Kolchak: The Night Stalker - The Ripper and intro

(The IMDb group I've hooked up, The Sages of the Single Season, has voted to watch and review/discuss Kolchak: The Night Stalker one episode per week now that we have finished with Gerry Anderson's UFO.  You can find us on the message board for that show: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071003/board)

I was eight years old when Kolchak: The Night Stalker aired in 1974.  Because it was Friday, I had permission to stay up an hour past bedtime - it played right after My Partner, the Ghost (aka Randall & Hopkirk, Deceased).  It scared me plenty, and I wouldn't miss an episode.  Bits and pieces of it stayed with me all my life...scenes, scares, and even certain music cues which I never forgot a note of.  Even today, a sudden familiar noise at two or three in the morning will harken back to this show and suddenly I'll be wide awake with my heart beating too fast.

It was a time when American culture was taken with the 'supernatural'...with mysticism and the occult, with ancient Egypt and its mummies and curses and 'pyramid power', with UFOs, with Kirlian photography and ghosts and ESP, with reincarnation, with Bigfoot and spontaneous combustion.  We had a fascination for the morbid and dark, The uncaught Zodiac awakening the chill of Jack the Ripper.  Leonard Nimoy visited our living rooms for half an hour every weekend to take us In Search Of...the lost town of Roanoke, the Nazca Lines, the ghost of Van Gogh, the death of Pompeii.  People carried tattered paperbacks of "Chariots of the Gods" like it was the new Bible. We wanted to know...we were desperate to know, and to believe.  We were ready.  There had to be more out there, if anyone would just ask.

We wanted to know about power, too.  America's unlikeliest heroes that year were a couple of investigative journalists who broke a story of corruption in the highest office, and the name Watergate became a dictionary fixture.  After the murder of JFK, after Vietnam, and now the President himself deceiving us we had become disillusioned by authority and wanted more Woodwards and more Bernsteins, tenacious seekers of truth who would defy the Powers That Be, to root out just what it was we weren't being told.

Carl Kolchak was that kind of reporter. 

He'd already appeared in a couple of hit made-for-television films, The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler.  Kolchak had been a print reporter in Las Vegas when a serial killer terrorized that city in 1972.  As the gruesome facts came to be revealed, Kolchak was forced to reach a difficult conclusion that no one else was willing to: the killer was not a madman who thought himself a vampire, but was indeed a genuine vampire.  Kolchak was a rational man, unimaginative and not given to fancies, bull-headed to the point of rudeness...but he understood facts.  The facts were undeniable.

The movies worked for a number of reasons, but foremost among them was veteran character actor Darren McGavin as Kolchak, a newsman as exuberant as he was tactless.  He is described in The Night Strangler as having walked straight out of a production of The Front Page, with his vented porkpie hat and simple blue-collar attire.  That's him, boy, he'd have been at home in Hollywood's Thirties with his flippant jibes and irrepressible belief in his calling, his steadfast conviction in the people's right to know the truth.  Carl Kolchak flows from McGavin like water from a spring.  He's not a collection of mannerisms, he's a force of nature.  If The Night Stalker had been a stage play it would have closed early because in McGavin's hands Kolchak would have chased everyone else off the stage in pursuit of a juicy story. 

Stephen King wrote in his book Danse Macabre that Kolchak was the key to taking the vampire from its stuffy Gothic setting where we might see it as silly kids' stuff and making it a credible part of the real world - the mundane place of used car lots and property leases, of tired and hassled casino showgirls, of hospital blood banks and bureaucrats and bellicose editors.  The supernatural was a hard sell for a down-to-Earth, no-bullshit guy like Kolchak, but if he could believe in vampires, King argues, then so could we.  Producer Dan Curtis (of Dark Shadows fame) and author Richard Matheson convinced us by convincing Kolchak.  King was praising the original Night Stalker telefilm.  He was less laudatory of the series overall but still impressed with star Darren McGavin.

This eight-year-old didn't know anything about any of that.  I'd never even heard of the two TV movies.  But I knew what scared me, and Kolchak knew it before I did.

That's what this show is for me, the "safe scare" that the horror genre is at its heart unadulterated by gore, sex, subtext, or other concerns.  It is simple fear distilled. It is the tale told at the campfire, in the dark, in the open where nothing will shelter you.  You know it's not real, but...you look over your shoulders anyway.  Just in case.  'Cuz you can hear the woods moving.

***********************

The Ripper

Our first two proper looks at Carl Kolchak (including a credits sequence that's a miniature masterpiece) establish him as 'a regular joe' and a working stiff.  He rides the L, has no head for fashion, and if his hat spends all day on the floor 'cuz he missed the coathook it's no big deal.

