410 – Night Stalker – What’s the Frequency, Kolchak?

The adventures of the Night Stalker come to an end with a bizarre kidnapping.  The victim:  Carl Kolchak. Simon and Eugene discuss. Episode synopsis: A man is chained to a wheelchair in a filthy room, filled with stacks of newspapers.  Another man pushes the wheelchair over a yellow line and down a long hallway and into a room.  Later, the second man pulls the blood-soaked wheelchair back across the line with a rope. Perri Reed is having a birthday and a surprise party which she knows about because “…[she’s] a good reporter.”  Carl Kolchak is working late that night on a series of missing person’s cases.  There’s nothing connecting them, but he’s got a gut feeling about it.  Perri tries to get him to call it a night and come to her party. [expand title=”More…” swaptitle=”Less” tag=”strong”] She leaves, but before Kolchak can follow her a stranger arrives acting as if he knows Kolchak and asking him for his answer.  When Kolchak doesn’t understand, the man, Paul, kidnaps him. Now chained to the same wheelchair we saw earlier, Paul demands that Kolchak give him his answer that he promised.  Paul is clearly deranged, but Kolchak is eventually able to ascertain that this man was two doors down from him at the insane asylum and that they talked a lot.  Kolchak remembers none of it. Paul believes that Kolchak has been sending him secret, coded messages in the articles he’s been writing about the missing persons.  The most recent message promises an answer to his problem with the Old Man. The Old Man is, for all intents and purposes, the Devil.  He first appeared to Paul when he was having shock treatment and he has been both inside Paul’s body and in the back bedroom ever since.  The Old Man wants Paul to cross the yellow line, but instead, to keep him quiet, Paul sends people he’s kidnapped down there to appease the Old Man. Meanwhile, Jain is getting worried that Kolchak didn’t show up for the party and eventually convinces Perri that something might be wrong. When Paul’s social worker arrives, Kolchak tries to engineer an escape attempt.  Instead, Paul sends the social work over the yellow line to die. Kolchak plays along and starts to write Paul’s story – the idea being that if he’s writing codes, it’s unconscious and by writing Paul’s story, he’ll reveal the answer.  It is, of course, just a stall technique. Kolchak tries to prove to Paul that it’s all in his head and that he is the killer.  He has Paul use the thermal camera to prove there’s nothing in the room, but there is something.  Just then, the badly wounded social worker comes out of the room, he pleads for help, but Paul insists it is the Old Man in disguise.  The social worker does seem to know an awful lot about Carl Kolchak, his wife, her murder and even casts suspicion on Paul by claiming he was temporarily released and in Vegas the night Kolchak’s wife was killed. While Paul “deals” with the social worker, Kolchak is locked in a room.  He sees Perri arrive and signals her over.  She comes in to help Kolchak.  They have a touching moment were Kolchak reveals that he’s afraid to let people get close to him.  She helps Kolchak free of the wheelchair, but Paul comes for him before they can get away.  Paul is enraged.  He has decoded the message in Kolchak’s latest work, which tells him to “Cross the yellow line” and he thinks Kolchak is trying to kill him. He sees Perri and insists that she’s the Old Man and she’s tricking Kolchak.  He shoots and kills her.  Blinded with anger, Kolchak beats the crap out of Paul and drags him across the line and throws him in the room.  The door mysteriously slams shut and locks.  Kolchak then sees Perri alive and not wounded and then she disappears.   The door opens again and Kolchak investigates.  It’s filled with the bloody bodies of the missing people and the dead body of Paul – nothing more. Later, it is apparent Perri was never there and Kolchak now believes that something was talking to Paul through him. [/expand]