139 replies to this topic

[Lesbonaut]

I kept thinking that someone would start a Forever Knight topic here, but so far no one has, so here goes.

I started watching Forever Knight somewhere in the middle of Season 2, and I really liked it. That was around 1993 or 1994. Season 1 was released on DVD last October. When I noticed it was available, just recently, I snapped it up. It's been great seeing "new" episodes of this old favorite. (The show was on for 3 full seasons; the DVD release is being called a "Trilogy" with Season 1 called "Part One." I suppose this is hopeful because it implies that the other two seasons will also be coming out at some point. But I haven't seen any release dates for those yet. If you have information about that, please do tell!)

For anyone who doesn't already know: Nick Knight (who is 800 years old and was a knight in the Crusades when he was sired by a vampire named LaCroix) is now a detective in a big city; he's trying to atone for all the evil he did in his past by protecting the innocent; and he hasn't drunk human blood, only animal blood, for a hundred years. Sound familiar?

As much as I like Angel, I have to say I like Nick Knight better, as a character. He's like Anne Rice's Lestat and Louis rolled into one. Played by Geraint Wyn Davies, he's got the earnestness and self-doubt going, but he's very winning and smiles a lot, too, and to me is much more believable as someone who's lived for hundreds of years. Like Highlander, Forever Knight relies a lot on flashbacks to the main character's personal past, to evoke some past situation that parallels what's going on in the present, and I love that stuff. The special effects are almost laughable (the only special effects, really, are the vamps' eyes and fangs—the credits even say "Fangs by..." and name the company that made them! Nick can fly, and they way they let the viewer know that he's about to start flying is to show a closeup of his feet as they rise rather slowly off the ground. Hilarious.) The production values are barely tolerable by modern standards; they're on a par with, say, The Rockford Files. The stories, at least in Season 1, seem to be mostly "old school" detective plots with the added vampire twist. But it's fascinating to see how this show laid the groundwork for the more elaborate vamp mythologies that have followed. And a few of the episodes really are classic, unusual vampire stories that IMO have yet to be surpassed.

[Fabrisse]

There've been Forever Knight topics here before. I didn't get to see the series until the third season. I'm still trying to catch up on some of the earlier stuff.

I also prefer the vampire mythos there to the one in the Buffy 'verse. There were at least two vampires that I remember committing suicide by waiting for sunrise. It was poetic. And they did so much more with the flashbacks than Angel does. Some of LaCroix's memories especially stuck with me.

The final episode just shocked me.

[missbebe]

This show was my sister's absolute favorite show ever. I watched it on and off, but it usually came on to late for me. I lliked it though.

The final episode just shocked me.

I remember this episode because my sister cried for about three hours afterwards, and we shared a room. If they would release this on DVD it would make my sister's life complete. This show and freakin' Beauty and Beast with Ron Pearlman, my sister is 8 years older than me and she made me watch some awful crap going up. (Not Forever Knight so much, but I hated Beauty and Beast horribly)

ETA: I should have read Lesbonaut post closer. I had no idea this was out on DVD. I know what I'm getting my Sis for a BDay.

Edited by missbebe, May 2, 2004 @ 3:46 AM.

[Cynthia187]

The final episode just shocked me.

I wasn't shocked...I was a bit sorry to see it end, but I felt it was time for the show to die a decent death. I'd hated the changes that had happened at the beginning of the last season, and I was unhappy that the actress that played Janette left. I was hoping for Nick/Janette pairing for the last season of the show, but instead, I got the whining, self-absorbed ME with Nick...Yep...I was beyond pissed, considering that the original ME was male.

Also, I remember Catherine Disher from WotW....ugh...

Edited by Cynthia187, May 2, 2004 @ 11:28 AM.