Writing for the Independent News Service, Carl is watching a big story pass him by.  Someone is murdering women in Chicago's sex trade.  That's the kind of mean, gritty beat Carl is good at...and he's stuck filling in for "Miss Emily", the advice columnist while the killer assignment lands on the desk of prissy Ron "Uptight" Updyke - a  reporter singularly unqualified for the job.  Carl has been sidelined as  chastised by editor Tony Vincenzo after Kolchak's latest act of overzealousness in covering a story: Kolchak made a 'citizen's arrest' of people who got in his way.  In Carl's view, that's just getting the job done.  Tony knows Kolchak's the best reporter he's got going but oh! The headaches!  Kolchak has a gut instinct for rubbing  every authority in sight the wrong way, and it always ends up in Vincenzo's lap.  That's Tony Vincenzo, bellicose with his underlings but timid with authority.  The lead characters and the dynamic that will drive them have now been expertly sketched out for us in a matter of minutes with  zero exposition and no fuss. 

These regulars are half the fun of K:TNS, balancing the careful build of fright setpieces with delightfully funny bickering.  Simon Oakland reprises the role of Tony Vincenzo from the two Kolchak movies that preceded the series, ever frustrated by his star reporter's eccentricities.  One of these days Vincenzo's gonna be driven to a breakdown.   Updyke (Jack Grinnage) is the butt of Kolchak's humor, never able to get the upper hand.  McGavin and Oakland had already established a chemistry with natural rhythm and timing into which Grinnage easily becomes a perfect third party.  They make a great comedy trio. 

Also funny are scenes of Kolchak being stymied at a massage parlor and encountering a Miss Emily fan who asks if he spends a lot of time checking on weirdos.  Cpt. Warren is not especially amusing in himself but his steadfast faith in rationality provides a launching pad for McGavin to send Kolchak on an outraged tirade - he's so much fun to watch when he's skyrocketing!

Humor is a staple of TNS, balancing extended sequences of terror.  We see the victims being assaulted, Kolchak investigates, the facts mount.  Our serial killer dresses like an escapee from  Gothic horror production with natty Victorian dress, cape, top hat and devil's-head cane.  He leaps from rooftops several stories high with no injury, walks away from being hit by a car, tosses  around grown men - trained cops - like rag dolls and never utters  a single sound. 

For  most of the episode we will only see the murderer's clothing, and in glimpses at that.  We are kept in the dark quite literally as time has darkened the film stock of what  was already a production set largely at night.  This renders some of the action difficult to make out (Kolchak declares that the killer demolished a squad car, but we don't see it), but it also increases the creep factor.  You can really feel those empty spaces where it's best not to lurk, or the isolation of a  city street at night.

Fellow journalist Jane Plumm sets Kolchak in the right direction when she points out that these killings are replicating Jack the Ripper's reign of terror in London of the late 19th century.  Even the crude notes left for police are the same, and a letter withheld by police contain a nasty taunt about devouring one of the victim's kidneys (Jane relates over a huge lunch).  Did you know, she asks, that the same killing spree has been re-enacted multiple times over the last century?  Contagious psychosis, that's her theory.  This story is going to make her career if she can land it for the tabloid paying her salary.  She's hungry for it.

Kolchak comes to a much more radical  conclusion of his own.  One of Jane's copycats was hanged for his crimes, and the next to appear had rope burns on his neck. That added to the superhuman power this killer is possessed of can mean only one thing.  This is the real Jack the Ripper, still alive and still killing.  I hate to say this, but I must... if you were to judge by the series alone without the prior movies, Kolchak comes off as kind of a flake sometimes.  The Night Stalker (1972) had a running length of about 75 minutes, plenty of time in which Kolchak - a down-to-earth skeptic toward the supernatural - could weigh evidence and become convinced that vampires are real. The Night Strangler originally ran for 75 minutes and has since had material restored bringing it to 90.  Following up on those two telefilms, K:TNS allows only some 50 minutes per episode, which necessarily means we get little or nothing of his process in reaching unbelievable conclusions.  We know he's right every time, but only because he's the hero.  By extension that means we know that people like Jane Plumm are wrong.  We get exasperated with people like Vincenzo, or figures like Cpt. Warren of the police who stonewall with their common sense.  All the same, these are the rational ones in Kolchak's universe.  I try not to let that bother me when watching, but sometimes it does.  because of the airtime limitations, Kolchak is kind of an incredulous nutter too quick to embrace the ridiculous.  Besides his bull-in-a-china-shop approach, it's no wonder the authorities won't give him the time of day.

This particular theory has some holes in it.  How exactly is the Ripper still alive and unaging?  Is he not human?  If not, then what?  Why does he keep repeating the exact same pattern of his infamous spree,  down to the same notes, instead of just...killing? How can he wear the same shoes for over 70 years without a hint of wear on them?  To be filed under YNSTA (You're Not Supposed to Ask).  You gloss over it because it's a campfire tale. The details just get in the way.  For many, Jack the Ripper isn't just another serial killer, he's the quintessential boogeyman.  You can use him any way you like in a story and it will work.

 

Where the banter with Vincenzo and Uptight have a playful score complete with a near-'wah-wahhhh' theme for horns, strings dominate the dark.  Otherwise, scenes of Carl hunting or preparing to confront a monster tend to be silent.  If he speaks. it's in pithy prose voiceovers, recorded notes from which he will write his accounts.  He tends to compose his thoughts with an ear for the melodramatic punch.  Not exactly the stoic hero, then.  The Ripper's final act is a confident tour of the Ripper's derelict home and lair, Kolchak making us cringe as he leaves his sign everywhere through sheer lack of grace.  That too is a nice touch, making us fear that he is waaay too incautious and really ought the get the fuck out.  But no, he takes us in with him, right into a closet where he and we hide as Jack keeps reaching his hand through a curtain and right past Carl's nose.  How does our stalwart hero hold up?  He panics and screams.  You have to love a hero who loses his shit like that.

