Kolchak: The Night Stalker - They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be...

"I will now address you in the universal language of Mathematico: AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHH!!"

That never fails to put a smile on my face!

THB,TA,TWB takes it's title from H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror: “The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.”  Lovecraft in turn echoes John 6:60 in the Bible.  Both sources speak of a greater nature to the universe than mankind can fathom (in John that unfathomable nature is our own).

That's pretty creepy, unseen and pitiless forces that care nothing for our well-being...but ya know what?  It's also great for filming on low budgets!

It's the first day of the World Series, The Cubs are playing, and Kolchak has tickets.  It's unseasonably warm* by the look of things.  Heat makes people crazy, audio reception is terrible, animals keep dying of heart attacks every night at the zoo, someone is stealing electronics - going as far as ripping them out of home stereo components on 2nd stories while they're in use!  Right out the windows of people's homes!  Someone trashed a guy's lawn, said guy insisting it must have been a road crew given the stinking globs of tar left behind.  the city swears no such work took place.  Said guy's neighbor had all her cats killed by someone.  Even the police are having a weird day.  Captain  Quill and his men respond to a break-in at Raydyne Electronics and witness a cinderblock wall blow out and a ton of lead ingots slowly fade out of existence before their eyes.  No perpetrators were ever seen.  Feds keep showing up - you can tell them by their aloof superiority, style-free suits, and closed mouths. 

The first half of the episode is a sequence of deceptively meandering incidents, letting us as Kolchak in on a feast of disparate and seemingly random phenomena.  We get it in fragments the way Kolchak does, distracted by the radio in his top-down Mustang. Kolchak begins to realize there are connections forming.  The "viscid mass" on the citizen's lawn also appears in the zoo every time an animal  dies.  The goo is composed of digestive acids and bone marrow.  A guard killed at Raydyne had the marrow removed from his bones, as have a few others who've died mysteriously. We see Kolchak taking in info from a variety of sources, and we get to put the pieces together as he does.  At a police press conference, everyone learns that those who were at Raydyne when it was raided have had their watches stopped dead.  Kolchak reasons it must have been an electro-magnetic force, and so invests in a compass.  Not all of his research makes it to the screen, we learn, as Kolchak brings Vincenzo up to speed on experts he's consulted on different fields.

Poor Vincenzo.  His star reporter is on crackpot patrol again. Not great timing, this briefing, the details and the headache are putting him off the gourmet dinner he's treated himself to.  What the hell is that on his plate?  Brains??  What's on Kolchak's plate, little green men?  Oh, sorry, little invisible men but obviously from Mars.  Oy vey.

Monique Marmelstein sure has pluck!  She was thrown last week the first time she'd ever had to face a murder scene, but she got right back in there.  You've got to respect that.  She's meant to be annoying as a foil to Kolchak but I appreciate the humor of Carol Ann Susi's performance more all the time, as well as the character's resolution to succeed.  She's feisty.  She's such a contradictory bundle of nerve, self-worth, and insecurity such as overhearing Updyke's comments on a roller-derby warrior that terrifies him: Monique thinks it's her being spoken of literally right behind her back.  She speaks up and offers opinions, right up until her boss uses her as a prop in a transparent ploy to lure Carl into taking an assignment. 

Everyone gets a  good moment.  Monique faces the wrath of Kolchak after the Feds press her to hand over his negatives.  Kolchak can be a holy terror.  He's not too soft on Updyke either when Ron needles him over the prized World Series tickets.  Jack Grinnage has a quiet moment, spot-on: "And you call me uptight." As gregarious and outgoing as Kolchak can be with strangers, it must be hard having him in your life.  He comes off as a bully in this scene.  No one likes a bully.

Quill must feel that way too, that Carl is hard to abide.  Call me crazy, though, I still got a whiff of grudging respect passed between he and Kolchak.  They both seem to know the other is good at what they do and are willing to watch out for each other as much as conflicts arise.  Quill cuts him off at a press conference with a subtle hint that Kolchak's line of questioning is going to make them both look bad.  Kolchak uncharacteristically never suggests that Quill is incompetent.  At least, he trusts the Captain more than he does the Men in Black.  Quill is well played by James Gregory, best known as the crusty Inspector Luger of Barney Miller and as General Ursus in Beneath the Planet of the Apes ("...the only good human is a dead one!") It's good casting, to type to foreshorten time spent establishing the character.  We instantly get this is a guy to take seriously.

Mary Wickes has a nice turn a Dr. Winestock, a vet at the zoo.  Gordie the Ghoul returns.  Dick Van Patten overplays just a bit the aggrieved homeowner.  Sportscaster Dick Enberg is the radio DJ, uncredited.  Kolchak gets a lead from a meeting of local UFO enthusiasts where he talks with one of those familiar bit players you know you've seen before but can't place.