[Lesbonaut]

I was definitely shocked by the last episode of Season 3. As a matter of fact I had no idea that it even was the last episode of the series, until the end of the show when it became obvious that it had to be. It was a real kick in the gut. I'm impatiently awaiting the release of the DVDs for the rest of the seasons, so I can watch this again. I remember what happened, but not the details anymore. I'm curious to see if it will be as emotionally wrenching as I remember.

As for Natalie the Coroner (whom I see now as a kind of proto-Scully), in general I thought Katharine Disher was okay in the part, but she often does weird things with her tongue. Not erotic, just icky. It's always popping out of her mouth or running along her lip. Distracting, but not in a good way. It's like her tongue has a mind of its own—a very feeble mind, at that. Nevertheless, I did enjoy "Only the Lonely," with the flashbacks to how she and Nick met, in the morgue's examining room, and how she agreed to try to help him become mortal again.

I just finished watching a Season 1 episode that featured a young Carrie Anne Moss, called "Feeding the Beast." It was soooo amusing to see Nick seriously try to kick his blood-drinking "habit" in a 12-Step program! "Hi, my name is Nick and I'm an addict..." !!!!

[NickChick]

I watched the series almost in reverse, i.e. I hadn't seen very many episodes when I caught the finale in first run. After watching it, I was glad that I hadn't been a hard core fan because I thought that must have been brutal for them.

When it showed up on Sci-Fi in daily rotation I finally got hooked on it. Good to know DVDs are out. Some of the eps were just high cheese and others were really well done. On the whole, it's a series I still quite like.

FWIW, the other thread is here.

[KSFan]

Lesbonaut:

I kept thinking that someone would start a Forever Knight topic here, but so far no one has, so here goes.

I did, but no-one has posted in it for a long, long time. If you click on search threads from the beginning, you can see if anything else has an old thread before starting a new one. Just a tip.

Email Sony/snail mail Sony and ask them when Season 2 will be out. Kickstart The Knight (fans trying to get FK back on TV be it repeats, new show, movies, put out on DVD) recently sent 170 emails they'd collected from fans, to Sony. The more people who ask, the better, I believe. It'll show them that there's interest in the show.

As much as I like Angel, I have to say I like Nick Knight better, as a character. He's like Anne Rice's Lestat and Louis rolled into one. Played by Geraint Wyn Davies, he's got the earnestness and self-doubt going, but he's very winning and smiles a lot, too, and to me is much more believable as someone who's lived for hundreds of years.

Had to quote this, because I agree with all that's said about Nick, and Ger.

Like Highlander, Forever Knight relies a lot on flashbacks to the main character's personal past, to evoke some past situation that parallels what's going on in the present, and I love that stuff.

In the first season, CBS ran 41 minutes of episode in an hour, or hour and ten minutes. The flashbacks were originally meant to be cut out of the American version, but put into the Canadian version (we got the longer version, but Germany got the longest, around 52 minutes in the first season) but everybody loved the flashbacks so much that they were left in, for both (U.S. and Canada).

Oh, and on the DVD, the very first episode, "Dark Knight Part 1" is the U.S. 41 minute one, the rest of them are the Canadian versions. There's still stuff missing when 1st season U.S. and Canadian are compared. *sigh*

Cynthia187:

I'd hated the changes that had happened at the beginning of the last season, and I was unhappy that the actress that played Janette left. I was hoping for Nick/Janette pairing for the last season of the show,

You can blame USA Network for that and all the cast changes between 2nd and 3rd season. They didn't think Janette (Deborah Duchene) was sexy enough (as if!!!! What alternate reality were they living in?!?!?), that's why Tracy was brought in, Vachon was supposed to mirror Nick, Tracy was supposed to mirror Nat, they were supposed to be what the audience would want. Wrong! Imo, there wasn't a good episode in the 3rd season until "Night In Question".

