razy Love
razy Love
Soon after a psychopathic killer, Peter Barlow, escapes from a mental institution, a patient's body is discovered on the hospital grounds -- the victim of a brutal and vicious murder. The following day another patient's body is discovered. Both crimes match Barlow's M.O., and Nick Knight is determined to prevent another murder. But, Nick's quick arrest of Barlow proves there is a different killer at large. Now he must find a new connection between the victims and the murderer.
Just as in "Near Death" (which aired immediately before this episode), Nick's "police inquiries" into the murders seem more like an avenue for recalling and coming to terms with his memories as a vampire than normal questioning. Any useful evidence is of secondary importance; he's trying to resolve his own moral dilemmas. Sure, he does collect useful evidence, but in both cases he goes beyond that, falling into flashbacks during each of his repeated visits.
One strange plot point that I couldn't reconcile was the fact that we saw Barlow approaching Whitney (the first murder victim) in the intro -- but later learned that she had been killed by Dr. Welsh (played by Deborah Wakeham). So he approached her, but didn't kill her, even though he had enough time? And Dr. Welsh somehow knew that Barlow had escaped long before anyone else, and took the opportunity to kill Whitney? Perhaps. But none of this seems very likely.
Nick is very worried that he's a lot like Barlow, killing people just to posess them, rather than just to sate his need for blood. Oddly enough, he feels this way towards Janette, even though he can't kill her in that manner. (On a side note, why haven't we seen this behaviour between the two of them before? For such a strong woman, I wouldn't have suspected that Janette enjoys having her blood drained, coming nearer to death) Nick and Janette already posess eachother in some sense, so his drawing blood from her doesn't bring her any more under his power in any permanent sense.
But at the end, Nick discovers that Barlow hadn't killed several of the victims, and confronts Dr. Welsh, who notices (as she's dying) that Nick really does understand the killing mind. Nick then seems to come to accept this, resolve it, and goes to see Janette again. Has he really come to terms with his own mind, decided that his "posession" of others is only secondary to his mandatory feeding, and concluded that he is different? Although that's quite probably true (at least in recent years), he's never before come to terms with his moral problems so quickly.
One interesting thing came out of the scene where he finally kills the wine merchant's daughter he was draining blood from. As she dies slowly, the heartbeat that we hear whenever he's using his vampiric powers dwindles off and then dies completely. So the heartbeat must represent the victim's lifeforce, rather than that of the vampiric entity. I had never considered that before, and it would be interesting to know if this hypothesis matches events in other episodes.
Episode rating (0 to 10): 3
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