The finale is well orchestrated, quiet dread building to a breaking point before erupting into frenzy.  It would have been nothing, though, without the firm base that the rest of the episode has provided.  We see women going about their lives, The Ripper literally intruding into the frame,  and then we see the aftermath.  it's not graphic, but the sense of transgression and violence is carried in the reactions of those who are on the scene.  Ron Updyke is an object of ridicule but his revulsion and horror are easy to sympathize with.
Carl Kolchak - a hero for the people.  I'll rate it 7 drawers stuffed with unopened letters asking for advice.

Asides:

The dialog keeps insisting that Jane Plumm is "fat" - that's the specific adjective repeatedly given.  Unfortunate enough, this body shaming, and in her one big scene she overloads at a diner.  Why, then,  was the part  cast with an actress who by any standard could never be considered anything but her ideal body index? There's not an ounce of fat on her.

Kolchak wears tennis shoes (or running shoes if you prefer).  This makes sense for a reporter, or these days for just about anyone: hard shoes suck.  I guess in '74 that wasn't the norm?  A masseuse (actually undercover police officer) remarks that Kolchak's  shoes "are so funny".

 

One of the series' signature music cues makes its debut at around 48:40 (per the DVD).  It's one of my favorites from childhood.  You'll be hearing it often throughout the show.  I also  love that title theme by Gil Mellé.  Mellé is credited with writing the music for (at least) this episode, however five composers contributed throughout the series.  They include Jerry Fielding and Robert Cobert from Dark Shadows.  Who wrote what exactly, I don't know. 

I like Johnny Depp, I do.  All the same, I have read with no small amount of relief that Disney has finally deep-sixed Depp's plans to play Kolchak in a modern film version of The Night Stalker.  I've nothing against Depp, who is adept at crafting memorable, colorful characters, but in any given performance he is as likely to rely on mannerisms and caricature as he is to push himself for something more genuine.  McGavin's Kolchak was not driven by mannerisms and tics but by sheer force of personality.  In that, McGavin and Depp's approaches would be polar opposites: one spontaneous and the other studied to death.   Depp proclaims that he is a huge fan of the series, the character, and McGavin, and that his movie would be respectful.  I'm sure he means it, but he said the same of Dark Shadows and we all saw the awful parody which he and Tim Burton delivered  instead. I like Depp, but keep him away from The Night Stalker.

Phantom of the Opera (Robert Markowitz, 1983, TV movie)

Who  would've guessed that the opera ghost can't carry a tune?

The setting is Budapest, circa early 20th Century - we are not told when, but Bartok is considered a young man of promise.  Elena Korvin sings Marguerite in Faust.  She hasn't the disciplined talent or voice for it but is encouraged by her doting husband Sándor, who is the opera's conductor.  Also keeping her in employment is the opera house's owner, the lecherous Baron Hunyadi.  After a disastrous opening night, Elena is further hit by a scathing review paid for by the Baron as retribution for spurning his advances.  She throws herself from a bridge.  Sándor's revenge on the critic leads to a fight and ubiquitous accident with acid that leads to his disfigurement.

Four years later, aspiring singer Maria Gianelli becomes an understudy in a new production of Faust.  Hunyadi still owns the theater.  Korvin survives in the catacombs beneath, having been rescued by the homeless who live there.  When Korvin sees Maria, and hears her natural talent, he believes her to be his Elena  returned.  Both roles, Maria and Elena, are played by Jane Seymour.  Korvin determines to groom Maria to his late wife's vindicator.

This Phantom was produced by the Halmis, both Roberts Sr. and Jr.  They're a prolific pair, having put out a handful of worthy productions and a library's worth of mediocre ones.  Phantom is one of the latter.  A few of the notes are there but the script and direction fail to find a melody.
Phantom stars Maximilian Schell as Korvin, Seymour, Michael York as an English director overseeing the new production, and Jeremy Kemp as Hunyadi.  They're a good cast doing their earnest best, but the script by Sherman Yellen doesn't  support them.  Their characters are inconsistent, lurching from scene to scene as the plot requires rather than developing naturally.  Korvin is meant to be a  musical genius but cannot tell that his wife is a terrible singer.  When at first he tutors Maria, he is singularly disinterested in her as a person...later he will kidnap her in a demented effort to protect her from the world, yet at no time does he ever evince an inkling of genuine affection for her.  Meanshile, Hunyadi's villainy remains restrained until the story needs it as a plot device. York  as the love interest is all over the map, one minute throwing an conceited fit and the next acting the gentleman and detective to boot.  Presented thus, no chemistry ever develops between any of the characters...and what is the Phantom of the Opera without passion?