Re: the last episode and watching it as it aired for the first time... yep, felt like I got sucker punched and I refuse to watch the last few episodes ("Ashes To Ashes" and "Last Knight"). If we had gotten the episode as Geraint Wyn Davies had meant it to be shown (he directed it, and a few other episodes), Natalie would have twitched after she had "died", and a few other things would have shown that the characters would continue. James Parriot (who created the show) was the one who insisted of making it look like everybody died. Mind you, by that point, it had already been killed/cancelled six times (CBS, syndication), then the last announcement (the sixth time) was when there were about six episodes left to film (that's why there was a wrestling episode in the third season, it was supposed to be for USA's audience of wrestler watchers) so I believe James Parriot was sick of his show being killed so he decided to make sure that this truly was the last time it was killed.

[RiverThames]

Few shows in the history of TV have had as strange a history in terms of "It's on! No, it's not! OK, it's cancelled now. Now it's back. Now it's cancelled again!" I mean, three seasons, each one broadcast differently (CBS Late Night, Syndication, USA). Roller coaster. I'm not surprised they just wanted off.

[Lesbonaut]

NickChick, thanks for the link.

KSFan, I'd be happy to email Sony about Forever Knight. is there a specific email address to send this kind of mail to at Sony that you know of, rather than the generic one?

Wow, it's great to get more behind-the-scenes info about this series.

But I'm really worried that they aren't going to put out the second and third seasons. And I want them Now. This Minute. If you have any further information about when the next set will be available, please post it.

A friend of mine who knows a lot more about the vampire genre--particularly in books--than I do just gave me a book called Bloodwalk by Lee Killough. It's a reprint of two novels from the 1980s, one called Blood Hunt and the other...I think maybe Bloodlines. I just started reading it; it's about a homicide detective in San Francisco. My friend claims these two novels are the basis for the Forever Knight series. So far the detective is not a vampire, but it looks like he's going to become one during the course of the story.

I've seen the Nick Knight movie starring Rick Springfield (the "pilot" for the later TV series), but don't recall seeing anything in that movie's credits about Lee Killough. And there's nothing I've found in the DVD set for the first season that mentions Killough either. The Blood Hunt book doesn't mention Forever Knight anywhere, either, that I've found. So I wonder what the story is behind that. Anyone know?

[adia cleo]

re: the S1 DVDs, I wasn't impressed with the lack of captions.
The extras were a joke, but I can live with ridiculous extras, however I cannot live without captions. Maybe S2 will bring these sets into the 21st century...

[Lesbonaut]

I'm still afraid that there will not be a Season 2 DVD set or a Season 3 DVD set. The Season 1 set came out 8 months ago, and I can't find any publicity anywhere that says Season 2 is definitely coming out at all, and no mention of it on websites that announce future DVD releases, as far ahead as this coming November. Bummer.

I finished reading the Lee Killough book Bloodwalk, and there doesn't seem to be much in common between them and Forever Knight, except for the vampire-detective idea. This detective is an Irish-American working in San Francisco; he's attacked by a female vampire while investigating a case, and becomes one; it takes him quite awhile to realize what's happened to him, to accept it, to learn how to survive honorably as a vampire (he gets his blood from rats at the harbor, and later from live cows), and to reconcile his crime-fighting profession with his new Undead life. It wasn't a bad read--just not what I was expecting from a book I was told the movie/series was based on.

[swannlore]

When I started watching Forever Knight, I was already heavily into the whole vampire mythos. At the time I think I was in my late teens or early twenties when I saw the original pilot with Rick Springfield. Then, when the crimetime after primetime thing started up and they said that Forever Knight would be on its schedule I was at first confused because the pilot was just called Nick Knight. Then when I realized that it was based on the orginal with Geraint Wyn Davies, who I remember from the third and awful season of AirWolf, I decided to check it out.

Geraint Wyn Davies was and still is a great actor who brought a great deal of strength and enjoyment to the series. As was already stated in another post, he was always smiling and energetic even when the character went through some really rough stuff. He made it seem like fun to be a vampire. And for a young teen who had just discovered the Anne Rice world and was going through a stage of teen life where I felt like an outsider, well let's just say that this show really appealed to me on alot of levels.

