I’m not all the way through revisiting season 1 yet, but I just couldn’t resist.
Why Found-Again? Like Highlander: The Series, this was much beloved by some of my roommates during the ’90s. Because it had only been a few years since I was my college’s biggest Vampire Files fan, it always bugged me at the time that I hated Forever Knight. It’s a classic example of a potential Found-Again show, and only availability prevented me from doing this one earlier.
The Premise: Nick Knight (Geraint Wyn Davies) is a 700+-year-old vampire. Nick would like to stop being a vampire; as a policeman, he’d rather be a good guy (and he can never be as cool a bad guy as his sire LaCroix (Nigel Bennett), anyway—my opinion, not his). Among his colleagues, only medical examiner Natalie (Catherine Disher) knows his secret; she’s trying, through a regimen of garlic pills and blood abstinence, to make Nick human again—and, as the shameless opening-credits monologue says, “end his forever (K)night.”
Good luck, lady.
Seriously, someone hop into the comments and help me, because I don’t know how to like Nick Knight. I think I am the ideal audience for a vampire cop show; my expectations are appropriately lowered from having disliked it the first time; and I can’t fault their casting, because every time I see Geraint Wyn Davies as Nick, I feel like he wandered out of a medieval movie, which should be a plus.
Instead, it just makes me wonder why Nick has had centuries to perfect his people skills, yet is still kind of a doucherocket. I even hate his name: Nick was a Crusader, so he used to be a knight, and he’s only out at night, get it? It’s as if I went out, got nosferatued, and started my new unlife by calling myself J. A. Wordwhacker. Forever Wordwhacker.
Let’s also talk about how 1) Nick doesn’t need a slightly dim, slightly sleazy cop sidekick, and 2) said sidekick doesn’t need to have a name that’s pronounced “Skanky.” (That Wordwhacker thing up there doesn’t sound so outlandish now, does it?) It’s a problem when someone saying a character’s name gently lifts you out of the story and back into the seventh grade, and the legitimate last-name spelling isn’t all that apparent when people are just saying “Skanky” on television.
The Verdict: I still don’t like Forever Knight, but I do have a better handle on why. Tortured soul? Multiple lost loves? Ostensibly the hero but really kind of snippy and condescending to the mortals? Nick Knight is Connor MacLeod from Highlander, but with fangs. (In fairness, Nick is probably a jerk because he is always hungry.) When I rule the universe, this will be a show in which Lacroix mind-whammies Natalie into curing all the other vampires so he can be the top pallid banana. Until then… well, until then, I even hate the graphic design.
Might go well with: I’ve always found that the best food for making fun of vampires is a bag of Bugles; use them for fake fangs. Otherwise, I’d go with Highlander: The Series and the Dark Shadows revival.
Next time: The Quest family gets über themselves.