The editing is sometimes unhelpful as well, such as the backstory: a stranger helps the ailing Korvin escape to the underground, and I was left wondering who this samaritan was and what his motivation might be  until well late n the story.  The director neglects to let us in on it.  I thought he'd been forgotten.  We never really do learn except by inference near the finale.  The Phantom has made a lair for himself but allowed the homeless to remain with him.  What are thy to each other?  No one involved has any interest in exploring this.  Is he a kind of leader to them, or an eccentric that they tolerate?

Filmed on location in Budapest, photographer Larry Pizer makes the whole affair very...brown.  Perhaps the idea was to emulate a sepia tone to suggest  antiquity, but no amount of lit candles lend warmth or make for a  golden aura, it's just...brown.  After a  while you long for a splash of color.  You want a splash of emotion.

As a phan, I hate to dislike any telling of the Phantom of the Opera.  Alas, of all the versions of this story I've seen this is the least inspired, without flair or feeling or sense.  There are no scares to be had, nor romance, both vital to any good Phantom.  Even the Phantom's masks look defeated.

This is currently available on YouTube.

Ye ban ge sheng (Weibang Ma-Xu, 1937)

aka Song at Midnight

Every midnight Xia listens for the song of her lover, dead ten years now. He never fails her.

Song Dan-Ping had been a revolutionary forced to flee his home and take up a new life and new identity.  Changing his name, he became an actor.  Success and fame followed, and soon he had met an admirer in Xia.  The two fell in love.  Unhappily for them Xia's father, a general, had already arranged for her to marry another, a financially advantageous alliance.  Actors being amongst the lowest class, Song never had a chance.

The fiance Tang Jun was a cruel and proprietous man.  When Xia defied him for Song, Jung flung acid into Song's face.  Disfigured and ashamed, Song had word sent to his beloved that he had died - hoping to spare her.  Instead, it sent her mad. 

We learn all this in flashback halfway through the movie, related by the very-much-alive Song who serenades Xia every night.  It's not a spoiler, for a ghost he's very physical.  Ye ban ge sheng was inspred by the classic Universal horror films of the Thirties, and by the silent classic The Phantom of the Opera.  Director Weibang Ma-Xu imbues his frames with gloom, dread, and loneliness, not a single moment taking place in daylight hours.  Rain falls, fog drifts, cobwebs waft.  Men and Women in Western dress emerge from Western automobiles to seek shelter in a ton closed down for the night.  it's a town where the people lurk in superstitious fear of the ghostly singing that comes every night.  They all know the legend of the doomed love.   The performances are often exaggerated, adding to a creeping sense of unreality and theatricality.

Into this comes a theater troupe looking for a venue.  Its best to warn that the most easily available copy (it's on YouTube) is difficult to follow in places.  For one thing it suffers poorly translated English subtitles.  They make for an amusing read, but are nearly incomprehensible - I'd advise you to skim them for a general suggestion of meaning rather than pay strict attention to them.  Also problematic are the visuals, lovely as they are.  It's a dark film by design with an alluring lighting scheme, and unfortunately age has only deepened it's shadows to overwhelm much of the scenery.  If Ybgs could have a digital restoration, it would be a textural wonder.  Are you listening, Criterion?  Ye ban ge sheng is reputed to be China's first horror film surely deserving of inclusion in the Criterion Collection right there.

The troupe makes itself at home in a lodging house and begins to renovate the disused theater, not knowing that it it now the home of the "phantom" Song.  Song sees in leading man Xiao Ou a chance to reach out to Xia and earns his favor by becoming a secret vocal tutor.  In exchange Ou approaches Xia, who mistakes him for her lost love become flesh again.  Unbeknownst to any of them, tragedy looms again as Ou's own girlfriend catches the eyes of the unrepentant Tang Jun, who - being upper class - got away with the assault on Song Dan-Ping ten years earlier. 

Ye  ban ge sheng is not an apolitical film, not are it's politics easy.  It's backdrop and heart lay with an aversion to the warlord's feudalism that still ruled much of China  in the midst of civil war.  Complicating matters, conflict with Japan had finally become all-out war in 1937.  Both sides were calling for solidarity against the Japanese, a spirit that isn't reflected in Ybgs as Song, ever the activist at heart, plies Ou with a revolutionist opera and encourages his new friend to keep the cause alive.  Dan-Ping's cause is the director's own and he leaves no doubt who the film's true villains are.

Ye ban ge sheng's place in the pantheon of Phantom of the Opera movies is an interesting one and deserves to be better known.  What it retains of Gaston Leroux is the shamelessly romantic side of pulp - it's a movie that wears it's heart on its sleeve politically and humanely.  While this Phantom, like Leroux's, is a shadowy teacher or music and aspiring composer, he is not psychotic.  He is a wholly innocent figure of heartbroken love, as later Phantoms will be (see some of the TV adaptations of the 90s), playing to audience sympathy.   To that end, he is also a man of attractive looks until assaulted with acid, a plot twist that originated here and transplanted whole into the next adaptation, Universal's Phantom of the Opera (1943), a prestige production directed by Arthur Lubin and starring Claude Rains as Eriq the Phantom.  Even people with only a passing knowledge of the Phantom of the Opera think of his as a character disfigured by acid...you can thank Ye ban ge sheng for that.  Ybgs also deviates from the Leroux in its finale, though perversely echoing Lon Chaney's 1925 classic with an exciting chase sequence involving the opera  ghost and an enraged public. 

