SGRoA: Forever Knight S03 E21: Ashes to Ashes

One bit of housekeeping: Even if you didn't sign up for Reading Until Dawn Con, you can still come see me! The Saturday night book signing is open to the public! Come on down and get your books signed, meet some awesome authors, and talk at me about Canadian professionalism!

And without further ado: DIVIA DIVIA DIVIA OMG ARE YOU READY, SNOWFLAKES?!

Some guys are breaking into an Egyptian tomb. They only have an hour before the security guards get back, and they're looking for something in the second sarcophagus. But oh noez? What if the legend is true, and the guy opening the box's soul is found wanting, and he gets destroyed? Well, dude, guess what: It's true. You're about to get eaten.

Back at the Raven, Lacroix's opening up for the night when he ~*feels*~ something watching him. He can't see anything, so he goes inside, unsettled.

At the precinct, Reese, Tracy, and Nick are talking about the creepiest serial killers. Tracy says it's John Wayne Gacy, but then Reese tells some story about a mid-century child-murderer. Yeah, I'mma go with Reese. Tracy says they would know about her, but Reese says that that sort of thing was reserved for seedy tabloids back in the day, and that people didn't really believe women capable of those kinds of killings. The number one rule of fighting evil, he says, is to keep your eyes open.

Reese wanders off, and Nick gets a call: "There's a body in the Raven." He asks who it is, but she hangs up.

Meanwhile, Lacroix is wandering around feeling creeped out, but all he finds is Urs and Vachon cuddled up on a couch. Urs had a nightmare about children with their heads cut off, and has seen a headless child ghost. She came upstairs to call Vachon, and felt "a presence". She said it was definitely evil.

Lacroix brushes it off to Urs, but he's still spooked. So's Urs as she leaves with Vachon, watched all the while by whatever's waiting in the shadows.

This is actually really well done. Probably because it's Nigel Bennett, working the subtly creepy like no one else. He goes to open up the bar and finds a headless corpse, of course, just hanging out in the bar fridge like no big. He finds the head in a box, along with a cameo necklace that makes him flashback, just for a moment, to him and Divia in an Egyptian tomb. He tells Divia that he can sense "evil".

He comes back to the present as Nick, Tracy, and a bunch of uniforms come in. He points out the body - calmly, coldly. As only Lacroix could.

He doesn't know who the victim is, and he says that no one has access to the club during closing hours. He's sarcastic and defensive. Which means, of course, that he's scared fucking shitless.

Reese suggests Lacroix committed the murder. Nick suggests he get a lawyer. Lacroix points out that there's zero evidence he killed anyone, and Reese admits it when he says that Lacroix should be held as a material witness - not arrested. Reese and Tracy leave.

Nick asks about the other vampires sleeping at the Raven. Lacroix dismisses them, and asks how the MetroPD even knew about the body. "An anonymous tip," Nick says.

Reese is convinced Lacroix is guilty of something, even if he didn't kill the current vic.

Tracy calls Vachon, who flat-out lies about Lacroix being a vampire. Tracy says she felt a presence in the club, something evil. If it's not Lacroix, what was it? Vachon brushes it off, saying of course Tracy's spooked by a headless body. She insists that evil is inside the vampires: she can feel it in Vachon, and it's why they'll never work.

Vachon's taken aback by that, but Tracy changes the subject. She makes Vachon promise to call when he gets home, and sends him on his way.

As he leaves, he, too, feels someone watching him. He rounds a corner and sees a child crying in an alley. It doesn't feel right to him, which is why he stops several feet from her to ask if she's okay. When she doesn't answer, he gets closer - within touching distance. "Did someone hurt you?" he says, and pulls away her blanket.

She turns, revealing her face, grabbing Vachon in a grip stronger than his own. "Lucius hurt me. My father. My son. You will pay for his sin."

And she bites him.

Okay, let's pause for a minute here. I'm remembering exactly why this is one of my favorite episodes. So far, we have creepy atmosphere, Nigel Bennett's ridiculously good acting, and a killer little girl with the best lines ever. In 13 minutes, we have a more tightly-plotted, better-acted episode than we've had maybe ever in this series. I wonder if they rebooted FK today, would we get more eps like this one? It's certainly a departure for the series, and it's the episode that feels most modern to me. Not a lot of talking. Not a lot of backstory. An episode that knows its viewers have been following along all this time, and know who the players are, what the stakes (HEE) are.

