|
Obviously, this version of “Ashes to Ashes” is a rewrite of the original. There are numerous differences—some of which are incredibly obvious. Nevertheless, the essential story remains the same: LaCroix’s daughter Divia, who is also his vampire master, returns from a two-millenia-long incarceration in a sarcophagus in an Egyptian tomb, wanting to revenge herself on him by destroying his life and all he loves, including Nick.
However, although this is a very promising concept, the actual episode had real problems. Some of them must have been in the script, which was by Phil Bedard and Larry Lalonde. Others may have been the decision of the director, Jon Cassar. Whoever was responsible, the televised “Ashes to Ashes” was very exciting to watch; but it was also very frustrating to reflect upon afterwards. There were enormous holes in the plot; there was muddled dialogue; and many aspects of the actual filming were hackneyed clichés. Also, of course, it killed off two very promising characters, Vachon and Urs. But, then, the series was being wound down; and the next episode to be aired, the finale, killed off most of the rest of characters as well.
So here I am writing the series on into its future, trying to cast the illusion that it was never cancelled. Clearly, that means that the actual series finale, “Last Knight”, has to be treated as never having been made.
Deciding the fate of the penultimate episode, “Ashes to Ashes”, however, proved more complicated. When I decided to make the half dozen episodes I had already written into a virtual fourth season of Forever Knight, I not only wanted to use Nick, Natalie, LaCroix, and Tracy; I also wanted Vachon and Urs, despite their having been canonically killed by Divia. So, as well as “Last Knight”, I initially also decided to drop “Ashes to Ashes”. The trouble is that, unlike the former (which was a stinker through and through), “Ashes to Ashes” had a good idea and many good scenes. Moreover, I wanted to draw on it as source material for at least one of my own episodes, “Daddy’s Girl”, in which there is a scene with LaCroix and Divia. Yet how could I use “Ashes to Ashes” to support “Daddy’s Girl” if, so to speak, “Ashes to Ashes” had not been made?
The solution was to “save” the episode from oblivion by rewriting it. This enabled me to both eliminate some of its weaknesses as well as reworking the plot so that neither Vachon nor Urs dies.
Originally, I intended to slip the “new, improved” version of the episode into Season IV. When that filled up, I proposed to slip it into a projected Season V. In the end, though, it seemed more reasonable to leave it in its original location as the penultimate episode of Season III. The season finale still disappears into oblivion. Any world in which this version of “Ashes to Ashes” airs in Season III presumably would have had an alternative twenty-second episode before breaking for the summer; but what that alternative season finale might have been must remain a matter of pure speculation.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Prologue
|
|
On the whole, I think the original Prologue was pretty good: effective and mysterious. I’ve really only made a couple of changes.
|
In the original version, Hamid says, “What if Re’Atum decides my soul isn’t worthy and I am destroyed?” This would be a reasonable thing for him to say if he were robbing the tomb in ancient times; but he is a modern Egyptian, and most probably Moslem. So I have him, instead, refer to a curse. Many tombs do have legends of curses—none more so, I should think, than one that had been sealed up by a vampire who would not want tomb robbers accidentally releasing someone he had imprisoned inside.
At the end of the actual prologue, the crack in the lid of the sarcophagus starts to open, seemingly by itself, and a bright light shines up from within. Presumably there was some “sun effect” from the seal of Re’Atum on the sarcophagus lid that prevented Divia from escaping—at least until the tomb robber smashed it. However, that doesn’t explain the source of the light.
