EDITOR’S NOTE: This episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker aired on the CBS Late Movie on June 22 and October 19, 1979; June 26, 1981 and January 22 and August 30, 1988.

Vincenzo gives Carl Kolchak another assignment: go out on the last voyage of the Hanover, a once excellent cruise ship — actually the RMS Queen Mary with some stock footage of another boat when it was on the ocean — on its final voyage as a swinging singles-only cruise.

Indeed, there’s no way that the supernatural will be on board.

Come on. It’s Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

One of the passengers is NATO officer Bernhardt Stieglitz (Eric Braeden), who last month turned in Montana and murdered an entire family. Now, he has a buffet of people to snack on as the Hanover heads into open waters under the full moon.

Working with the movie-obsessed Paula Griffin (Nita Talbot), Carl realizes that he does indeed have a werewolf on his hands — even if Paula thinks John Wayne was in Werewolf of London before realizing that it was Charlie Chan actor Warner Oland — and he has to steal the ship captain’s uniform and melts down the buttons to make silver bullets. This seems like a lot of work, but I’m writing about Carl’s adventures, not living them.

By this point, five episodes in, Carl has faced Jack the Ripper, an alien, a zombie and a vampire. The “monster of the week” format starts to show here as Carl is sent somewhere new, meets a partner of sorts, butts heads with authority and battles a monster that throws people all over the place.

What does work and elevates the show is the humor and how well McGavin imbues our hero. Plus, the werewolf is a sympathetic character who doesn’t want to be a killer. Carl’s ship roommate Mel (Dick Gautier) is also a blast.

Maybe the makeup isn’t perfect, and perhaps it all seems rather silly now, but Carl’s ending lines point to something more that made this show special: “The body was never recovered. When the old ship was scrapped, all evidence was scrapped along with her. Of the eleven crewmen and four passengers attacked by the beast, it is not known how many actually died. The injured… well, they disappeared. Rumor has it to Switzerland to undergo treatment for a rare blood disease. The shipping line would only admit to having had a psychotic stowaway onboard. The killer had fallen overboard after being cornered by the ship’s officers, so they said. All traces of Bernhard Stieglitz vanished. His baggage was gone. His name could not be found in any passenger manifest. NATO officials claimed that no such man had ever existed in their organization, and any attempt to publish a werewolf story about such a man would be met with the heaviest legal artillery. Vincenzo, always gun-shy, conveyed that message to me in no uncertain terms. So here the story sits. For good, I guess. No one but you or I know the real truth… the real story.”

We have become complicit in the conspiracy that Carl Kolchak has found himself coming up against repeatedly. Only we can understand his private struggle, that in the dogged search of the truth and the story behind it all, he’s just one man, surviving by dumb late just as much as skill or smarts. And there he remains, constantly finding and losing the threads of what’s lurking in the shadows.