The least and last of first-season Forever Knight far exceeds the best and brightest of many another television series! That's good for "Dance by the Light of the Moon" (S1E05) (DBLM), which, in my personal opinion, is one of first season's few serious misfires. DBLM has many strong ingredients, but, as I see it, they never quite all click.

Recap: This is the episode in which former corporate lawyer, current stripper, Ann Foley, finds "fascination" (her word) and "thrills" (Nick's word) in seducing men previously renowned for their probity into committing crimes, and then murders the survivors. Before seeing Ann, but after learning of two "good men" gone very bad, Nick begins a flashback journey through his last hours of mortality, progressing from a banquet with his comrades, to Janette's arms, to Janette introducing him to Lacroix. Along the way, Schanke and Natalie become concerned that Nick has fallen for Ann's wiles and lost sight of the case; luckily for everyone, he hasn't. Ann jumps to her death to avoid arrest.

( Some thoughts on DBLM )

What do you think?

Next week: S1E06 "Dying to Know You" (DtKY)

"For I Have Sinned" (FIHS) is one of the many episodes for which the German title ignores the English context. The English title quotes the traditional opening line of a Catholic confession ("Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned"), which resonates through the episode on different levels for Nick, Schanke, Magda, and Father Rouchfort — and perhaps even for an attentive audience — as well as for the villain, while the German title, "Avenging Angel" ("Der Racheengel") applies to the villain alone. (And of course this choice uses up that title before the actual "Avenging Angel" (S3E17).)

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with FIHS. Some elements, like St. Joan and Magda, I adore! I can happily watch their scenes over and over. Other bits, like Nick egging on Schanke's confession, I struggle with. I still can't sit through that scene without chastising Nick, although I do begin to see its humor as I couldn't when I was younger.

( some thoughts on FIHS )

What do you think?

Next week: "Last Act" (S1E04)

Premiere time! Forever Knight launched in spring instead of the traditional fall, the first of its many airing oddities. Part of CBS's idiosyncratic "Crimetime after Primetime" line-up, FK showed its first two episodes on sequential nights, cut many minutes from the US airings compared to the Canadian (never mind the German), and took almost an entire calendar year to get through its first season.

Tonight, I rewatched both the Region 2 (German) and Region 1 (US/Canada) DVDs of S1E01 "Dark Knight." I won't do that every week of this rewatch project! But I may repeat for S1E02 "Dark Knight, the Second Chapter" next week. I find the missing footage extra irritating in DK. I've seen all the cut "Dark Knight" scenes in English on the taped-from-TV VHS tapes slowly degrading in my closet; there's no justification for leaving those scenes off the Region 1 DVDs! (Granted, "anything is better than nothing.") Other episodes, later in first season, have snippets that I've only seen on the German DVDs; the lack of those true "Eurominutes" doesn't bother me the same way.

( a few thoughts on scenes cut and kept )

What do you think? :-)

The random-number generator determined that "The Code" is the episode to rewatch and chat about, just a little, desultorily and casually, as discussed in my previous post.

Come and play! No pressure. Why not pop "The Code" into the DVD player or stream it? Why not share a thought, memory, question or joke?

( It's the suit, Schank, the suit )

( I hate winter )

( I'll get your heater fixed; it's on me )

( We met earlier )

( I would have eaten glass to hear that )

( Dogs go to the end )

( Terrible likeness, really )

What do you think?

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.

Yes, I am marathoning third-season FK episodes on-and-off across my holiday weekend. :-)

So: ah! relief! "Night in Question" is still when the third-season pumpkin turns back into FK. With Nick sidelined, the others manage to become themselves and we're all talking again about Nick not wanting to be a vampire. No more cringe-inducing Lacroix Lite and his underdressed Raven. No more "good cop" or "babe cop" posing of Tracy. No more... well, you know that I blame Natalie and Nick's past third-season behavior on the shocking losses of Schanke and Cohen (and Nick's future third-season behavior on amnesia and demonic possession). We're back! More or less. It's third-season, after all.

:-) It just today struck me to wonder whether Natalie has a stack of forms from every hospital in Toronto, half filled in with the various ways in which Nick might wind up in their hands, such that she could sweep in the way that she does in NiQ. She must have been preparing for this all along... or at least since the first time that she had to dig a bullet out of him. There's another story for someone to write! (I don't recall ever reading one before, but even if someone else has written one already, there's more than enough room for your own angle.)

Rewatching "My Boyfriend is a Vampire" last night while re-ripping my oldest CD albums from WMA to MP3, I found the silliness of the talk show still very silly, the flashback still disconnected, and the third-season-ness on every level unmistakable at any range... but... barring the ending, it dawned on me that this is one of the smarter and better executed episodes of early third season!

The parallels in the present-day story really do work. Maggie, Charley, Tracy and Natalie. Four women in four very different but comparable frustrating relationships that mix personal and professional involvement, hopes and facts, understandings and misunderstandings. "Wellness and unwellness love," if we must.

( First, Tracy and Maggie. Then, Natalie and Charley. Finally, that dratted card. )

I think that Forever Knight's "Fatal Mistake" (season 1, episode 21, originally aired February 23, 1993) may be an underrated, underconsidered episode. I've been thinking about it on and off since musing on prompts for this year's rarewomen game, and finally fit it in this evening during dinner (now pondering prompts for fkficfest/fkficfest).

