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.)

I had FK's "Amateur Night" on while I did some other things tonight.  I pulled up short when I heard Captain Amanda Cohen say, "My daughter jumps rope."  "My daughter"!  This means that a) Cohen canonically, indisputably, has a daughter, and b) I have failed to fully absorb this fact for an awful lot of years.

"Amateur Night" is nobody's favorite episode.  I think it's underrated and deserves respect as a Schanke vehicle (with some intriguing Natalie tidbits on the side), but even I rarely rewatch it.  What do we all rewatch?  "A More Permanent Hell."  Everyone has seen AMPH a dozen times, and AN a couple, so we absorb that Cohen has photos in her office in AMPH, and miss that AN tells us who one of those photos depicts!

Okay, maybe none of you did that; maybe it's just me. ~grin~  Certainly, fanfic usually depicts Cohen as the mother of a daughter (on the rare occasions that Cohen's personal life wins a mention).  If only I had studied Cohen back when I was writing character FAQs, I would have learned better.  I have always known that Cohen has that photo of a girl in her office, but from time to time, from forkni-l to here, you'll find me ruminating on the question of whether the girl is Cohen's daughter, niece, sister, or herself as a child (alongside similar questions about the photographed couple with the leis).  Well, one question answered, anyway!  Cohen has a daughter, and she is at least as old as the girl in the picture, and still young enough to jump rope.

Pet peeve warning.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but seeing modern Nick called "Nicholas" in discussion and essays (and some present-day stories) gets my hackles up.

Born "Nicholas de Brabant," he has chosen to be "Nick Knight."  Only Lacroix unfailingly calls him "Nicholas" in the present.  (Even Janette occasionally calls him "Nick," although she does much prefer "Nicholas" in her French "Nicolas" pronunciation.)  Yes, characters are likely to be most comfortable with the name in which they met him.  Yes, "Nicholas B. Knight" is canonically his legal name in the present.  But for us to habitually call modern Nick "Nicholas," as Lacroix does, is to reject Nick's self-definition, to join Lacroix's party, to subtly deride Nick's values and worth.  It belittles him and, with him, the series of which he is the hero.

This creaky old peeve pokes up its head now because I posted to the AO3 for the first time.  (I wanted the FKFicFest collection to include my contribution.)  Overall easy and good, but it seems as if the archive's tags, especially as they appear in the filter function, are cumulative, so whoever gets there first gets to decide which words are used, how they're spelled and how they're capitalized.  (For example, "LaCroix" instead of "Lacroix.")  Well, all the pairings use "Nicholas" instead of Nick.  This irritates me.  You do what you want on your stories, naturally, but adjacent to mine?  "Nicholas Knight/Natalie Lambert."  "Nicholas Knight/Janette Ducharme."  ~wince~ 

I know that the archive cannot — and should not be asked or imagined to! — accommodate all the intricacies of factions and interpretations and so on (not to mention the complications of Rick Springfield's Nick Knight versus GWD's).  But I do wish that whoever had gotten there first had chosen to use "Nick" instead of "Nicholas."

Ah, well.  On the subject of AO3 use, I discovered that if you accidentally select multiple author names when loading a story, you cannot later delete the extra(s).  This is a known bug and I'll be patient until a fix is found; I just wanted to share the caution so no one else makes that mistake.

I've tended to picture Natalie's lab as a simple rectangle, but of course it's not.  Varying a little season to season and episode to episode, it's usually arranged about like this: ( Map of Natalie's Lab )

What caught my attention is that it's not the walls jogging in and out that my memory had oversimplified.  Instead, in conversation with celli about her femme_fic story, I realized that I have habitually, mistakenly, imagined the exam table as parallel to the counter (with the desk thus on the same wall as the counter)!  I went back through many screenshots (most courtesy of Knight Watchman) and worked out the map above, pushing and pulling at my longstanding mistaken impression.  Why had I pictured the exam table sideways?

Wide shots of the lab are rare, of course, but that's not the key.  I concluded that it really comes down to FK's tete-a-tete filming style, in which conversations between two characters do not usually show both on screen at the same time when that would require the camera to back up to capture both.  Instead, the camera more often flips from framing one character's torso to framing the other's, showing each against his/her own background throughout the conversation.  Of all the scenes in Natalie's lab, so many frame Natalie against her desk and Nick (or Schanke, Grace, Tracy) against the counter, with no hint of the wall space between.  My imagination had discarded the "missing" wall, the one with the chalkboard on it.

Interested in sharing reflections on some favorite Knightie moments?  These would be episodes, scenes or recurrences that are pro-Nick in his canonical hopes and goals: times he got it right, times to root for him, times he gave his all.  By definition of the traditional Knightie affiliation, these would be celebrations in accord with the Knightie Creed (quoted in the subject line).

Yep, this game is pretty self-indulgent (unless there are any other Knighties around?).  If you post on your blog for your own FK affiliation, I'll do my best to contribute!  But here... I'm a Knightie.  Revisit, reaffirm, restore?

No rush.  The post will be here whenever.

( My Favorite Knightie Interlude )  ( And Runner-up )

So what are your favorite Knightie moments?

I know that I said that I wouldn't do a "personal favorites" list from fkficfest, and would stick most sincerely with urging everyone to check out the masterlist and tags to find the stories that will inspire and enthrall your unique FK imagination.  The ficathon game was privileged to see loads of gen and N&N, some IB and Seducer, a dash of UF and Nanette, and more...

But may I make just one exception?  I would like to commend to your enjoyment the beautiful "Theory of Lost Things" (PG-13, 3000 words, Nick/Urs, flashback Janette) that leela_cat wrote to match my very own fkficfest prompt.  Her story is well-written, thoughtful, canon-aware and lovely, building a rare pairing with delicacy, grace and realism.  It also immensely satisfies me, personally, reconnecting me with a possibility that once shone in my love of FK, but which became tarnished through no fault of its own.  I don't expect that this pairing calls to many the way it calls to me.  I do think that the story makes its own striking case for a choice that could have broken free of third season just in time to earn all the characters a different chance at happier fates.  The story filled me with enthusiasm for what could have been.

Nominally, Nick/Urs is the "Les Miserables" couple faction.  ( Some Thoughts on Nick/Urs, in Canon and Out )