So I have substituted a different scenario. In the actual episode, Hamid simply put the flashlight down somewhere to free his hands so he could hit the sarcophagus lid with the hammer. As he had a small light attached to his equipment, there was still a source of illumination. Here, though, I have him set the flashlight—still turned on—down beyond the sarcophagus. I can thus have a dramatic backlit final shot of Divia as she rises from the tomb.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Act One
|
|
Bedard and Lalonde turned a pretty good act here; so most of the scenes in my Act One are almost identical with those in the actual episode, though very few remain completely untweaked. On the other hand, some things were cut entirely. In particular I cut the scene between Urs and Vachon in LaCroix’s living room with its prophetic “Urs-has-a-dream” climax. This has the advantage of shortening Act One, which was remarkably long.
|
In Scene 2, Reese tells Nick and Tracy about Betty Ann MacKenzie. In my revision, he calls her “a juvie at the time, kids’ babysitter”, thus creating a parallel with Divia: both girls in their teens; both sadistic killers. This also allows me to explain why Tracy has never heard of her (“Her name never got in the papers.”) since the names of juvenile offenders are not permitted to be published.
The original Scene 2 ends with Nick taking an anonymous phone call telling him that there is a body at the Raven. However, putting this call before the scene in which LaCroix talks with Urs and Vachon gives the impression that it took the police a remarkably long time to respond. (Bear in mind that both the Raven and the 96th Precinct are downtown; and cop cars with sirens would cover the distance quickly.) So I’ve relocated the call to a later point in Act One.
Since I cut the scene with Vachon and Urs, the next scene in my revised “Ashes to Ashes” is the one in which LaCroix finds the body in the beer fridge. Divia’s phone call to the squad room is added here as a voiceover: this tightens up the flow of events, making the arrival of the police swifter. I’ve also cut the original flashback (in which LaCroix apparently claims the mysterious power of feeling evil presences), and instead substituted a brief scene of LaCroix putting the cameo on Divia.
In the original, Tracy says to Vachon that she felt an evil presence when she and her partner were in the Raven investigating the case. These mysterious sensations of “evil presences” bug the hell out of me! So I have instead had Tracy wonder if LaCroix is a vampire because he’s the owner of a nightclub that she associates with vampires because it’s Vachon’s preferred hangout.
In the original, Tracy says, “Evil is a part of you. It’s in you; I can feel it; and it scares me.” However, this negative evaluation of Vachon comes out of nowhere: in no previous episode is she anything but fascinated by his vampiricity.
To try to make sense of her reservations, therefore, I’ve therefore altered the lines to, “I know there’s stuff you don’t say. I know there is. And … sometimes it almost scares me there’s stuff like that. That it’s maybe why we’ll never work.” With this change, I hope to suggest that it’s not so much that Vachon himself scares her as that his deliberately holding back secrets indicates that he must not trust her enough for them ever to become a couple.
Divia’s attack on Vachon is one of the most effective scenes in the original; so it is largely intact. I have, however, added a lead-in shot of the deserted church where Vachon lives in order to indicate that the alley where Divia is lurking is right by the church—probably the place where he habitually lands when he flies home. In this way, I hope to intimate that Divia has been checking out her intended victims so she’ll know where best to lay an ambush.
Though the attack on Vachon goes past so fast as to be rather obscure (unless you rerun the scene in slo-mo), I have added a shot in which he bites her in an attempt to defend himself. There are two reasons for this. First, it seems incredible that none of her victims attempts to defend themselves, given their military histories. Second, it explains his later fevered visions of her past, since he drank her memories with her blood.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Act Two
|
|
Much of what happens in this act is essential to the plot; and, though I have some reservations about parts of the original flashback, the script is actually pretty good. Of course, there are minor points….
|
The opening scene in the rewritten Act Two is brand new. The police will have left the Raven by the time LaCroix finally returns to the club. This scene has been added, therefore, to give the viewer a quick idea of what goes on in the interim. It also shows that Urs (and presumably the other employees) simply show up for work in the usual way, only to find themselves at a crime scene. After all, LaCroix couldn’t possibly have called them to tell them not to come in: he was being grilled at the police station.
As well, this scene provides some explanation for Urs going to see Vachon.
