Much has already been said about Kolchak as a character and as a show (and TV movies), so I don't have to worry about introducing any context that establishes who and what the character is. Instead, I'll treat the character as someone we know fairly well.

But before I start talking about the episode itself, I have to mention that I'm still unsure how to deal with the fact there are two TV movies that precede the show. On the one hand, watching the movies would steal the show's freshness (and as I've watched them before the show, I am convinced they would). On the other hand, a few things are much better explained in the movies, and I feel really tempted to mention a few of them at times. We'll get there anyway.

One thing the show has that the movies don't is the opening credits sequence. It reminds me of an anecdote about a young civil servant starting at his first job in local government and, eager to do a good job, starts pounding away at the keyboard keys like a "1930s newshound with a great scoop to tell," thus making the other more veteran civil servants look bad. That image of the furious 1930s typist has stuck with me, and it translates the typical attitude of someone involved in a more idealistic age of journalism. At which time, even Superman decided to join a news team in order to make the truth known.

The other detail of the opening is that Kolchak misses the coat rack when he tosses his hat, showing he has little care about his surroundings, his clothes, and fashion in general: the only thing that matters is the story.

About the episode itself, we can see that the heart of the show is the interaction between Kolchak and Vincenzo, as established already in the two movies. These are easily two very likable characters, and one of the main reasons viewers would come back to the show week after week.

by Simian_Jack » 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. that's a crucial point. And I think that's going to repeat every week. For us it's a sort of deja vu comparable to Straker's uncanny intuition to explain the whole situation even without any facts to support it.

Another point that the show misses and the movies provide us with are the consequences after the killer is neutralized. In the show there was a brief narrated explanation and the episode ended. In the movies we have much more in terms of consequences and the reaction of the authorities trying to cover things up.

by lorkris » I can’t imagine a show today not having at least one of these actors being a 29 year old guy who looks like he spends the majority of his day at the gym. More than likely the boss would be the ‘old’ guy and the police captain and Kolchak would be young ‘gladiators’ playing off each other. Nowadays at least one of these characters wold be a woman. I bet the police captain would be an African American, like Lieutenant Van Buren from Law and Order. But I can see the Kolchak character more or less unchanged today, but perhaps with a much darker side. Come to think of it, "Saul Goodman" seems to be modeled after Kolchak in a way, except that Jimmy McGill has a much darker side, while Kolchak's dark side is literally manifested in his flirting with dark supernatural forces.

I was surprised that they killed Miss Plumm. My guess is Miss Plumm, in the library, with a candlestick.

Anyway, after watching the episode I came up with a few questions. Let's see how the show handles them:

• Will all of the killers' victims be women? The ladies seem to get the short end of the stick in Kolchak stories.

• Is Kolchak going to come across some unlikely supernatural incident every single week in Chicago? What are the odds of that happen?

• What does Kolchak actually do for a living? I mean, what kind of stories does he normally write? No reporter could survive writing about vampires and monsters on a daily basis. Especially when none of his stories get published.

• Speaking of which, Kolchak didn't get lucky this time and his story was buried. Will any of his stories see the light of day, or will they all be buried under the mysterious cloak of the night and indifference?

• Kolchak didn't seem to be a very flexible reporter, considering his lack of adaptation to the position of "sob sister". How would he react having to do real reporting work? (E.g. interviewing the secretary of water and sanitation, covering a teachers' protest for better salaries, interviewing an expert about changes in local traffic, analyzing City Hall's planned budget, covering a sports event, reporting on damage caused by a storm, etc... (Of course, I'm just joking, but it's funny how traditional reporters in fiction investigate crimes, while most of the stuff we read in newspapers are about something else, things that affects us daily.)

• Will Kolchak every be in the editor's position (perhaps filling in for Vicenzo on, I don't know, jury duty) thus having to demand cold hard facts from an intempestive rookie journalist?

• Speaking of jury duty, will we have a jury episode in which Kolchak will try and convince the other jurors the murderer is someone other than human?

• Will there be a bottle episode, say, with Kolchak and Vincenzo stuck in an elevator the whole time?

Well, more questions to come.

The episode gets 8 desk drawers with badly hidden sob letters to "Miss Emily".

I'd never heard of Kolchak before this, so apart from a quick peak at the overall design of the show and the episode titles I was pretty fresh. I really enjoyed the story. Kolchak comes across instantly likeable. He's a character we don't see to much of these days, a true everyman. He isn't smarter or stronger and that made him relate-able. I enjoyed his banter with the rest of the news room especially his interplay with his boss. His hiding of the Miss Amy letters in various drawers was pretty funny.

I initially cringed when Updyke was introduce with his soft voice and his mincing walk across the room. But I ended up sympathising with his reaction to the true horror of the killings which although played a little for laughs did demonstrate how gruesome they were. The Ripper is always an intriguing character. The way they portrayed him in this reminded me a little of Eugene Toombs in the X-Files episodes "Squeeze" and "Toombs". A strange non-human immortal who emerges every few years to kill.

I would have like to know why he kills 5, what does he do with them. The only victim we see after was Plumm and he seems to have just hidden her under a dust sheet. The cops in this did seem to have their heads screwed on. They chase him across the rooftops at one point and then lay a trap that would have been successful for a mortal man but only captures him due to luck. His super strength seemed a bit cheesy, I would have preferred if he was a little more stealthy, sneaking from crime scenes and being rarely seen.

I did start wondering how they were going to tie up the episode as each time Kolchak was around the Ripper he, quite rightly, just went to take photos and not try to stop him. His use of investigation to figure out the Rippers location and a possible weakness was interesting if a little bit of a stretch (the date of the electric chair) but I guess he did see the effect electricity had to subdue him.

The final creeping round the house was very tense and I like how Kolchak had prepared a trap in advance. The way Jack never speaks was suitably mysterious and his melting away at the end was a good effect.

Overall a great start and I'm looking forward to episode 2 7 straw hats out of 10

A few thoughts: The punters at the go-go dancing place get their moneys worth with one girl finishing and another running in immediately. Bit weird that the girls appear to get changed in the managers office. I love how Jack just flipped the guy over the bar who tried to stop him in the club. I guess after the fire Plumm will turn into a missing person. This might be bad news for Kolchak who on the night she disappeared heard where she was going and ran off. Imagine if the fire hadn't destroyed her body, I think Kolchak might have some explaining to do.

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".