Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

Kolchak: the Night Stalker: "The Ripper"

The opening episode of Kolchak: the Night Stalker was all about investigative journalist Carl Kolchak's efforts to track down a modern-day serial killer who was slaying women in Chicago so naturally the first two murders in this episode took place in Wisconsin. Oh, well. Few people my age watched Kolchak for the plot logic and unfortunately, the TV show in its heyday never really caught on with people older than me.

While I find it a bit surreal to watch the show nowadays -- the older I get, the more I sympathize with the people Kolchak encounters and the less I sympathize with Kolchak himself -- I still had a bit of affection for the TV series -- and not just because it inspired producer Chris Carter to create The X-Files. It doesn't hurt to remember that when Kolchak was created, investigative journalists were still seen as heroes thanks to their role in exposing the Watergate scandal.

In any event, as I noted above the show started off in Wisconsin inside one of those 70s-era topless bars in which all the dancers seemed to have Godiva hair and never faced toward the camera unless they were being filmed above the shoulders. The dancer went back to her dressing room for a brief break, only to encounter an unexpected male visitor with a sword cane. Not long afterwards, another woman was killed by the same gentleman and then the scene shifted to Chicago.

Kolchak was doing his damnedest to get out of an unwelcome newspaper assignment when news of the Ripper killings occurred and then suddenly he was doing his damnedest to track down the killer in hopes of getting a big story. Before long, he realized that the villain in question was no ordinary murderer but the original Jack the Ripper -- a ripper that oddly enough acted much like the vampiric killer Kolchak pursued in the 1972 made-for-TV movie The Night Stalker which first introduced Kolchak to American audiences -- only without all the blood-sucking. Like the vampire, the ripper displayed superhuman strength, an invulnerability to bullets that even Clark Kent would envy and the ability to get out of a locked jail cell as easily as other people walk through a spider web. Kolchak kept insisting that all this proved his theory about the Ripper but for some reason, the Chicago police -- who did not have the best of reputations in the 1970s, thanks to the tactics they used during the 1968 Democratic National Convention -- chose not to believe him.

In any event, his pursuit of the story was hampered by his having to avoid his perpetually frustrated editor and boss Tony Vicenzo -- played by the late Simon Oakland -- as well as his having to outmaneuver his rival co-worker Ron Updyke (played by Jack Grinnage), a financial reporter whose journalistic skills would seem to be in much demand nowadays but on the show were constantly dissed for not being more suited to covering murders. Nor did it help that Kolchak kept crossing paths with various members of the Chicago police department, few of whom seemed particularly happy to see him.

Eventually Kolchak tracked down the Ripper to his lair thanks to the aid he got from a rival reporter (played by Beatrice Colen) and an elderly woman (played by Ruth McDevitt -- who would later join the show's cast as a full-time character). Unfortunately, his confrontation with the Ripper went less well than expected and, well, to say more would be telling.

Suffice to say that Carl Kolchak survived to live another day but lost the chance to file his big story due to lack of proof. Which, considering everything that could have happened in this episode, wasn't the worst thing that could have happened to him.