The scene in which Reese tells everyone what the Egyptian police have said remains substantially the same. However, in the original version, Hassim Karam lost radio contact with Hamid, searched the tomb, and found only blood. I pointed out in my critique that it is doubtful that Hassim would have reported his brother as a missing person, since it would have meant admitting being a tomb robber. So the corpse in the beer fridge is now Hassim, and the Egyptian police were alerted by security guards. The identification of the tomb as Aya-Hotep’s comes from an archaeologist now on site.
Yes, I’ve changed the time frame. It is now a month, more or less, since Hamid’s body was found in the tomb. To me it seems unlikely that Divia would be able to locate LaCroix, cross the Atlantic, figure out that he is the owner of the Raven and who his associates are, plot his doom, and pick up excellent idiomatic unaccented English—all in twenty-four hours!
In the new time line, she killed Hamid as soon as she emerged from the sarcophagus. In her two-thousand-year starvation, she pretty well ripped him apart. From his blood, she learned that he was a tomb-robber whose brother was waiting outside for him. (That is information that would make sense in both ancient and modern cultures.) She then hypnotized Hashim and used him as a data source. His twentieth-century knowledge of computers got her information on LaCroix as proprietor of the Raven; his underworld connections got them both out of Egypt to Canada; and her drinking the blood of victims in Toronto granted her a command of idiomatic English. For the rest of the month, she spied on LaCroix, marking out the vampires who seemed to be his associates as the victims that she would use to terrorize him.
Then she started her campaign against her father by killing Hashim in order to ruin his cover as an “innkeeper”.
Although the flashback to the tomb of Aya-Hotep starts the same, I’ve totally changed the rest of that scene. In particular, you will note that I cut out the references to Divia’s master, Qa’ra. Put simply, I thought it was melodramatic overkill. (“Staked. Scorched by the sun. Then interred…”.)
It is obvious from the way the set is dressed that, in the original episode, there are a few grave goods lying around the tomb, and all three of the sarcophagi have undamaged lids. In my version, the tomb has been looted by Divia. However, she has not been able to open the sarcophagi because of their sun seals. This is a variance from the original script, of course.
When Divia interred her master in Aya-Hotep’s tomb, she expected “the symbol of the sun-god to imprison him for all time”. However, this fails to explain why, if the sun seal keeps vampires sealed inside the tomb, she was able to touch the lid of the sarcophagus on the outside in order to lift it and put her master inside. And yes: in one scene, we do indeed see both her and LaCroix put their hands on top of the lid, albeit not on the seal itself. Given that vampires can therefore canonically touch the uncarved parts of the lid, why couldn’t the imprisoned Divia (or Qa’ra, for that matter) simply push the lid up from inside and escape?
If, however, it is impossible for vampires to touch a sun-sealed tomb at all, the situation makes sense: Divia is truly trapped in the sarcophagus until the seal is broken by the tomb-robber. To make this clear, I have LaCroix exhibit doubt, and try touching the lid only to burn his hand on it.
I have added the scene in which LaCroix is released by the police but enjoined not to return to the Raven because it is (of course!) still a crime scene. Naturally, being both the man and the vampire that he is, he disregards the orders.
I found the original scene in which Urs goes to see the injured Vachon to be pretty goddawful. Personally, I prefer not to require the actor to fling himself around the set in an attempt to cover up the inadequacies of the script.
Besides changing the dialogue, I have added a few frames to Vachon’s hallucinations—specifically, of Divia with Hashim’s corpse. I’ve no idea why they didn’t do something of the sort themselves in the actual episode. Of course, they were reusing bits shot for other scenes rather than film stuff specially for the hallucinations. I’ve put it in, though (despite its going by so fast as to be virtually unrecognizable unless re-run in slow motion), because it does explain why Vachon immediately calls Tracy and says that he knows who the murderer is.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Act Three
|
|
In the original Act III, Nick listens to LaCroix’s Nightcrawler speech on the radio in his apartment while LaCroix remembers Divia (through footage from “A More Permanent Hell”), after which Urs—on her way to try to get Nick to help Vachon—is attacked and killed in the elevator leading to the loft. This version sees some major changes!
