In this column, we look at two pop-cultural interpretations of ubiquitous Weird legends as portrayed by two narrative television programs… like how Bones’ Angela and Six Feet Under’s Olivier both use art to explore distant, uncharted regions of the human capacity for being annoying. But with monsters. Enjoy.

This week:
Jack

Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Episode 1×01, “The Ripper”

And

Star Trek, Episode 02×14, “A Wolf in the Fold”

For two and half months in the latter half of 1888, Jack the Ripper prowled the brothels and boarding houses of London’s seedy Whitechapel district, killing and mutilating at least five prostitutes with brutal aplomb. The Ripper was never captured and, over the course of the last century, the list of possible suspects has grown to contain the names of over 100 people, ranging from abortionists to cobblers to known confidence men.

While it’s increasingly likely that detectives and pathologists will never uncover the true identity of one of the world’s most notorious serial killers, Hollywood has continually stepped in to offer fantastical solutions.

If there’s one service that pop culture dutifully provides, it’s the declawing of society’s fiercest bogeymen by strapping them down into three-act structures and onychectomizing them with sharp dialogue and steady-handed denouements.

These episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Star Trek are quintessential examples of popular storytelling providing the solace of a solution where real life finds none and, in doing so, offering the viewer a false sense of comfort and security. The anonymity of Jack the Ripper is why he has endured as an elusive, frustrating and terrifying cultural enigma; he is an abstract, at once man, monster and ghost – a human driven to inhuman deeds, who then disappeared into the ether of nightmares before his true face was revealed. Fortunately, the first step storytelling takes to allay our deepest terrors is the provision of a monstrous physical form that can then be attacked and conquered by the brave and the savvy and the attractive. It’s in this aspect – personification – where these shows choose radically divergent paths, while still managing to arrive at a similar and wholly unsatisfying brand of succor.

In the pilot of Kolchak: Night Stalker, “The Ripper,” the titular stalker, a wise-cracking newspaper reporter, is investigating the knife murders of three women in the Chicago area. After watching police do battle with the suspect, who eludes the fuzz by performing an array of seemingly superhuman feats, Kolchak begins researching the history of various slashers throughout history, including Jack the Ripper, only to discover that dozens upon dozens of seemingly unrelated, geographically scattered attacks are the work of a single supernatural immortal who limits his regional murders to five victims, and whose only weakness is electricity. Kolchak proceeds to electrocute and destroy the Ripper, but the body burns up and no one believes him. Subsequently, Kolchak cracks wise.

In the second season Star Trek episode “A Wolf in the Fold,” Scotty is accused of murdering two women after two separate incidents in which he’s found alone with stabbed bodies and in possession of a bloodied knife and a nagging case of amnesia. After a thorough lie detector test is administered on the Enterprise, everyone is convinced of his innocence. After doing some research, the crew discovers that the murders were actually performed by a formless and seemingly immortal being that feeds on fear. This being, which can take an invisible physical shape, and also possess other creatures and objects, was responsible not only for the murders attributed to Jack the Ripper, but also to a string of other violent killings across time and space. After the creature possesses the ship’s computer and a couple other folks, Kirk and Bones trap it in a corpse and use the transporter to disperse its atoms throughout deep space.

Clearly, each episode approaches the personification of the Ripper in a wholly different way – Kolchak by endowing him with the dark cloak and haughty cane (plus a bizarro beard) that people have always envisioned, but then hanging those accoutrements upon a supernatural creature, and Star Trek by refusing to give him a definitive physical shape, choosing instead to preserve his facelessness, and the terror thereof, while still providing a narrative resolution to an enduring historical mystery. Given the radically dichotomous portrayals of the killer in either show, it might seem a given that both episodes are also exploring different corners of the Ripper’s mythology and cultural currency – of the lessons society can extract from his violence and the truths these lessons reveal about the dark, primal shadow that haunts human nature. Instead, Kolchak and Star Trek bluster and scapegoat until mankind is not just an unfortunate victim, but also an heroic savior.

While both shows manufacture monsters to pawn the Ripper murders off on, it’s Kolchak that fully and completely passes the buck. The creature, referred to simply as the Ripper, has lived among humans for decades, moving from place to place and killing women for no apparent reason. It presents the most basic narrative blueprint of a stock monster, who is then defeated in a ridiculously clichéd manner – the exploitation of an arbitrary, accidentally discovered Achilles heel. Meanwhile, the greater message, that the savagery and violence of Jack the Ripper’s crimes exceeded man’s natural capacity for evil, ergo, those crimes must have been perpetrated by some extra-natural being, attempts to erase the rightful respect and fear of the human capacity for brutality that the Ripper should instill in everyone.

Star Trek doesn’t do much better. In typical glass-is-three-quarters-full Roddenberry fashion, “A Wolf in the Fold” not only attempts to explain away a specific set of 19th century hooker murders, but also some percentage of evil itself. Star Trek, as a flagship of late-‘60s American culture, was always enthusiastic to portray a future in which humanity has systematically conquered many of the prejudices and injustices of past societies. By creating a being that lacks visible physical form, and which can also possess people and machinery, this episode takes the larger theme of man’s ability to better itself as a species to an entirely new level; it posits that, for centuries, humans have been attacked and possessed by an innately sinister invisible creature. Following the episode’s implications out to their logical ends, one can only conclude that any number of malevolent, allegedly human deeds could have actually been the work of some amorphous, fear-hungry anathema. This regressive attribution of historic human barbarism to nefarious invisible monsters that can act independently through human hands is merely a contemporary secularization of the type of “the devil made me do it,” humans-as-Satan’s-pawns beliefs espoused by less-enlightened ancient cultures.

Jack the Ripper was scary precisely because he was human. That a regular person could be capable of such extensive, unhesitant violence is much more frightening than the idea that a monster might exist, or that some powerful, external evil could force a human hand. Pop culture creates monsters out of human fear to give people something tangible to fight. To wrap our insecurities, our irrational terrors and momentary peccadilloes, into grotesque, drooling masses of scales and teeth, and then snap their sinewy necks, is a form of desperate empowerment. To escape the dark side of human nature by attributing it to some other-worldly creature that cackles and howls and possesses starship computers is sheer denial. And as witty and exciting as Kolchak or Star Trek might make it, I’m not buying it.

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