And I can't forget to mention the character that really was second only to Nick, and that was Lucien Lacoix played by Nigel Bennett. Lacoix was the perfect antithesis to Nick who was always seeking to become human. From temptations like the blood itself or using Jennette to outright threats and violence, Lacoix used every trick in the book to keep Nick from regaining his humanity and Nick resisted everytime.

All in all, this show was excellent in spite of its small budget and production value. It had the right gothic feel and a cast that wasn't ego driven and full of itself, they just seemed to enjoy it. I was sorry to see the series end the way that it did but the ending played straight to the very core and tragedy of the show and didn't actually disappoint. And besides, we never actually saw Lacoix bring the stake down did we?

[Sleestak Hunter]

I loved this show. My friends and I called it 'Forever Cheese' because of the production values- but we loved it all the more because they were kinda crappy.

Who knew Toronto was crawling with vampires?!

Don Schanke was the best partner a vampire cop could hope for. R.I.P., Don. The show just wasn't the same after you & Capt Ohama left.

[KiwiRaptor]

When I started watching Forever Knight, I was already heavily into the whole vampire mythos

I came in from the opposite side, having never watched anything about vampires, but being heavily into cop shows. It was FK that me hooked into watching later vampire series' like The Kindred, Buffy, and Angel.

From what I remember of the ending (keeping in mind that it's been several years), Nick turns away from LaCroix. LaCroix says "Damn you, Nicholas", and begins plunging the stake down just as the sceen cuts to black. We don't actually see the stake hit him, though.

Edited by KiwiRaptor, Jun 2, 2004 @ 9:33 AM.

[Cesium]

In what I think was last week's TV Guide, the cover story was the top 25 cult shows ever, and FK was one of them - somewhere around 10 or 15, perhaps? I took a quick look @ tvguide.com and didn't find any online info.

[mr.simpatico]

In what I think was last week's TV Guide, the cover story was the top 25 cult shows ever, and FK was one of them - somewhere around 10 or 15, perhaps?

In my print edition of TV Guide they have FK listed at #23 (ahead of Absolutely Fabulous and behind Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman). I hope 10 years from now when TV Guide does this Top 25 thing again (as they always do) that Angel doesn't overtake it just because it had a higher fan following (leading from Buffy), more seasons and higher production values. FK is IMHO was much better at getting at the premise of what Angel was originally about - a vampire trying to repay for the lives he had taken by doing for others. Nick Knight never needed a curse to give him a soul to change his thinking and he didn't face larger than life Powers that Be, just low-level human (and supernatural) scum all the while dealing with the demons of his own past. I think GWD did a much better job than any of the "reformed" vampires of the Whedon-verse in showing how much guilt he had, how it was always there in the back of his mind - Spike and Angel by contrast didn't dwell on all the lives they took all that much. And I still think LaCroix was one of the best fictional vampires ever on TV both as villian and character - unapologetic and unreformed yet you can sense he still cared for his "children" like Janette and Nick and wanted to bring them back to what HE saw as the "better" side.

I'm kinda sad at how it ended though - all of the last season was kinda meh for me though the first 2 seasons had some very good episodes. Not to mention all the Canadian actors that are recoginzable from other stuff. Sometimes I'll watch my season 1 DVDs just to see how many Canadian HITG!s I can catch.

Edited by mr.simpatico, Jun 3, 2004 @ 6:56 PM.

[Bitterswete]

Well, I like Angel better than FK. But I do have fond memories of FK. I wish I could see it again from the beginning.

[selkie]

At least FK managed to not recycle actors within the series so much as Highlander did. There were many actors who had roles as 2 different characters over the course of the the HL franchise, and a couple of three-timers.

I've got mixed feelings about the third season of FK- so many things were wrong, and yet I really liked Vachon, and even grew a bit fond of Tracy over time. I'm still denying the last three episodes exist.