In 1941, director Weibang Ma-Xu made a sequel, Ye ban ge sheng xu ji (literally 'Song at Midnight - the sequel').  Ye ban ge sheng has been remade twice, once as a two-part film in 1962 (aka The Mid-Nightmare) and again in 1995.  The latter was directed by Ronnie Yu and starred Leslie Cheung.  As yet I have  not seen any of these.

This was my second time seeing the movie, and I have to say I'd love to own a restored  copy with accurate subtitles.  It's grown on me considerably, having thought it soulful but confusing the first time several years ago.  "We didn't be baffled  forever."

O.C. and Stiggs (Robert Altman, 1985)

Let it be stipulated right up front that the Schwab family are monsters.  According to a number of sources I've read, they are meant to represent the middle class, but if that's so then they belong to the upper reaches of middle-classdom.  They are conspicuously wealthy and conspicuously unworthy.  The Schwab patriarch is a bigoted boor, his wife an oblivious alcoholic who thinks she's fooling everyone, the daughter an obnoxious brat and the son was born to sport taped-up hornrims and underwear pulled over his head by the school bullies.  These people stepped out of a cartoon.  Not a parody, a cartoon.  I stress that because the film and its characters are an adaptation of a series of stories published by National Lampoon.  We expect satire, but Robert Altman takes the clan a few steps further.

That's an awkward choice, because from all accounts he has played down the antics of the films teenage protagonists Oliver Cromwell Ogilvie and Mark Stiggs.  The two are meant to be taken as a couple of laid-back smartasses expressing their contempt for suburbia, for everything bourgeois, and for their peers.  We are supposed to snicker at their war waged on everyone in sight.  They're smarter than Beavis and Butthead and less manic than Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo.  Unfortunately, their contempt is not based on moral outrage, like Hunter S. Thompson's, it is because they are a couple of sociopaths.  A typical day for them is to buy a Studebaker (so they can feign being too poor to have insurance),  turn it into a monster truck, and crash into other people's cars.  For them, an amusing wedding gift is a loaded uzi.   Their dripping sarcasm spares few: Wino Bob,  because he amuses them; a girl that O.C. is attracted to (he's  quick to drop her for "some sluts" when she displays some humanity and taste);  Dennis Hooper, a brain-fried Vietnam vet, because he can get them armaments; King Sunny Ade, because Stiggs thinks being a fan makes a political statement; and Schwab's neighbor, a self-made millionaire.  The guy got rich selling tacky clothing to plus-sized women..."hogs", in his parlance.

So I have to ask, as crass as the Schwabs are, how can they be morally offensive to the titular antiheroes who value nothing?  We hate them, Altman hates them, but why do O.C. and Stiggs hate them?   Altman goes after familiar targets as easy as they are deserving, but he asks us to accept as surrogates a pair of champions who are every bit as loathsome.  Schwab is confronted with poverty when his house is used as a "charity" front, but our heroes have no genuine concern for the homeless folk - they too are fodders for a joke, for which O.C & S hope to make a buck themselves.   O.C. is no Hawkeye, and Stiggs no Trapper John.  Their misanthropy has no fire in it.

It helps that it's Altman.  His style is unmistakable, and he fills the movie with his usual impeccable cast (including Paul Dooley, Jane Curtin, Melvin Van Peebles, Martin Mull, Ray Walston, Cynthia Nixon, Jon Cryer, Tina Louise and Bob Euker),  his usual quirks, his visual and aural layering,  and enough quiet touches that I almost forgot what scumbags I was being asked to sympathize with.  Still, the humor never quite finds its groove nor do the  nominal heroes ever earn their  rewards.

I have not read the original stories from National Lampoon, nor do I desire to.  It's enough to have read that Altman has excised most of their destructive swath and taken their edge off.  It's impossible to guess if that was a good move....O.C. & Stiggs are too assholish for the film to be amiable, but it also fails as the black comedy it wants to be because Alltman has defanged it.  Had he not done so it could have been a success, or maybe an Ishtar-caliber bomb.  Instead it's simply forgotten.

UFO - The Long Sleep (final episode)

The waters are awfully icy this morning. Col. Lake informs Straker that a ten-year-old case has just been reopened and asks if he would like to look into it personally. 'Asks' night not be the right word, more like 'taunts'...and then we learn why. The case involved a woman who had been hit by a car and sent into a coma. The man that hit her was Straker, and the woman has just woken up. The way Lake lets her boss know borders on cruelty. Straker has such a look of guilt on his face that he can't object.

Under the care of Dr. Jackson, Catherine Frazer rebuilds her memories of the accident and the circumstances that led to it. As a young woman she had just run away from her parents and spent the day with another youth she had just met, Tim Redman. Tim also was an escapee with nowhere to go, he running from academia. Together they wasted a day in an abandoned farmhouse. At night, Tim introduced her to drugs. While they were high, they encountered by chance a couple of aliens planting a device in the barn. What fun!

