Saturday, July 14, 2012
I Want to Be Forever Knight
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| carling2u.co.uk |
You know what – I like the night. Even when they find a
treatment and I take back the daytime, I’ll still be nocturnal. I like it that
way – I am biologically and culturally nocturnal.
Any sunlight treatment would eliminate the huge risk
vampires run every time we’re away from a nice windowless shelter – which is
great, because that’s the real problem.
On a smaller, universal scale with nocturnal living, you
have the limited job opportunities, the inconvenient hours for anything worth
doing (Museums, galleries, libraries – they almost always close at five) and
the lack of bargain matinees.
No bargain matinees. Hey, that was a big deal before Netflix
and the wonders of the Web. Ah, the wonders of the Web, where there are no
hours, either for jobs or for entertainment.
I’d still be working the night shift, sun treatment or not. I
don’t miss the sunshine.
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| article.wn.com |
Part of this might be generational. I spent my early
childhood on a frontier farm. Sunlight dictated our schedules in the other
direction.
Sunshine meant work. On a good day, I’d be doing the
housework indoors in my honored capacity as ‘eldest child.’ More likely, we’d
all be doing the hard labor outdoors. And then fiddle music later, hopefully
distracting us from the fact that we had no air conditioning, no electric fans
or even electricity, no sunscreen, and not even a hat with a brim. And we
didn’t even know it.
A decade later,
I was in the city working inside all day, as one of the first generations to do
that. Another decade, and I was with the vampire community, slowly adjusting to
their schedule. Actually being in the sunshine, instead of seeing it on TV, is
a distant memory from another world. Almost as much as the frontier. I’m a city
slicker now – I can’t go back.
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| truebie.blogspot.com |
When Sophie-Anne Leclerq had her little artificial beach
party on True Blood, it made her even
more alien to me. How can she miss the sun after 500 frigging years? I’m 142. I
did at first. Now? It’s like that isn’t even the way the world looks anymore.
I feel like I live in a different climate than everyone else
I know, where everything’s usually several degrees cooler, it’s always dark,
and the wildlife is a lot more like me. Sure, I’ll talk to them about their
weather, but I don’t want to move there.
Don’t tell that to Nick Knight, the protagonist of Forever Knight. He wants to move there
for life, regardless of the cost. Which is death.
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| (God, it's hard to find a picture of Nick where he looks normal. Stop snarling at me, Nick.) yuchtar.com |
Forever Knight.
Love the title. You could interpret that four different ways: Nick’s last name
is Knight, and he’s immortal. He’s also a Vampire with a traditional sun
problem, and thus has a ‘forever night.’ Also, he was an actual knight in
medieval France, so he’s a knight made immortal. And most importantly, now he’s
a knight-in-shining-armor cop who happens to be immortal, with all that that
implies.
Too bad it’s a misnomer.
Nick doesn’t want to help people forever, because he doesn’t
want to live forever. His main goal throughout the series is to become mortal
again. He tries that even if it consequentially puts humans in danger, because
his domineering sire LaCroix won’t stop hounding him and anyone in his way.
Atonement is a secondary goal, and Nick jumps at every opportunity to be human
even if that would mean cutting short his life and time to help people.
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| home.sprynet.com |
Nick – you spent nearly 700 years killing people. You can’t
make up for that. You’ve gone 100 years without killing anyone – you’re not a
threat anymore. All you can do is help people now. You can save people who
wouldn’t be saved by a conventional police officer – and that’s more or less
the organizing principle behind this series, so you should have realized this
by now.
You’re a philanthropist who’s given millions of your
ill-gotten gain to help the needy with your De Brabant foundation – awesome.
One of the things I’ve liked best about the show is its emphasis on real-world
good deeds. Nick doesn’t do good works by saving people from a never-ending
supply of demons like Angel – he does it the sort of bureaucratic, down-to-earth
way that makes society function.
During the Civil War, Nick was working as a medic for the
Union Army (despite not completely giving up killing). During the Civil War
Angel was – uh, still evil, but I guess 150 years later is when he’d be running
his unlicensed PI service that repeatedly butted heads with the actual police
force. Which was, of course, useless in the fight against demons despite
overwhelming evidence of the existence of demonic activity.