[Sandbagger1]

For those of you in the DC area, Geraint Wyn Davies will be starring as Cyrano in the play of the same name at the Shakespeare Theatre this month. Here is a link.

Cyrano

[Sleestak Hunter]

and even grew a bit fond of Tracy over time

Yeah, me too, I guess. I even kinda liked Vachon & his rat-eating sidekick (can't remember his name or even if he lived to see more than 1 ep).

Tracy was OK- but she was no Don Schanke.

[avid_reader]

KiwiRaptor

From what I remember of the ending (keeping in mind that it's been several years), Nick turns away from LaCroix. LaCroix says "Damn you, Nicholas", and begins plunging the stake down just as the sceen cuts to black. We don't actually see the stake hit him, though.

That's what I remember, too. And we don't see the stake come down because Natalie made a sound that caught everyone's attention and LaCroix didn't kill Nick. And when Natalie recovered she realized that Nick never really felt the same about her as she felt about him so she left his brooding self and had a very happy (un)life without him.

Thanks, swannlore!

Edited by avid_reader, Jun 4, 2004 @ 10:34 PM.

[swannlore]

Bwah!!!! I like your ending for this series, avid_reader a great deal better than that of the writers.

[KSFan]

Sleestak_Hunter, the rat-eating sidekick's name was Screed, and his last episode was "Fever". He was in a few others, in the third season, before that.

selkie, why are you denying the last three episodes exist? I can understand about "Ashes To Ashes" and "Last Knight", but why do you deny that the episode between them (or before them) exists?

[Lesbonaut]

Jess Atreides:

I honestly think that FK and Highlander employed pretty much all 24 actors in Canada.

Of course everyone probably knows that "Tracy" went on to become "Beka Valentine", the ace pilot in Andromeda. It's one of the main reasons I watch Andromeda, which is also a Canadian show. But last week I saw the first episode of Andromeda Season 4 for the first time, and was pleasantly surprised to recognize Nigel Bennett as the insane bad guy in that episode. Funny to see the former vampire and the former cop on a Starship together! (Bennett appeared only as a hologram on the ship, but later the crew found him in person in a cave on some raggedy-ass disintegrating planet. He did a really good acting job.) Too bad they couldn't have included a part for Wynn Davies in that episode as well, and had a regular FK reunion in space.

[Sleestak Hunter]

Nigel Bennett rules. He was the best thing about Lexx (besides Xenia Seeberg's immense hotness).

[selkie]

I figure it's easy to give up "Francesca" if I'm getting rid of "Ashes" and "Last Knight" on either side of it, and to prevent any accidental re-encounters with "Ashes" I might as well call the series done with "Jane Doe"

Not rational, but then neither was how they ended the show.

[KSFan]

A funny (not!) thing happened when my local ABC station first ran "Francesca"... they ran the first half hour of the episode, then the last half hour they showed "Jane Doe"! ARGH!!!! Talk about frustrating!

Nigel Bennett - gotta see that episode of Andromeda. Luckily, a friend of mine taped it for me. <g> The same friend is going to see Geraint Wyn Davies in "Cyrano de Bergerac" in Washington, D.C. tomorrow night.

I hated the way that FK ended, too. Apparently there was a real fight between Geraint Wyn Davies (who directed "Last Knight") and James Parriott about what stayed in and what was taken out. Parriott won, and we got what we saw on the screen. If Ger had won, we'd've seen little things like Natalie twitching after Nick had drunk her blood.

[Fabrisse]

The moment in Last Knight that always creeped me out was the one where I realized that the somewhat fuzzy, low-angle shot that we kept coming back to was Natalie's POV. Since the conversation in the foreground was discussing her death...

[adia cleo]

If Ger had won, we'd've seen little things like Natalie twitching after Nick had drunk her blood.

ah, it's great that he wanted little things left in, but re: the above "little" thing... REALLY glad it was left out **shudders**