Nevertheless, in terms of furthering the plot, the really important development in Act III is Nick’s discovery that there exists a mysterious young girl who hates LaCroix.
|
I have replaced the initial opening scenes in Act III with a sequence in which LaCroix returns to the Raven only to find bodies littering the place. (Vachon would have been another vampire victim for LaCroix to come home to, except that he bit Divia back, so she flew off mid-attack.) As LaCroix explains to Nick in a later scene, the corpses were all patrons of the Raven. Divia is here leaving a message for her father: she will destroy his current life as proprietor of the Raven.
Admittedly, I have put one of the victims in a location that did not appear in canon: LaCroix’s study in the apartment above the Raven. The set they did build, a living room, appeared only in the scene between Vachon and Urs in Act I, which I cut. If you are curious, there is a description of the study as I use it in my virtual season, FK4. Alternatively, if you prefer to stick to the canonical set, just stick a desk in there somewhere.
It should be noted that, in the original “Ashes to Ashes”, LaCroix only learned of the deaths of Vachon and Urs secondhand; and, since their bodies were left elsewhere, it would have been entirely possible that he might never have learned their fate. Here, Divia’s victims are delivered directly to him, pinned to the door of his club and left in his apartment above.
Canonically, it was hearing Divia on the radio call-in that decided Nick to go to the Raven to talk to LaCroix. Of course, if he’d not been listening at that particular moment, he would have had no reason to ask his master about the mystery girl. Here, though, coincidence is avoided: LaCroix calls Nick to come to the Raven. He wants him, as a trained detective, to take an unofficial look at the corpses.
Their discovery substitutes for the attack on Urs (which, in my version of “Ashes to Ashes”, never takes place). This is a deliberately nasty scene—even nastier, I think, than the attack in the elevator since we see the dead vampires quite clearly. As such, it is quite in keeping with the humour of the episode.
Since in my version, Urs was not attacked, the scene in which Nick and Natalie discuss her death has been cut. Replacing it is LaCroix’s phone call to Nick about the bodies he has discovered at the Raven. What may not be obvious is that not only is the setting the same as the original scene, i.e. Natalie’s office in the Coroner Building, but also the staging. Both scenes open with a body on the autopsy table, Nick standing by the lab bench, and Natalie heading for her desk, where she sits down as they talk. (The dialogue, naturally, is quite different.)
The first part of the scene in which Tracy goes to see Vachon is left essentially intact. She comes, of course, in response to his phone call; and her canonical initial words on entering the church (“Vachon, what happened? Vachon? Who did this to you? Vachon! Talk to me!”) are a natural response to seeing him obviously injured. That she immediately drops into cop-mode (“You said you knew who the murderer is.”) I find jarring. I therefore added “Did he hurt you?” to suggest that she sees a possible direct connection between Vachon’s phone call and the attack on him.
One of my aims in writing an alternative “Ashes to Ashes” is to not kill off Vachon and Urs. Canonically, his plea to Tracy to stake him comes in Act IV, followed by a tender death scene. However, in my version, she flatly refuses and runs off. Thus abbreviated, the whole encounter slips tidily into Act III.
In canon, Nick learns of Divia’s existence when she calls in to LaCroix’s Nightcrawler broadcast while he is listening to the radio in the loft. Since, in the new version, there is no such Nightcrawler broadcast, if Nick is to overhear Divia talking to her father, it must be in circumstances in which he is physically close enough for their conversation to be audible. So I have LaCroix ask Nick to come to the Raven, where he shows him the bodies of the vampires Divia killed, thus putting the two of them in the same room when Divia phones. As a result, although her call does not go out on the air, it is still audible to Nick. Vampire hearing comes in very handy here.
Divia is actually outside the Raven throughout this scene. Why is she there? Well, first of all, she wanted to see LaCroix’s reaction to the bodies she left for him. Then, when she was about to make the phone call, she needed to know that he was still there to take it. Also, she wants to see what he does when she hangs up.