Imagine the poor aliens' bewilderment at these two crazed humans who steal the key to the device to play tag with, lead them on a merry chase to the roof, and then one of these mad terrestrials leaps off the roof to his own death. Imagine poor Tim, who thought he could fly.

Now imagine poor Catherine. She awakes the next day to see Tim's body dragged away by the aliens and witnesses the UFO fly away. She hitches a ride to return to the city only to have to flee the driver who tries to molest her. She runs right into the path of one Ed Straker.

It's Ed that Jackson calls in to help revive her memories (that's right, Jackson, the girl's state is fragile so call in Mr. Tact). She has no family now, her parents died waiting for her to recover.

Someone else is waiting. Tim was revived by the aliens ten years ago, programmed, and stationed as a sentinel to watch over Catherine. As long as it may take, they want that key.

Something about Cathy's tale has Ed spooked. In 1974, three days prior to colliding with Cathy, a UFO was spotted over Turkey. A few hours after that Turkey was rocked by an earthquake that killed 80,000 and leveled a city. (note - that places this episode as taking place in 1984, so it has now been four years since our introductory episode 'Identified'). Somehow Straker makes the leap: the UFOs destroyed the Turkish city, therefore they must have been about to do the same to rural England. (Really? Not, say, London?) Yes, it must have been a bomb! No, not the plan, I mean literally a bomb - and it's still there!

Indeed it is. A bomb, barely covered by loose soil hastily tossed ten years ago, in a farmhouse no one has set foot in for ten years, not even local kids looking for diversions. Yep. Not only that, the key is still on the houseboat it landed in, the boat that still sits on the same patch of river under the bridge Catherine threw it from. The chase is on because now Tim knows, and so does Straker. they both obtained the final lost memory with the use of an alien serum that sped up Catherine's heart rate as a side effect. Tim used it on her and carelessly left it behind. To stop him it must be used on her again. For once, Straker is unable to make the call that endangers a life, and the morally inscrutable Jackson is reluctant as well. It's Foster who insists. Turkey, 80,000 people dead...Straker put the fear into him. Ed, though...you'll remember the last time someone he was responsible for was in a hospital waiting for him to make a choice. Ed has come to care about Catherine.

We see Ed in the waiting room. it's a nicely understated callback to 'A Matter of Priorities' without exposition or otherwise being obvious. I like the direction of this episode very much, the work of Jeremy Summers who also directed The Psychobombs. The flashbacks scenes are in sepia, until that gives way directly to shifting bright color filters for the pharmaceutical high. It's an effective transition. The script is by the same David Tomblin who gave us The Cat With Ten Lives, Reflections in the Water, and three episodes of The Prisoner. Just what the aliens get from killing by the tens of thousands is unclear, but it doesn't exactly hurt their aims either. One might speculate that it throws nations into chaos as cover for the aliens to do their work. Real-world answer is likely the same fuzzy spec script communication that resulted in 'Destruction': they're aliens so they must want to kill us all (and who said anything about body harvesting?) You might wonder why the aliens don't simply send another key on the next UFO headed our way, as in 1974 SHADO was probably not up and running yet, but it may be a matter of resources - notice they left a human drone behind to deal with it instead of their own personnel. That's a minor matter. What counts is that this is the rare episode that lets us have a little backstory for our civilian characters, not much but enough to invest in them, get to like and root for them.

Alas, this is UFO so things come to a sad end. Tim accomplishes his task and essentially falls over dead. SHADO techs fail to disarm the bomb, so they employ a miniature rocket to send it into space. Returning to the hospital, Ed finds that Catherine died as Tim did: their life force spent. Catherine aged rapidly. Jackson doesn't have any answers but guesses that the aliens brought Tim back to life by stealing some of her life essence.

Tim and Catherine met, perhaps fell in love, and spent one glorious day together. They spent ten more years apart but locked together, and died still tied one to the other.

Lake's anger at Straker has vanished, replaced by empathy for his pain and for Catherine. Ed goes home alone.

10 'Century 21' logos. Even those thrilled me as a child, part of the ritual of watching every Sunday around noon like seeing the old UA symbol appearing before Bond flicks when they aired on the ABC Sunday Night Movie.

And so UFO comes to a close. Plans were shaping for a second season in which SHADO would expand their forces, the aliens would step up their fight, and much of the action would take place on and around the Moon. Unfortunately the show was dropped by ITC. Not ready to give up entirely, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson took what they had and created Space: 1999.

UFO - Timelash

The morning after leaving to pick up Col. Lake at the airport, Commander Straker suddenly appears at SHADO HQ disheveled and apparently stark raving mad and taking it out on the machinery. Taking the show out to the Harlington/Straker sets, he leaves in his wake a hefty damages bill and questions: how did he get back into the building, why is he holding dangerous drugs to increase metabolism, why is Lake unconscious on the roof, and why is one of the lesser technicians dead in a go-cart, riddled with bullets?


