgery on leo ramutka was fired by a crossbow.
real talk: this episode suffers from "the voltron principle". for the better part of a 22-minute episode, the drivers of the voltron lions dicked around doing next to nothing while the ro-beast of the week only to form the big ass-kicking robot near the end and ultimately prevail. like, why didn't you just do that from the beginning? we all knew it would end this way. stop wasting our time. i'm also looking at you, captain planet planeteers. what i'm trying to say is that this episode of kolchak should probably only be about 25 minutes long.
in another part of fancy chicago, brewster hawking, owner of the canadian-american leisure corporation (CALC for anyone scoring at home) is lazing in his bed and engaging in the act of being wealthy when an armed and armored knight comes clanking into his boudoir. i'd like to believe that brewster hawking -- unlike stephen hawking -- is actually ambulatory. but seeing as he didn't bother to get out of bed while the knight shambled up and socked him in the face with a mace, i can't be 100 percent sure.
on to the next instance of a scene being too long for no damn reason. kolchak visits the hoity-toity hydecker museum where curator mendel boggs is being historically culturally snooty about what belongs on the museum's wall while interior decorator minerva musso is being modernally cuturally snooty about what the decor for said museum should be in order to host a fancy disco dance party. their conflicted banter is hilarious.
narrator: it wasn't hilarious.
there was a lot of mindless jibber-jabber but here are the main talking points.
- the dance party is being sponsored by CALC! which recently bought the museum
- arrows had been stolen from the museum
- and ... um ... yeah, that's about it.
moving right along, kolchak talks his way into brewster's mansion to observe brewster's millions. oh, and to see if he can get any more info about why the man caught a cast iron spiked ball to the face-piece. what he did learn is that CALC! has branched out into the world of soft drinks, though it's not going so well. i mean, if you consider facing a class-action lawsuit because the sweetener you use is making people sick a bad thing. and he also found a smashed up phone. call the clue crew! but not with that phone. because it's been smashed up.
by now, carl's started crafting his theory of dark and dangerous knights. he harangues tony vincenzo with it. tony's not in the mood. tony's never in the mood. one day he's going to walk into lake michigan after hearing one of kolchak's theories and never come back. i understand, tony. i understand.
next up is a trip to visit renowned interior decorator minerva musso, who begins by rambling about david bowie. alas, i don't think the thin white duke would want anything to do with this. musso then turns her ire onto the historically culturally snooty mendel boggs, pretty much calling him a weirdo who talks to suits of armor and recites esoteric abstract poetry. and, well ... she's not wrong.
then...
what knight through yonder front door breaks! it is the killer and musso is the target.
(i'm not good at quoting shakespeare. it bored me in school. leave me alone.)
anyway, kolchak tries to barricade the door but the knight busts through and bowls him over before finding minerva huddled up in the bathroom. needless to say, her body is not impervious to battle axes. minerva musso, we thank you for your contribution to this episode.
you might not know this about cops but they get suspicious when they find a live person locked in a room with a brutally murdered one. they start asking questions. this is bad news for carl kolchak, who has made a habit of being found near dead bodies but (as yet) has not faced any significant charges. this time, however, cap'n rausch says kolchak is a material witness. i'm guessing this won't stick. carl is the teflon reporter. which is amazing for a guy no one likes.
perhaps in an effort to save his own skin (or maybe he really was just fed up), kolchak starts berating rausch about being a lazy has-been who doesn't do any of his own investigating and stealing angles from reporters to inform his own police work. then he starts running down his own kooky knight theory. and rausch starts eating it up. at least enough to warrant a visit to the hydecker museum to question boggs.
the ol' stodgy curator harumphs and flabbergasts his indignity at the addlebrained cop and the fanatical reporter. in a world where outraged vehemence doubles as innocence, boggs was as pure as the driven snow. fortunately for boggs, carl kolchak's haunted chicago is just such a world.
what kolchak did notice at the museum was a suit of armor that looked suspiciously like the one that attacked him. one doesn't forget the first time one is trucked by a walking suit of armor carrying a battle axe. he also spies a banner with a family crest. armed with that knowledge, carl visits a coat of arms dealer. i guess that's a thing. seems like something that would thrive at county fairs.
like everyone else in this episode, the husband and wife couple running the shop (get to the point) gab about much of nothing (get to the point), spouting off information about Great Kolchaks In History without being asked (get to the point). eventually we get around to learning that the mysterious crest at the museum belonged to the family mettencourt.
i know these interactions are supposed to introduce cheeky, fun characters. but this feels like pee wee herman directing a john carpenter script.
turns out that mr. mettencourt was a douchebag of the highest order and also dabbled in the black arts. there were rumors that he also recorded games without the express written consent of major league baseball, but they couldn't make that charge stick. he was also known for being pretty invincible in fights. which i imagine would only make him more douchey and insufferable.
of course, everyone has a kryptonite. (mine is barbarella. crap, i shouldn't have said that.) mettencourt's was a divine sword or axe. when he was killed, he swore that he would have no mirth or dancing near his grave and that anyone involved in said mirth or dancing would pay the price. where's his grave, you ask? it's under the hydecker museum. where they plan to have mirth and dancing knightly. that's why the dark knight killed minerva and brewster. it spared boggs because he was playing the "john lithgow in footloose" role and preventing mirth and dancing.
hey, remember ramutka and danvers? they were involved with building permits and parking for the get down. that's how deep this goes with mr. knight. he was serious about the no mirth and dancing thing.
real talk: dude might have been a turdbucket but i can't be mad at him about this. i don't think i'd want people dancing all over my grave. i think in this case, the living humans need to check themselves.
the bad news is that we're gonna need a divine weapon. the good news is that there happens to be one of those at the hydecker museum. convenient. so why not just break on in in the middle of the knight.
knight uses lance!
it's NOT effective!
knight misses!
kolchak breaks glass!
kolchak retrieves strasbourg axe!
kolchak decapitates chops slices cuts hits knight!
really? he just hits him with it?
it's SUPER effective!
kolchak wins.
what a letdown.
i feel like after this i'm obliged to make some sort of gladiator reference.
are you not entertained? are you not entertained?
i mean. it's cool if you're not. let's try again next week.
reporter's notebook
this monster had it easiest of all of the kolchak baddies so far. mostly because no one ever ran from him. instead, his victims just sat screaming has he slowly approached and murdered them. are rich people really that easy to kill?
updyke update: i think ron said 3 whole words. still better than miss emily, who didn't appear at all.
time for our occasional moment of silence for monique.
..............
thank you.
quote of the week
kolchak: "what killed him?"
rausch: "society."
nit. wit.
next week on kolchak: the night stalker: when four young people disappear and four elderly corpses are found, kolchak senses a connection.