Divia’s own words remain unaltered. I only cut LaCroix’s rather weak retort at the very beginning of the call.
In the original version of “Ashes to Ashes”, Divia’s call is preceded by an historical flashback to Pompeii before the volcanic eruption, which simply establishes Divia as LaCroix’s mortal daughter, now a vampire. This I have cut.
Space is thus freed for me to shift into the post-phone-call spot some things that originally appeared in Act IV: Nick’s questions about Divia and an abbreviated version of the scene from “A More Permanent Hell” in which LaCroix is brought over. LaCroix’s subsequent words are pretty well unchanged, but here serve as a sort of bookend just to the Pompeii scene.
I’ve added a little scene to catch us up on what Tracy is doing, since she is obviously not impaling Vachon.
She has no further role to play in the episode; yet it seems an unplugged hole in the plot not to explain what she does during all the hectic events of the next couple of acts. So here I put a little scene with Tracy and Capt. Reese. We are now at the end of the shift. Reese is going home. Presumably that is where Tracy is going to head now, too. And, for that matter, Nick can go home when he leaves the Raven, though that won’t be until after Act IV.
Of course, there’s still quite a lot of story to get through, all of which has to be fitted in before sunrise. Hmmm … maybe it’s wintertime. (Why not? Filming takes place months before a show airs.) In the northern hemisphere, sunrise will not come for quite some while.
In another new scene, Urs goes to Natalie for help. To me, this actually makes more sense than her going to Nick. After all, in “Fever”, when Screed was ill, Vachon wanted Natalie’s help. Why wouldn’t Urs react in the same way, but instead just go directly to Natalie? Vachon is ill: get a doctor.
Of course Vachon whittles himself a stake!
He asked Tracy to stake him, and she refused. Why would he give up his intentions? And no: he doesn’t keep a stake in a box. That would be nuts. So he has to make one.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Act Four
|
|
Obviously, at this point, the story line with Vachon has deviated sharply from the original. All the scenes involving him are therefore brand new.
In the original “Ashes to Ashes”, it is only at the beginning of Act IV that Nick goes to the Raven. The act basically consisted of two long scenes of LaCroix’s past, separated by only a few lines of dialogue and framed by longer scenes of the two of them talking about the situation. In my version, some of this has been shifted to Act III. There still remains, though, the story of her entombment.
|
For the scene in which Nick and LaCroix discuss Divia’s threats and motivation, I have tried to redraft the dialogue by reordering the good bits so the lines flow more smoothly.
There is a real problem with LaCroix’s striking off Divia’s head. It was beautifully staged; but, no matter how dramatic, it totally contradicts everything established in the series about beheading vampires. I chose, therefore, not to have LaCroix kill her before entombing her.
We have not had any evidence one way or the other on the frequency with which vampires have to feed or their need for oxygen. Improbable though Divia’s survival may be, perhaps vampires do not starve or suffocate no matter how long they go without food or air. Or maybe they sink into some sort of hibernation or coma.
For the prosaic, “I put the remains in the sarcophagus. The sun god on the lid acted on her in much the same way as the cross does on us,” I substituted the more succinct, “I sealed her with the sun.”
LaCroix does not handle the lid of the sarcophagus with impunity. In Act II, I showed that it will singe him. Here, his hands are clearly burning, much as they would be if he were to hold a cross (something that we have seen Nick do in a couple of actual episodes of the series). Presumably, in the extremity of the moment, he is able to ignore the pain. The result is, I hope, just as exciting in its own way as the beheading was.
I had LaCroix tell Nick, “I have sensed her around this place for days now,” to make explicit that Divia has been spying on LaCroix for long enough to learn the details of his current life.
The scene in which Natalie analyses what is wrong with Vachon is, obviously, new material. It can be compared with the sketchy explanation proferred in the original Epilogue, where LaCroix says to Nick, “Perhaps your resurgent goodness was all that was needed to defeat Divia’s evil,” and Nick responds, “Urs and Vachon were young. They did not know how to deal with it.” Well, it is not out of character for Nick, at least, to fall back on supernatural explanations.