Lake isn't much help when she comes to. She's diagnosed as having sustained a blow to the back of the neck that has caused a two-hour amnesic gap. I don't know what's more impressive, knowing to tap a neck to produce a two-hour amnesia (top that, Spock) or diagnosing that it's been done.


The answers will have to come from Straker, who also inhabits a recovery bed. Not coming around fast enough for Henderson who declares that a SHADO without Straker is a dire emergency and promptly orders Dr. Jackson to administer a drug that might kill Straker instead of hastening his recovery. Makes sense. You wouldn't want to just give the man a day or so to get his wits back. Might be a rough job of it, from his ravings. "They murdered time!"


Here begins the flashback. Returning from the airport the night before, Straker and Lake are first tracked by a UFO, then attacked as they near HQ. We know something happens as the screen image turns negative for a moment, but just what it is will take unraveling. I've seen the episode some four or five times over my life, and I'm still trying to work it out. Hurrying on to the studio lot, night suddenly turns to day and time has stood still - people frozen mid-stride, birds aflight, tossed objects that remain in the air. Straker grabs a piece of wood and strikes at a stool doing bullet-time and can't make it move, failing to realize that he should have been unable to pick up the wood...or open doors for that matter. Apparently only objects that were under the influence of kinetic energy are paralyzed while those at rest can still be manipulated. Probably a neat conundrum in there somewhere, make for a cool sci-fi novel. There's no time to explore it here, but we do pause for some brief exposition that clears up nothing.


Let me see if I have this close to right...at first it appears that SHADO has been caught in a bubble of frozen time. We have to guess why Straker and lake are immune, perhaps because they were caught at the edge of the affect area. Their watches no longer work. Straker has a better theory: the aliens have projected in which they themselves move at a highly accelerated rate, making everything around them appear to stand still. This explains how they could get past moonbase, an incoming UFO is travelling in such a bubble, and because its path brings it right to HQ the forward edge is now affecting Harlington/Straker studios. SHADO is shielded by heavy lead within its walls, so another field generator has been placed inside HQ, thus necessitating a traitor to plant the device. They wouldn't have to do that to blow the place sky-high, so the idea must be to take it over entirely. An ambitious scheme on all fronts!

Wait, that doesn't sound right either...if the wave is hitting the studio, then everything there should speed up too. My brain hurts, it'll have to come out.


Frozen time, sped-up movement...either way it presents us some problems that haven't been worked out. For instance, if the world is still moving at normal speed then things like elevators, guns, and electronic security panels should not be moving at his speed. Nor go-carts. Nor should the laws of physics bend to his will - gravity and others. So, we have to wonder. Like Straker, we're guessing. Best leave it at that.


Like I said, not a lot of time (heh!) to discuss it because - let's all shout it angrily together - "TRAITOR!!!" One of our lesser techs, Turner, is an agent for the aliens and it didn't take mind control to turn him. Looks like Straker's not a hit with everyone after all. Turner is one of those with a hate-on for humanity and how he's been treated, and sells us out with the promise of a chance to whip out his psyche and wave it at Straker.


The rest of the episode, a good half maybe, is a game of cat and mouse with Lake & Straker hunting Turner while an unhinged Turner tries to kill them. Somewhere on the base is a bit of equipment that the tech rewired into a transmitter for the alien time wave. Again, I'm too slow to follow what does what here. The signal is being sent from a UFO outside the time envelope, and though it is on it's way it has to come slowly because it is operating at a different temporal level and must adjust as it passes the threshold. I think. I wonder if that shouldn't affect the oscillation of the signal as well (ala sound and light waves). Meanwhile, Turner is able to play with time in ways a Gallifreyan would envy, projecting himself backwards or forwards, pulling Straker out of incidents to witness them again. So what kind of time manipulation are we talking about here? A world slowed down or people sped up? if there's an explanation for this it could only be pulled from Jackson's backside. It's wicked fun and doesn't make a lick of sense. Seems to me the aliens have endowed Turner with more power than they've allowed themselves, a rather foolhardy move. You can tell from the childishness of his taunts that his cogs have slipped big-time. He's been promised a high place in the new regime. Aren't they all?

I'm also not clear how Straker and Lake made it into the affected field and whether they were meant to. I doubt it, as they were attacked before arriving...and why do they not need to adjust at the same rate the UFO does once they're through the envelope? Really, there are all sorts of things that you're not meant to think about here. Timelash was written by Terence Feely, who also contributed scripts to Space: 1999 and The New Avengers. I enjoyed those as well, but this is easily the better piece aided by terrific direction and fx work.


I don't care. It's a brisk episode that grabs your attention right away and never lets up, nor is it straightforward enough to easily guess where it's going. If sense must cede to sensibility, this is a good way to go. with many wondrous little touches and a little skewed humor. This is among the best of what UFO could be when it comes to sheer exuberant strangeness. So, I'll give it 9 magic machine guns that never need reloading.



Asides:
It's good to see Henderson again, and Jackson! I'm gonna miss these guys.


ep concludes with Straker coming to his senses. Jackson explains to Henderson that Straker has experienced...ah, I can't remember what he caled it, but it sums up what we just saw. But how the hell does he know that??