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| en.bestpicturesof.com. |
Angel the Series
makes up for it with the gray Wolfram and Hart plot arc, where the Fang Gang
tries reforming an evil law firm. And Angel signs away his opportunity to be
human, because it meant fulfilling his scheme and saving the world. Nick? Not
so much.
He has all the time in the world to use his gifts for the
good of the society he’s supposedly trying to repay. And he’s throwing it all
away to feel redeemed, without actually being redeemed.
Dying for your own sins, which is Christian in kind of a self-absorbed
way, is easier and more selfish than the hard work, difficult decisions, and
moral ambiguity that constitutes redemption through good works.
Becoming human would be less moral, Nick. You may feel like
you’d be on the side of good, because your understanding of metaphysics is
stuck in the Middle Ages. But all the people you could have helped will still
be dead. And then you’ll be dead.
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| mybeutifulroses.blogspot.com |
But I have to say; the absolute worst is when I have to
listen to Nick frame his desire to be human as the desire to see a sunrise. The
theme narration says it all: ‘emerge from his world of darkness, from his
endless forever knight.’ Yes – Classic Vampire Angst in a nutshell: seasonal
affective disorder.
Louis had that same thing in Interview. I kinda liked that scene, I guess – at least Louis was
getting enthusiastic about new technology. Hah: some of our elders flinched the
first time they saw a sunrise film. I was mostly just excited about the film
itself.
Films were exciting for just being films back in the
Progressive Era. It was just so cool that they could do that with pictures.
Seeing the sunrise itself on film was like looking at old tintypes: ‘Oh yeah. I
forgot about this.’ Commemorating the past, not looking toward the future.
Nick - it’s the early 1990s. Watch a video if you want a
sunrise. You can fast-forward through it, too – and you have color, not like us
poor slobs a few decades before. YouTube is less than two decades away – you
can get all the sunrises you want, all over the world.
Wait a little while longer, and we’ll have Augmented Reality
technology that can simulates the sunrise so it’ll look more real than the real
thing. Constant simulated sunrises that never stop, and all you may need is a
high-bandwidth Internet connection and decent AR glasses. ‘Sun’ = ‘human?’
Wouldn’t that make you superlatively human?
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| simple.wikipedia.org |
Why are you pining for what you lost in 1228, when you have
the whole twentieth century at your disposal, and the 21st is right
around the corner?
I know that sunlight is a symbol, and the sun represents
‘humanity’ for Nick. Well, Nick – think of it this way. Our technology will
allow you to see the sun, meaning technology has created a bridge over which
you can rejoin the human race. We’ve advanced to the point where we can all be
‘human’ together. If that’s what you want, and you don’t know how to feel good
about yourself in any other way.
The sunrise is great: if people like the sun, awesome. We
all have our preferences. And Nick, I’m sure you’d start tearing up if you saw
the sunrise again. You know something that made me cry? Seeing a picture of my
planet from space.
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| collthings.co.uk |
That Big Blue Marble photo from the Apollo 17 mission? It’s
one of the most published photographs now, and barely even raises an eyebrow.
But I saw it and I couldn’t stop thinking: that’s the earth. That’s us –
everything that’s ever happened in human history – right there. Even the Lunar
Orbiter 1 photo from 1966 was exciting – we saw this little scrap of the Earth,
but it was still Earth.
Now you can watch videos on YouTube that pan out from our
planet through the universe.
Here’s an artist’s rendering of the Earth from the 1400s:
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| en.wikipedia.org |
It makes me cry for a different reason.
The amount of scientific and social progress that has
occurred in my lifetime boggles the mind. It’s genuinely humbling to look back,
and think where we were in the 1870s, and where we are now. And I got the
opportunity to be a part of it, to whatever extent I could.
Nick, I don’t know why you’d genuinely give up everything
for the sake of moral symbolism.
I haven’t led a blameless life either, Nick, and I’ve done a
lot that I’m not proud of. But I don’t regret still being here for a moment.
And, in the words of Daria, ‘there’s nothing like seeing the
sunrise, except seeing the sun set in reverse. Get a VCR.
Or better yet, a spacesuit.
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