lose Call
lose Call
When Nick saves Schanke's life during a fire fight, Schanke can't help but notice Nick has taken up flying. Despite Nick's hypnotic suggestion to forget what he saw, Schanke begins investigating Nick's past. Natalie can't deflect him and Janette's attempts to hypnotise him fail. The trail soon leads him to conclude his partner is a vampire and from there to LaCroix. The question is, what is LaCroix going to do with the inquisitive Schanke?
A nice, very different, sort of episode. No guest stars. The dozens and dozens of flashbacks to the first season were amazingly cool. (why didn't they have many of these before?) There were many bizarre, poorly justified scenes, but overall I really enjoyed this episode.
The premise of this episode, that Schanke finally realizes that something's not quite normal about Nick, is reasonable. But the way it comes about was a little too forced. Suddenly Nick becomes careless and lets Schanke see him swooping down? And instead of shooting the crazed killer, he decides to fly over and punch him out?
Maybe if they had spent more time at the beginning constructing a more plausible scenario it wouldn't have seemed quite as abnormal. But perhaps not. After all, why does Nick have an old driver's license from his previous "life" in his glove compartment? Hasn't he learned to get rid of, or hide, such evidence? At least most of the artifacts he keeps in his house don't have his photograph.
There's a really creepy sequence when he's roaming through the Raven, poking around, and you just know Janette's going to pop up. And a bizarre scene where she's trying to hypnotize him, but he somehow partially breaks loose in a sort of free-association stream. Vampiric suggestion is much less powerful than it was at the beginning of the season.
It was disturbing that every time Schanke makes a mental leap, or tries to recall something, we see him flashing back -- every time. And occasionally the flashbacks weren't very related to his thoughts. But I suppose this could be explained away, since his subconscious is trying ot rebuild these facts that he's been hypnotized into forgetting. And why does he keep comparing the photographs of Janette, Nick, and LaCroix? Surely he's not seeing some sort of similarity. And he remembers the picture of the three of them (sorry; of their three grandparents), so he can't be trying to reconstruct that.
Even his association of Nick with the "Nightcrawler" is tenuous at best. Before he sees the photo in Nick's desk (and how does he know who that person is?), all he knows about the Nightcrawler is that he's some talk show host that Nick listens to. Big deal. (as an aside, does anyone know what's written on the photo Nick has? It almost looked like "for Nicholas, always regretting...", but I couldn't make it out...) For that matter, why on earth does he go to confront LaCroix if he thinks they might be vampires? Stupid, stupid.
I also couldn't understand why LaCroix was asking Schanke all these things, as a psychiatrist might, nor why Schanke answered him truthfully. Something about their whole conversation was a bit wrong. And then LaCroix asks him "did you feel a surge of strength within you?" -- was that so he could decide between bringing him across and just killing him? Apparently not, since he did neither.
LaCroix's reluctance to directly lie to Schanke is interesting. When asked whether Nick is a vampire, he just returns the question with a "what do you think?". Even when he makes a statement with a hidden meaning, he's careful to phrase it in such a way that Schanke won't figure it out. But thinking back to other episodes, LaCroix really doesn't lie; he only misleads, or withholds information. I'm not sure if this is a sign of some sort of honorable trait, or if he's just playing a game.
One final question: why does LaCroix draw the curtain closed, blocking out Nick and Janette, at the very end? This is just after he's told Schanke that he should go home to sleep, to leave LaCroix to his "family".
Episode rating (0 to 10): 9
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