Of course the episode does have drawbacks. In three separate scenes, at least one actor misstates a line such that it too obviously doesn't mesh with the lines around it (e.g. "You'll never let me live it down, will you?"/"Not if I don't let you, partner." was probably meant to be "I'll never live it down, will I?"/"Not if I don't let you, partner."). Alexandra does come across as less than bright in the present, not that everyone in the world must be clever, yet certainly not justly deserving her "bimbo barmaid" sobriquet from fandom. There's no Janette, little Natalie and no sight of the inside of the loft. The firm focus on the "cop plot" is not to every taste. The episode's title unsubtly garnishes some dialogue. And as we all know, the script set the flashbacks circa Chaucer, when Nick was near his darkest, while the costuming sets them circa Cromwell, when Nick was well into his "only the guilty" code, making an interpretive mess all around.

Yet think of the connections with other episodes! This overlooked corner of first season may be a fountain of incipient ideas that later bloomed in second season. What fun! Does Alexandra ("Fatal Mistake") foreshadow Serena ("Baby, Baby")? Both women were happy to have sex with Nick, but were taken by cruel surprise by his vampirism; both despise their vampirism and blame Nick for it (Serena more fairly than Alexandra). Does Lacroix's lecture on the staircase about Nick's guilt and fear foreshadow the flashbacks of "Curiouser & Curiouser"? They sound highly akin to me. Does Alexandra's pining for all the world that Nick has seen and she hasn't hint at Fleur's interests come "Be My Valentine"? And how about the actions of the perpetrator bent on vengeance and those way ahead in third-season's "Night in Question," also luring by voice mail, distraught from the loss of a partner-in-crime? Sadly, perhaps, looking toward "Black Buddha," when Nick asks how Myra deals with the dangers Schanke faces on the job, Schanke says that they never talk about it. And looking back to first season instead of forward, consider Nick staking Alexandra with a metal exhaust pipe. Does it recall staking Lacroix on the metal grate in "Dark Knight"? Finally, how does Nick's susceptibility to the idea that Alexandra is a ghost connect with "Last Act," "Dead of Night" and "Francesca"?

Those are all fun to play with across the series, but of course the merit of the episode unto itself is in the paralleling between Nick and Stonetree. The episode builds this not simply from guilt over a life taken, but in recognition of how dangerous it is to be what they are. When Stonetree muses that maybe he wants out, to not be this anymore, he echoes Nick's quest, and Schanke firms up the connection (just in case we missed it) by saying that when they catch the other perp, "Stonetree walks in the sun again."

Of course there's a great deal one might analyze around the storytelling use of Alexandra and why it feels so ham-handed next to episodes like "If Looks Could Kill" and "Baby, Baby." But not tonight. Tonight, I'm just tickled to play "spot the FK trope."

This past week, I scraped up enough time to watch two Forever Knight episodes, one of them "Fallen Idol." FI is the pro-wrestling murder case with the vampire-blood injection of the developmentally-impaired witness and the flashback to Nick's nephew Andre (played by Hayden Christensen). It includes the notorious "teen night at the Raven" and the infamous "pit of condemned bimbos." It happens only two episodes after Janette's return and departure in "The Human Factor," and just five episodes before the finale, "Last Knight."

( Now )

( Then )

As you may know, my interpretation of Forever Knight considers the power of hypnotism perhaps the most insidious, corrosive temptation of Nick's vampirism. Unlike his supernaturally enhanced strength, endurance and agelessness, hypnotism requires an active decision each time he uses it. Unlike flying, which is also an active choice, hypnotism is by its nature an assault on another person's free will. Now, often, the storyline unleashes vampiric hypnotism strictly on the dangerous and depraved, or makes hypnotism the only choice to save a life in a certain situation; sometimes, it is employed on a smaller scale, to cause sleep or dull pain; occasionally (as with Tawny Teller in "Unreality TV"), Nick even gets permission before hypnotizing. Other times, however, he succumbs to the temptation to force people to do his bidding against their wills for no good or sufficient reason (as with Schanke washing the Caddy in "Close Call"). Of course this is tragedy. It demeans them and further corrupts him.

Each time the opportunity to use hypnotism arises, Nick should consider whether there is another way to achieve his goal, and, if not, whether his goal is truly worthy of the use of such a power. Naturally, inured by long habit, Nick more often acts first and thinks later, if, on hypnotism, he thinks at all. And that's part of the wonderful story of his Everyman struggle for redemption and whether — "Last Knight" aside — he (and we) may finally achieve tragedy or triumph.

This came to mind in response to an essay by Colbert King in today's Washington Post, which linked to an old (1992) essay in the Acton Institute's Religion and Liberty: "Power Corrupts" by Ben Moreell. Moreell writes:

"When a person gains ... power to force other persons to do his bidding when they do not believe it right to do so[,] it seems inevitable that a moral weakness develops in the person who exercises that power. ... [H]e eventually concludes that power and wisdom are the same thing. And as he possesses power, he must also possess wisdom. ... At this point, he begins to lose his ability to distinguish between what is morally right and what is ... expedient."

Above, I suggest how this recurring temptation harms Nick. Lacroix, though, is surely an even better illustration, from generalship through vampirism, of the effects on its wielder of the power to bend and break others' wills. "As he possesses power, he must also possess wisdom," Lacroix concluded of himself ages past, and never looked back. Nick is still fighting to distinguish between the right and the expedient. Lacroix long since ceased to recognize the distinction, if ever he did. (It's easy to suppose that Janette, as usual, would fall somewhere between, but instead I submit that we have too few instances of her hypnotizing people to place her firmly in comparison... except perhaps to float the hypothesis that she may hypnotize less often than Nick or Lacroix.)

To deny someone the freedom to think and remember as he wills is a horror. Even a slave has his thoughts and memories, surely? Such hypnotism is non-con/dub-con through a fantasy/sci-fi metaphor.

(Each to her own when it comes to squicks, of course! This just happens to be one of mine.)