>"I love how well, for its era, this show delivers competent, professional female characters."
Yes!!!
For all the "neck of the week" action and "damsel in distress" detours, FK's simple respect for its women characters -- recurring and guest, human and vampire, present and past -- was astonishing in its day, I think. Maybe even unrealistically so... idealistically so... for some of the cultures depicted?
Natalie and Grace represent Science, and the consulting science experts (e.g. the ballistics examiner who tries to hit on Schanke, the medical examiner who kills the man who murdered Natalie's goddaughter, the third-season computer technician) are almost all women, too. The exceptions are two male lab techs (one of whom proves to be a murderer) and two male computer technicians (also one of whom turns out to be a murderer).
The show (and therefore the Nick character) almost always (especially in first season!) assumed that women were competent, diligent and intelligent, and that if this was blocked or stymied, it was because of things in the way -- cultural things, psychological things, plot things on which the story could turn -- never because of inherent gender traits. Schanke's occasional forays into demeaning women are uniformly exposed as idiotic (if not potentially fatal), and otherwise only bad guys demean women (at least until the haystack and bar scenes in "My Boyfriend is a Vampire;" poor third season has many problems, include sad retrenchment on FK's fundamental quiet feminism).
I appreciate Saint Joan's role in FK in this context.
FK's quiet feminism
Yes!!!
For all the "neck of the week" action and "damsel in distress" detours, FK's simple respect for its women characters -- recurring and guest, human and vampire, present and past -- was astonishing in its day, I think. Maybe even unrealistically so... idealistically so... for some of the cultures depicted?
Natalie and Grace represent Science, and the consulting science experts (e.g. the ballistics examiner who tries to hit on Schanke, the medical examiner who kills the man who murdered Natalie's goddaughter, the third-season computer technician) are almost all women, too. The exceptions are two male lab techs (one of whom proves to be a murderer) and two male computer technicians (also one of whom turns out to be a murderer).
The show (and therefore the Nick character) almost always (especially in first season!) assumed that women were competent, diligent and intelligent, and that if this was blocked or stymied, it was because of things in the way -- cultural things, psychological things, plot things on which the story could turn -- never because of inherent gender traits. Schanke's occasional forays into demeaning women are uniformly exposed as idiotic (if not potentially fatal), and otherwise only bad guys demean women (at least until the haystack and bar scenes in "My Boyfriend is a Vampire;" poor third season has many problems, include sad retrenchment on FK's fundamental quiet feminism).
I appreciate Saint Joan's role in FK in this context.