Natalie, on the other hand, is a scientist. She, therefore, is going to want to work out just what Divia actually did to the vampires she attacked. What was it they had to “deal with”, to use Nick’s phrase?
Each of the vampire corpses found at the Raven was killed in a different way: staked, beheaded, heart cut out. These are all effective methods of killing vampires. However, Divia seems to have bitten Vachon, which suggests that she tried to kill him using exsanguination. Normally, when vampires bite each other—during sex, say—they sort of sip each other’s memories. We haven’t seen the effect real draining has on a vampire.
Cross this with “The Fix” and its idea that there is vampire RNA. Can a synthesis of concepts explain what happens to Vachon? What is the effect of Divia’s own RNA invading his body, either through her saliva or because he tried to defend himself by biting back? Consider the parallel with the process by which a human is brought across. Is his nearly drained body so busy fighting Divia’s foreign RNA that it isn’t healing?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Act Five
|
|
In the original “Ashes to Ashes”, Act V opens with a series of little scenes intended to tie up petty plot points: Nick learns from Reese that Tracy has gone to Vachon, sees her cradling her friend’s body, and goes to Natalie’s office, where she points out that the obvious next target will be Nick himself. Only then does the story head into a major scene, when Nick returns to the loft to find Divia waiting for him. However, this is where my version of Act V opens.
|
The light no longer dims mysteriously as Nick rides up in the elevator. Instead, he is alerted by the rushing sound of vampire flight up in his loft.
As Divia was presented in the actual episode, she looked sleekly dangerous in a black leather outfit with boots. On top of that, she flatly informed Nick that she intended to kill him to hurt LaCroix. In my version, she is dressed as a sweet young thing to take Nick off his guard. He sees her as a child, and reacts accordingly. Naturally, his first assumption is that LaCroix has been, at the very least, slanting his story askew of the truth.
In the second season episode “Bad Blood”, Toronto is visited by an Irish police officer, Liam O’Neal, survivor of a vampire attack when he was a boy. Though partly drained, he was saved from coming across by the local priest, who poured holy water over the wounds on his neck. Though O’Neal never told Natalie his history (or at least not on screen), the vampire community knows at least something about it. Or, of course, she may be extrapolating from what she knows of the effect of crosses and holy water on Nick.
The attack on LaCroix has been tweaked a bit, mostly in the dialogue; but the first part of it stays substantially the same. The major change comes only at the end, which is the climax of Act V.
I could never account for the appearance of the sickle in the original “Ashes to Ashes”. Divia had nowhere to conceal something so large in her clothing, nor did she whip off to get it from a hiding place. However, as far as this version of the episode is concerned, the matter is moot: LaCroix did not behead his daughter; he entombed her alive. There being no sickle, though, I had to come up with some other climactic scene.
Ironically, Divia may well have no idea of the reaction vampires have to crosses—certainly no gut fear of them, since she predates Christianity as a major religion. In her day, it was still just a minor sect of Judaism. So, when she says, “Shall we try you on the cross, then,” she is thinking rather of crucifixion as a Roman form of execution—one that was very painful and prolonged, and hence just the sort of torment that she would delight in inflicting on her father. Divia expects LaCroix just to suffer and suffer and suffer and not die.
Of course, Divia is Nick’s “grandmother”, so to speak. Presumably their RNA is pretty similar already. So Nick’s body can put its energy straight into healing—as Vachon’s can also do once Divia’s RNA is cleansed from it.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Epilogue
|
|
A great opening, a great close. So naturally my version opens and closes identically with the original. Of course, since Vachon and Urs didn’t die, the long medial passage contriving ways to tie off all their teeny tiny loose ends is now unnecessary. Instead, I have my own dangling thread to deal with.
|
Why does Natalie carry a bottle of spring water with her? In case she gets thirsty at a crime scene.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
