Night Stalker 1.5x02 Traffic

Episode Written by James Jordan
Review Written by David A. Bindley

Now that the weight of the pilot’s necessities have been removed, Night Stalker should be starting to stand on its own two feet, right? Right?

The basic genesis of this episode – the legend of the “haunted highway” – is one of those things that pretty much every sci-fi and supernatural show will cover at some point. It’s just one of those stories. The X-Files did it memorably with season 8’s Roadrunners, and of course Supernatural has tried variations on it a number of times. Luckily, JJ somehow manages to find some original ground to cover in this, one of the biggest horror story clichés. I was a little confused by how the victims could be in two places at once (with Kolchak and back where they were killed), but with this genre of show, it’s best to just go along for the ride, so to speak. And it’s not like much else could have been done whilst still keeping it from being a retread of what we’ve all seen before. The whole method of getting to the actual mystery itself did seem a bit forced, though – would Kolchak really give a hitchhiker a lift on a stretch of road where he knows people have been brutally murdered?

This episode feels much more packed than the previous one. Not only is the haunted highway aspect explored in greater detail than the Sphinx was, but this time around we also got more in the way of character development from Perri and Jain (whom I already love). Perri does come off a bit Scully-esque at times, but she’s much snarkier with her disbelief than Scully usually was, and it serves her well. (Admittedly, the bizarre pseudo-sunniness Gabrielle Union usually brings to scenes, warranted or not, may be foisting itself upon my imagination here, and warping my views.) On the other hand, Jain pretty much defies analogies. Which is a wonderful thing in this case. It helps him to stand out a bit more compared to the others, thus allowing the writers to focus on everyone else for a bit to get them away from the comparisons without too many readers feeling like he’s going to get shafted. Jain’s Kolchak-fanboy streak was an amusing piece of minor character development in the meantime, though. It’s great that JJ appears, at this stage at least, to be thinking along these lines, even though it’s probably more due to Kolchak and Perri being main characters while Jain is the Token Comic Relief. Now all we need is some way to stop me from imagining Mitch Pileggi playing Vincenzo.

Grade: 7.5 idolising newspaper photographers out of 10. (You may choose whether to keep the top or bottom half of the eighth idolising newspaper photographer.)