This is another episode whose origin lies years before it was finally written.  I had the idea that it would be interesting to see what Natalie’s take would be on the metaphysics of the vampire condition, if she could ever be brought to take cognizance of it.  It seemed to me that, as a scientist, her response would be to try to bring the irrational under rational “control”, so to speak, by trying to take a scientific approach—turning it into something that could be tested and measured, like the more obviously medical aspects of Nick’s condition.

That Nick might see this as irrelevant to a cure and not want to cooperate—that I saw from the start.  In the original version of the experiment, she turned to LaCroix as an alternative subject.  Naturally, I was aware of the improbability of his agreeing to involve himself in any investigation of hers.  But it simply had not occurred to me to use Vachon instead.  In that version of the scene, the test was performed in the Raven, during the day (when it is shut), with the objects spread out along the bar.  I then had LaCroix invite Natalie up to his study for a drink; and, in their absence, Urs came in and tidied up.

Urs’s immunity to crosses was always integral to the plot.  I wondered, you see, why vampires were supposed to be unable to touch them.  It’s a common part of the vampire myth:  people who write vampire stories pretty well have to either use it or explicitly refute it (as Anne Rice does).  Yet no one ever bothers to explain.  For the Forever Knight world, however, it does tie in with Nick’s certainty that vampires are damned.  They are serial killers:  they are damned.   They deny natural death:  they are damned.  Whatever.

But what of vampires who are not serial killers?  And—let’s face it—the hallucination that Nick had in “Near Death” was pretty vague on the function of the door and the white light.  How was he supposed to know the true nature of the choice he was making?  I had already had the idea that these Death figures were enigmatic (and hence quite unfair, in my opinion).  Of course, the episode in which we actually see Urs’s death vision, “Death Shall Be No More”, was long to be written.  But, as I said in the Notes to it, I had had the idea for Urs’s hallucination for quite a while before I wrote the episode.

For Urs not to be a confirmed killer, it follows that she could never have got used to killing.  So I conceived of this as a sequel to the Season III episode, “Hearts of Darkness”, in which we were told how she was brought across by Vachon.  Presumably he would then have had to teach her killing techniques, much as LaCroix taught Nick.  But, on Urs, the teaching would have had to have failed.  It followed—given the approximate date she was brought over—that she would have had to have had some alternative source of supply long before bottled blood became possible.  Hence I also decided from the start that there would be a reference back to the season premiere.

The historical and experiment scenes were eventually written about the same time as Vachon’s memories of Luc for “A Richer Dust”—I guess, about mid 1998.   The two subplots were not written at the same time, though conceived together; but I later went back and chopped each up into chunks, interfiling them in a manner that I thought might fit into the five act format.  Originally, though, Urs’s memory of killing the maid was not in Act One.  It was the Prologue.  When I came to slot the episodes in place, I read this after “A Richer Dust”; and the two juxtaposed historical Prologues jarred on me.  Forever Knight normally opens with the present-day murder.  I quickly fixed the problem by reordering the scenes, and adding a little tiny new Prologue.

Why did it take so long to get down to writing the episode (for it was not written until the fall of 1999)?  Well, it was the usual problem.   Unless the main plot is a vampire story, episodes tend to be inspired by character subplots or historical scenes.  There are exceptions.  (The next episode, for example.)   But, as a general rule, the police plot is the last thing I come up with.  And, believe me, it can be hard at times.  But, as it is the matrix into which the character and historical scenes get slotted, there’s nothing much I can do about actually writing the episode as a whole until I’ve come up with a murder mystery.

One of the big problems in this case was contriving a way to have the murder inspire Urs to remember killing the maid.  Parallel locations served as a partial answer:  hotel then; hotel now.  But Urs never plays any role in the solution to the police plot—how could she?  Tying the plot threads together was therefore a pain.  I suspect, from your point of view, the connection between the three parts of the story must have seemed tangential at best.  I hope that the Epilogue came as a revelation.

Natalie's Experiment

I don’t claim to know what Natalie discovered with her experiment, though I have my suspicions.  Given what happened in “Walk Out Once More Beneath the Sun”, it seems likely that not all of the objects she tried on Vachon had the same effect, even discounting the ones she used as controls.  Nor, if Natalie ever manages to persuade Nick to do the experiment will she necessarily find that the different objects have the same degree of effect on each and every vampire.  But frankly?—I’d rather not get into details.