One of these episodes, either this one or Mindbend, has a glimpse of the Interceptor cockpit sets. Between the swift pace and looking away to take notes, I failed to spot them.


Give Harlington/Straker a hand, ladies and gentlemen! That prop gets a lot of use. maybe they're filming a sequel to whatever movie used it last time.


Catch the funky wind machine effect on Straker's face as he tries to target the UFO? To quote MST3K, "That's quite a tic ya got there, son."


Turner fumes that Straker is "the guy all the girls admire". There's no evidence from the series to support that. I can buy that Turner believes it, though, it's clearly a sore spot and I can see him endowing Straker with every trait he feels a failure at.

UFO - Ordeal

"Two weeks here and you're going to feel on top of the world", the therapist says.  He should have said "out of this world".  It would have been truer.

Immediately followng his return home from a stint on Skydiver, and the night before a mandatory stay at SHADO's torture  health spa, Col. Foster spends the last of his energy on a party.  (Prediction for the 80's: your future will be fashion retro with a nostalgic wave of mod 60's excess.  Get your unironic Austin Powers on!)  So he's drained going in, struggling when he realizes he's locked in the sauna with the temperature rising, and limp when the aliens find and kidnap him.

Except they don't.  Foster has passed out and is having a vivid stress-induced nightmare.  You're not told that until the final moments of the episode, and there's a deft bit of sleight-of-hand to fool us all: SHADO HQ has been hunting a UFO that broke though their perimeter, and Foster's nightmare hinges on just that scenario.  It almost feels like  a cheat upon reveal, but the former is common enough for SHADO while the nightmare would be a  common one to personnel.

Speaking of entertainement in general, this is exactly the twist that always turns audiences off.  The 'it was all in his/her head' ending.   People become invested in the situation only to be told "It didn't happen?"  "It didn't mean anything!"  It smacks of the writers not being able to think up a decent solution to the central dilemma so they reach for their handy book of trite cop-outs.  An argument can be made that the dream of Ordeal does certainly mean something and has some value, but in this case I can only be just so enthusiastic about it.

The episode is illustrative of the fear, tension, and fatigue that must be what every SHADO agent carries just under the sonscious barrier on a daily basis.  That's worth seeing.   As an inner look at Paul Foster, he turns out to be not that interesting.  We see very little that we hadn't already seen on the surface.  That is, we may not know it's a dream but sriter Tony barwick does, so he's aware that manifestations of Straker, Freeman, Jackson and the like are taken from Foster's own perceptions and expectations.  Of ccourse, Barwick doesn't want to tip his hand, so we get the same Straker, Freeman, etc.. that we always do...and honestly I don't think Barwick was after anything other than a thrilling experience, which he deelivers quite expertly.  From our POV, we've never been the abductee before.  Now we have.  I'm just saying we could have had that small bit more, not enough to break the illusion but enough to leave lingering questions about Foster and his working relations.

Maybe there is something,  though.  For a fantasy concocted by Foster's id, Lt. Gay Ellis features a lot in his rescue.  For example, how often so we see her take to the lunar surface personally when someone under her command needs rescuing?  Foster is an exceeption, is he?  Must be awfully special to her...It's your classically romantic scenario, she spends every minute after in his company, reassuring and comforting him right up to the moemnt he comes to on the sauna floor at the health spa.

The episode is gripping on a first viewing, with plenty of tension as Straker orders the UFO shot down (will  the Sky 1 pilot Waterman comply?), as the damaged UFO crashes on the moon,  Foster having his lungs filled with the liquid aleins use for space travel, etc.   Having seen it a number of times, I know it holds up on rewatch.  So,  I'm giving it 7 rights clearances to Paul McCartney's catalog.  Never ceases to surprise me that 'Get Back' made it in in the first place, and more that it's still there.

Asides:

F.O., Foster! That means you're first, alphabetically!

At SHADO HQ, a female technician brings coffee to a male tech...at least it  didn't seem as if he aked, she simply offers him some.  Either the sexism problem is more institutionally entrenched at SHADO than any of us has realized, or she really likes the guy and wants him to notice.  I'd like to think it's the latter.  She reminded me a little of someone I fell for once.

"Have you ever been in a sonar bath before?"  Sounds neat.  Is that like a sonic shower on Star Trek?  Hmm, so you need steam for a sonar bath?  How does that work?  Why not just call it - oh, I see.  Sauna bath.  Ne'mind.

Should have been a lot more green liquid gushing out of that helmet, and to clear Foster's lungs he should have been leaning forward. Still, kudos for getting the  panic right.

On learning that Foster was abducted, a Skydiver crewmember exclaims, "How could that happen?"  She must be new, because it happens to SHADO people all the time!

At the spa there's a guy named Franklin who's overweight.  Oh, sorry, I meant to say fat.  We're supposed to be thoughtful of others and not inflict 'political correctness' on them.  Franklin's a tub.  That means he's the comic relief.  Just pointing out that he's a fatass is inherently funny.  So go ahead and have a  laugh at his expense, because even the score mocks him.


Two episodes to go.