"Only darkness can satisfy you, only darkness."
Nick battles his dark side when he meets a mind-controlling stripper.
This week, Nick nearly meets his doom at the hands of a mind-controlling stripper named...Ann Foley. Canadians aren't very good at stripper names.
Ann is a lawyer-turned-stripper who can make men do anything. If I could make men do anything I'd have them washing my car and doing my taxes, but Ann wants them embrace their dark side so they can tell her how it felt to do something baaaaad.
But she's (probably) never met a vampire before. Until now, Nick's journey has been all about reaching for the light, but now we get to see what happens when he's a bad guy. The pendulum swings the other way. Nick is ignoring Natalie (she's slightly jealous he's spending so much time with a stripper) and being mean to his partner. Nick can be a total jerkwad when he wants, and he's turned it up to 100,000% just because Ann asked him to.
And he's enjoying it. No more moping around. Nick's grinning like a cat who's found a mouse and he's strutting around Toronto like he owns the place. It's...almost like this is who Nick's meant to be. At last we have the answer to "Why doesn't Nick want to be a vampire?" This horrible version of him is just the outcropping of the wicked man he's been trying to keep under wraps. And he's having so much fun that it's hard to believe he'll stop.
Things get pretty dark when Nick follows Ann's orders to murder Schanke...but wait—it's a trick! It was all a ruse to get Ann to confess to a previous murder! At some point, Nick must have changed his mind. We don't get to see that part, which makes the last minutes of the episode really confusing.
Ann runs (faster than a vampire I guess) and leaps off a building to see what death feels like. She lays on the ground, whimpering out her last words, "God help me...it feels good...it feels soooo good."
Flashback:
Back to the catacombs where Nick was changed into a vampire. Janette is there, chanting about the darkness that will become his life. She seduces him with a few looks that would melt the pope and whispers, "Do you want to be conquered?" He does.
Clever viewers would have noticed by now that Nigel Bennett's name keeps appearing in the opening credits even though La Croix was killed two episodes ago. As the episode closes, we see La Croix join the flashback, ominously promising that he'll always be a part of Nick's life.
We won't see much of him for a while, but he'll be lurking in flashbacks, a dead character whose presence in the past changes how we see the present. It's neat idea for a TV show. Very creative.
Quotes:
"Say goodbye to the light, Nicolas. Now you know it will never satisfy you...No matter how shining and good a knight you were, the darkness was always there."
"Ultimately, everything she did came down to one reason: thrills. Cheap thrills."
"Well, I don't know, those cheap thrill turned out to be pretty expensive."
Little Bites:
-Fashion police: Nick, Janette, and La Croix are wearing different clothes than the last time we saw this flashback. The producers thought we wouldn't notice, but we did.
-Familiar Faces: Cynthia Preston, who plays the stripper, was the lead in an exceptional movie called Whale Music. She also played a long-time General Hospital villain named Faith Roscoe, starred in The Brain, voiced princess Zelda on a cartoon many of us grew up with, and had a memorable role in Amazon's Jack Ryan. Also, her wedding was performed by the father of Geraint Wyn Davies, the star of our show. Canada looks big on the map, but apparently it's just a small town.
-Hats off to TV strippers who can't take off their clothes and have to somehow pretend they're stripping. 90s TV shows loved having "stripper" episodes, but the women on stage were always wearing as much as everyone else. Ann's big stripper moment was pulling off her pearls and letting them roll all over the stage. I bet the other girls loved that.
-Nick holds up his badge and we see that his precinct address is 7 Curity Avenue, which is currently a Home Depot. (Where would you be without my hard-hitting investigative writing?)
-So, what's the deal with La Croix? The show isn't going to answer us right away. It's a tease.
-(Sorry for the low-quality screenshots. YOU try getting nice pictures from a 90s show filmed on VHS in the dark.)
Final Analysis: This is actually a pretty interesting episode, but the last minutes simply don't make sense. 3 out of 4 fully-dressed strippers.
Adam D. Jones is a writer, musician, and medievalist who feels a kinship for vampires because his sensitive eyes that make it difficult to go outside during the day.
Small correction: the actress is Andrea Roth. Also canadian.
ReplyDeleteAndrea Roth is on two episodes of Forever Knight, but not this one. She was also a guest on LOST!
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