   

The appearance of a swastika among the objects Natalie tries out on Vachon is, of course, a reference back to “Walk Out Once More Beneath the Sun”.  His reaction suggests that, like Nick, he associates the symbol with the Nazi party.  I doubt if he’d look startled by Natalie showing him something he considers a sun symbol.

And what about that First Aid box with the Red Cross symbol?

Not to mention the Star Trek stuff.  The IDIC symbol from the Star Trek series symbolizes something that, though not religious, is nevertheless philosophical.  But this significance is purely fictional.  Would it affect a vampire?  If so, how strongly?  Vachon probably knows its origin, just as he recognizes the Star Trek communicator pin:  in my version of Forever Knight he is a fan of SF television.  But I suspect that Nick would fail to recognize it.  Remember in “Sons of Belial”, when he didn’t get Tracy’s Wizard of Oz reference?  He isn’t exactly up on popular culture.

Miscellaneous

The title of this episode comes from Thomas Hardy’s novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles.  It was the original subtitle of the book.

In Chinese, the family name comes first and the personal name second.  It is common, however, for immigrant Chinese to anglicize the word order, even when they do not take alternative English personal names for their daily interactions outside their own community.  Nick, whom we know from “Cherry Blossoms” to be fluent in Chinese, uses the proper order.  Tracy and Captain Reese use the anglicized order.

In the Prologue, Hong Wei is described as “sitting up at the head of the bed by the bedtable (on l.s.)”.  This is a clue that his initial story is a lie.  The door to the room is on the right side.  For Hong to get into this position, if his story were true that he got back from dinner, came in, and found the body, then he would have had to go round by the body in order to get to the telephone in the room.  Yet this is a guy who throws up at the sight of it.  More likely, he’d bolt back into the hall and down to the front desk.  The position does fit, though, with his coming from the bathroom, which is on the left.

Polymorphic light eruption is a real medical condition, involving extreme sensitivity to ultraviolet radiation.   I know that, in “Black Buddha”, Tracy asks Nick about his “phototropic” condition; but this is a mistake on her part:  she got the word wrong.  Very wrong, actually.  Phototropism involves turning towards the light.  It is found in many plants—but not in too many vampires!

The Portuguese has had to be left untranslated, since I do not know the language.  Rather than try to cobble together out of a dictionary something that would undoubtedly be ungrammatical, I decided just to go with the asterisks.  Nick understands what is being said, of course:  he is a polyglot.  But the “viewers” do not, unless they are Portuguese speakers.  I can, however, tell you what they are saying (though I wrote it, of course, in English).  If what I wrote is unidiomatic in Portuguese, then you may take it that they said something of similar import.

The first, longer, speech by the old lady is:

And the second, shorter, exchange is:

When we are told that, because of her grandmother’s opinion on the subject of her working, Tina did not dare talk about her new job when she visited her parents, this is not merely a touch of characterization.  It is also a plug in a plot-hole.  It can only be because Tina could not talk about her job that her sister doesn’t know the name of the hotel where her sister is working.  Otherwise, she'd be a fool to go there.

When Josefina says that all that’s important to her fiancé is her wearing a long white wedding gown, she is giving away her motive.  Whether or not we can believe that it’s only her parents who consider the big wedding important (and in my opinion—and I wrote it, after all—it’s really Josefina who wants to impress Bob’s family), it’s clear that he doesn’t give a damn about the reception and the flowers.  So he isn’t the kind of man to care about a fancy dress, either.  Not in itself.

But symbolically, of course, the white dress means virginity.  And, whether or not, in this day and age, Bob cares if his bride lost hers to a previous boyfriend, she presumably knows him well enough to realize that he’d call off the wedding if he learned that she has a taste for sex with total strangers she picks up in nightclubs.  “Amber” is not the girl he thought he was asking to marry him.

Would her sister have told?  I doubt if Josefina even thought about it.  She just panicked.

Why was Josefina carrying a gun?  Presumably she had it with her—and kept it to hand even in bed—in case the stranger she picked up turned nasty on her.  Guns are far less common in Canada than they are in the United States.  I doubt if she had a permit.  I suspect the gun with which she killed her sister was purchased illegally.

Once again, I mention Hardy, the composite artist who appeared briefly in “Crimson Joy”.  My intention, of course, is to give the impression of a consistent roster of police officers.  There aren’t all that many people employed by the Toronto Police to make these pictures.

By the way:  notice that for once it’s Reese who makes a sensible suggestion that Nick hasn’t thought of.  The man must, after all, have been a pretty good cop to have got to the rank he has.

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