“Jack The Ripper in the future” inspired a wonder and a blunder of ’60s TV

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http://www.avclub.com/article/jack-r...der-60s-243760

Around the time Charles Manson came to Los Angeles to get famous, Jack The Ripper took off. Not that Jack the cultural figure had ever been as elusive as Jack the man. As horror maven Kim Newman puts it, he’s the most filmed uncaught serial killer of all time. But toward the end of the Psycho decade, a wave of Ripper-centric entertainment mounted. Jack was the boogeyman of a late-night TV movie stitched together from episodes of Boris Karloff’s previously unaired anthology series The Veil, a historical icon in Peter Barnes’ play and Peter Medak’s film adaptation of The Ruling Class, a villain on a two-part Get Smart. And he was the spirit of slaughter possessing a pair of doppelgangers.

As the Summer Of Love faded to winter, two writers found themselves tangled up together with Jack The Ripper. “Tied in a knot,” as Harlan Ellison puts it in his landmark sci-fi anthology Dangerous Visions. Published a week before Halloween 1967, the collection features two stories about the unknown murderer of five women on the streets of Whitechapel in the fall of 1888. The first, by Psycho author Robert Bloch, is a pseudo-sequel to a canonical work of Ripper lore. Bloch’s 1943 tale “Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper” casts the killer as an immortal who fled London but left a trail of bodies tracking his progress well into the 20th century. Long an admirer of the story, Ellison pitched, in Bloch’s words, “What about Jack The Ripper in the future?” When Bloch submitted his story, Ellison was once again so taken with Bloch’s Ripper he pitched Bloch a sequel, this one written by himself. Both men’s stories—Bloch’s a snakebite and Ellison’s the paralyzing aftermath—and the background information appear in Dangerous Visions. What’s less well known is what came next. Within three months of the anthology, NBC and CBS, respectively, broadcast two episodes of TV following Jack the Ripper in the future: Star Trek’s “Wolf In The Fold” and Cimarron Strip’s “Knife In The Darkness.” One was written by Robert Bloch, the other by Harlan Ellison.

Produced by Star Trek’s increasingly overworked secret weapon Gene L. Coon, “Wolf In The Fold” was Bloch’s third and final script for the series. On a visit to pleasure planet Argelius, which seems to be nothing but bars and brothels connected by foggy cobblestone alleyways that a certain slasher might find psychically triggering, Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy, sly and wry, are hoping to rehabilitate chief engineer Scotty. He was recently involved in an accident caused by a woman that resulted in a concussion, and if the situation is not addressed swiftly, it’s feared that Scotty may suffer from (in 22nd-century medical terms) “total resentment toward women.” Basically Kirk and McCoy are trying to set him up with a dancer, but not because he’s their bro. This is strictly professional. Unfortunately, that dancer becomes the first victim in a series of stabbings reminiscent of Jack The Ripper, and Scotty keeps being found in a fugue state at the scenes of the crimes holding a bloody knife.

Cimarron Strip takes Jack the Ripper to a more immediate future. The show’s setting—a sort of no-man’s land in what is now northern Oklahoma, circa 1888—struck Ellison as a plausible hideout for Jack The Ripper, and one with the familiar squalor and libertinism to incite him to more killing. Hence, “Knife In The Darkness,” a hushed, shadowy cycle-of-violence story snappy with dialogue and heavy with mood. As a long night unfurls, more and more women are found stabbed to death, and it’s up to Marshal Jim Crown (Stuart Whitman) to catch the killer.

More than any other genre of television fiction, serial killer stories like these risk exploitation. The starting point is a man getting away with murder for a while and a handful of women corpses. It takes care to resist the easy narrative, to avoid glamorizing evil or perpetuating the idea that women are disposable. “Wolf In The Fold” and “Knife In The Darkness” make a staggering comparison in that regard: Goofus makes sweeping generalizations about women! Gallant writes women with personality!


Consider the opening sequences. Both start with a woman who is soon to become victim number one dancing before a gaggle of lustful men, and both conclude with her walking off into the foggy night, chased by a stalker to her end. Directed by Trek regular Joseph Pevney, “Wolf In The Fold” even opens with her seducing the camera, a sort of “Great Train Robbery” gunshot appealing to the Jack The Ripper in all us men, an idea both Bloch and Ellison address in Dangerous Visions. But “Wolf In The Fold” is too blunt an object to point in any direction, least of all the clumsily incriminated audience. The dancer, Kara, isn’t named until she’s a corpse. She gets two lines, both delivered like she’s Ginger Grant in sleepy Marilyn mode, and then it’s off to the slaughterhouse. That’s when Kirk and McCoy reveal their plan to get Scotty’s head screwed on straight again, as it were. The whole episode is like that. It’s punctuated with sexist trivia like “Women are more easily and more deeply terrified, generating more sheer horror than the male of the species.” And the women are mostly footnotes in this story of the men of Argelius, the suspects, the persons of interest, and the killer.