Canon check on significant word choice

[brightknightie]

From a comment PJ made, I wanted to identify for certain in which Forever Knight episode Nick uses the word "slave" to describe his perception of his unwanted connection to Lacroix (as opposed to Lacroix's perception of Nick as his "brother," "son" or "protégé"). Of course Nick's perception is implicit in many episodes (e.g. "A Fate Worse Than Death," "Strings"...) But where was it explicit?

I'd mistakenly thought that the usage was part of the "I shall repay you" flashback of "Dark Knight, The Second Chapter." But no, it's not on the North American nor German DVDs (I don't have my VCR hooked up anymore to check the original Canadian cut on dubbed VHS ~grin~). What is there is:

NICK: You made me a murderer.
LACROIX: I made you a god! I made you eternal. I made you my brother.

(My memory had mistakenly matched 2:2 in that exchange: murderer/slave to god/brother.)

So where was it? Not the symbol-rich dreams of "Dying for Fame" or "Feeding the Beast." "Curiouser and Curiouser" comes close, but there it's Lacroix who says Nick is "enslaved" (by his guilt). Had I made it up, after all?

No. It's in the flashbacks of "Killer Instinct" (which, chronologically, almost immediately follow the flashbacks of "Dark Knight").

LACROIX: My protégé.
NICK: Your slave.

Comments

[greerwatson]

The term "master" in this context is not, of course, one that Forever Knight invented; but it does invite one to consider the nature of the relationship between the vampire-who-makes and the vampire-who-is-made. For Nick (who in many ways represents the modern North American take on semantics), the opposite of "master" is "slave".

One might think that Lacroix, who came from a slave-owning culture, would feel the same way. However, he explicitly doesn't; and I think this is perhaps a case of cultural (and linguistic!) mistranslation. English is not Latin, in other words. Nor is it medieval French. (Nor is the exchange between Nick and Lacroix in "Killer Instinct" in medieval French; but that's another matter.)

For myself, I think the antonym that Lacroix is trying to convey is "apprentice". He is the master vampire, and has taken Nicolas to be his apprentice at that trade. It is certainly a relationship that would make perfect sense contemporaneously. Probably not, though, the first one that would first come to a twentieth-century viewer, especially an American.

[brightknightie]

You make some good points about the vocabulary. Obviously, "master" isn't used on screen in these scenes, but would be assumed by many viewers from other genre storytelling. I would never suppose that Lacroix's motivations were one-dimensional.

"Killer Instinct" was clearly trying to "jumpstart" the show after the hiatus, very nearly to "reboot" in today's parlance. I think that makes these two scenes even more parallel than they are sequential, and perhaps an interesting shorthand for some of the differences between the two seasons.

In this particular case, I'm more interested in Nick's word choice than Lacroix's. While the scripts are -- at best -- haphazard in the historical legitimacy of their word choices, I would assert that there is no Nick, from Sir Nicolas de Brabant to Detective Nicholas B. Knight, who would, in any language, era or context, find "slave" anything but a status from which he must rebel, revolt, flee and overthrow the oppressor. I think that Nick's characterization of Lacroix's imposed relationship is very accurately pointed to convey to the audience not just those first nights in 1228, but the persistent baseline of all the nights since.

[pj1228]

LACROIX: My protégé.
NICK: Your slave.

But then Lacroix's immediate reply is “As I am your slave" if I remember correctly. Of course Lacroix would't allow himself to be anyone's slave, hence the expression has to convey something else. In Be My Valentine Lacroix states “True love is like morphine. One taste and we're enslaved.“
So what we hear in Killer Instinct might be an expression of love in Lacroix's twisted way.

[brightknightie]

>"what we hear in Killer Instinct might be an expression of love in Lacroix's twisted way."

Here, I'm mainly interested in how Nick expressed his own understanding of his situation.

:-) I'll leave Lacroix to you. :-)