One of the UFO groupies has disappeared. Kolchak finds his equipment and an audio tape in the woods, made just as the man was attacked and killed.  Using his compass, Kolchak follows a magnetic trail to a nearby planetarium.

This was the single most frightening scene for me as a child, one of the most memorable of the whole series - one of those that left an impression.  Visually it looks like a Mario Bava film in saturated red, blue, and yellow.  I didn't know what a planetarium was at the time, and the projector looked  like the kind of exotic weapon H.G. Wells' Martians might have employed.  More unsettling was the fact that it was moving by some invisible hand as if the machine had a mind of its own (like I said, I didn't know how those work - controlled by an operator at a panel) - that's inherently terrifying, because a machine bent on killing cannot be reasoned with.   It's the same thing that made The Car (1977) and Killdozer (1974) so potent for me, as well as the Gunslinger in Westworld (1973) or later The Terminator (1984).  "It can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with...it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear...and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."  You cannot appeal to empathy from  what has no human feeling, and when it doesn't even look remotely humanoid (as an auto or bulldozer certainly do not) the possibility doesn't even enter one's head.  The aliens aren't machines, but they  do seem exactly as unreachable. And they were right there in the room with Kolchak.  Probably standing right next to him.  He's not searching anymore, he's found them now and that's probably a huge mistake.

THB,TA,TWB often rates low with fans because the aliens are not seen and because the finale plays as an anticlimax.  On the former, I think it was the right call for the reasons given above and because no alien design or costume would fail to come across as silly.  Overall, I like  how the intruder (we don't know if there was more than one, but its craft was pretty small) was handled from the police being hurled slo-mo to the  wind that heralds their passing.  Many UFO reports allege objects or craft simply fading out rather than navigating away from a scene, so I've no problem with the ingots disappearing - though I'd ask why it's necessary to blow out a wall if translocation is possible.  I also wonder why an electromagnetic field strong enough to stop watches doesn't ruin Kolchak's film or erase audiotapes.  (Would it affect Kolchak's pictures?)  As for the weak ending...the entire episode is an immersion into the creepy, a pervading air of the Lovecraftian.  I prefer that Kolchak is in over his head and can  do nought but stand by and hope that it's over.

The UFO is singularly unimpressive by today's standards but is an average depiction for the era.

"A traveler has a breakdown, stops to fix it, gets a roadmap, has a bite to eat, and goes on his way.  It's happened to all of us.  This traveler happened to be light years off his course instead of miles."  No invasion, not even the slightest interest in humanity.  It's a rare treat to see the alien arrival scenario without the narcissistic insistence that Earth is some special jewel coveted by the rest of the universe.  The idea was inherent in Ray Bradbury's It came From Outer Space, and the line Kolchak speaks to his recorder echoes the novella Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.  Roadside Picnic was the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and an inspiration for the podcast Tanis.  I highly recommend all of these titles.


9 ghastly repasts of gastronomic enchantment.  Get this plate away from me before I throw up in my brains!

Asides:
You can tell that rewrites took place mid-production.  Vincenzo and Carl have an exchange about a second large cat being stolen from the zoo in two days.  That's an intriguing story, because who would steal a cheetah and a panther?  That's the last time the script refers to thefts, henceforth Kolchak and everyone else speaks of deaths at the zoo and no suggestion the animals ever went missing.

I've been to a MUFON meeting.  The UFO group in the ep is played for laughs with all the usual nutters trying to find meaning in stellar designations twisted beyond recognition (Wormwood means DOOMWROM if you read it backwards and upside-down!).  Amusing but camp.  In real life, the people I've met at MUFON are sober, educated, and highly credible people who have either an interest or experiences that are inexplicable by any 'rational' means.

I've noted the opening titles sequence and how deftly it sets the tone for what's to follow, but not yet mentioned the closing credits.  Titles play over Kolchak picking up his coat and hat, walking for the exit, and turning out the lights.  It's clearly night.  He'll be crossing the city alone.  Yeah, it seems to say, you sitting there about to turn off the TV and go to bed - you try sleeping after what you've just seen.  Pitch-perfect way to close each episode.

*The outdoor scenes were obviously filmed in Summer, though Chicago does have the odd hot day in October.  They had one in '74, October 11th. First day of the World Series was October 12th, between the Oakland A's and the LA Dodgers and was played in California.  Had to look it up, not a baseball fan.  Kolchak says he's a Cubs fan, but the series never establishes whether he is or is not from Chicago.  The movies had him in Las Vegas, then Seattle, and the planned third (The Night Killers, written by Richard Matheson and William F. Nolan) would have seen him in Hawaii.