It's a flash of brilliance. And while I love how very cheesy and 90s this show is regularly, I love this episode more, simply because it allows me to see what might have been, if the writers and actors had been allowed to take everything just a little more seriously.

Gritty FK reboot. Somebody get on that.

The vic turns out to be the guy from the beginning - Hamid, who got his head handed to him back in that Egyptian tomb. The team gets this news from Reese over the phone - Nick, Tracy, and Nat are in the lab. Nat says it looks like the guy was torn apart by animals, but clearly, that can't be the case if he was found in a tomb. And an animal wouldn't have gotten the body all the way to Toronto.

Good news is, this clears Lacroix. Nick goes down to the holding cell to let him out. All the other petty criminals in there are huddled on a bench, as far from Lacroix as they can get. "Clearly," he says to Nick, "I have a sobering influence on the disenfranchised."

Nick tells Lacroix who Hamid was, and where he was found: in the tomb of Aya-Hotep.

Flashback Time! Lacroix and Divia are in the tomb. She says he was "Son of the sun god. Lord of heaven, or some such nonsense." It's her master, she says, her true father. He's rumored to be among the first of their kind, alive since before the pyramids were built. He was staked, burned by the sun, and sealed in a tomb. Lacroix asks if Divia took revenge on the person who did it. "I could hardly do so," she says, "since I was the one who killed him."

The dawning horror on Lacroix's face in that tomb, when he begins to realize exactly who Divia is, is sublime.

Nick brings him back to the present. Lacroix mentions none of it, merely demands his release.

Urs goes to the church to look for Vachon. He grabs her and seems to try to bite her, but she throws him off. He begs her to "make the killings stop". He's having visions of Divia's memories, all the killing she's done, all the children. The wound on his throat is still bloody. He tells Urs to get out, before she's "staked and scorched by the sun".

Urs goes, and Vachon calls Tracy to tell her he knows who put that body in the Raven. He suffers an attack while on the phone, screaming down the line, and Tracy rushes off to see what's wrong with him.

Lacroix's on the air as the Nightcrawler, with Nick listening from home for once, talking about evil coming in the guise of a child. He flashes back to Pompeii, to his return from the war and his fractious wife and his miraculously healed daughter - though he calls Divia "your daughter" to his wife. Someone overhears, and tells him that if Divia's alive, he'll be a monkey's uncle. Divia appears briefly, turning away when Lucius beckons her into his arms.

"A child's innocence and purity knows no bounds. Neither does its cruelty, when evil comes upon its soul," he says, and then takes a call.

From Divia.

She asks if he knows what it's like to be betrayed by his own child, to be left in the darkness. No, of course he doesn't, but he will, when all his friends die, and those that are left flee for their lives. There's that dawning horror, that subtle fear across Nigel's face, as Urs rings Nick's bell and Divia hangs up.

Urs feels watched in the elevator, and for good reason: Divia attacks her in the short time it takes to get up to Nick's loft. Nick finds Urs, bloodied and dead, when he opens the door.

Tracy shows up at the church, and Vachon is hiding in a corner, all vamped out. He tells her to leave, and she badgers him about who the murderer is. He pins her to the couch, saying that "her thoughts are becoming my thoughts".  He comes back to himself, and Tracy takes him in her arms, telling him he'll be fine, he'll heal. "I'm not healing," he says. "I'm dying."

Nick brings Urs to Nat, who can't figure out what killed her. Nick suggests it's the same thing that killed Hamid. Nat says the probability is high, and Nick wonders why Urs didn't heal. Nat wonders if it's a new breed of vampire. Nick remembers Divia's voice on the radio. "A new breed," he says, "or a very, very old one."

Nick goes to the Raven to get the answers from Lacroix. Lacroix admits it's something too painful for him to discuss, and Nick tells him Urs is dead. Lacroix muses that Divia is killing everyone around him, until he's as isolated as he left her. "Because you brought her across," says Nick, and Lacroix corrects him as he flashes back to Pompeii.

The mountain is erupting. Divia offers Lucius immortality, and of course he takes it.

Nick is shocked. Why did she save him? Because she's his daughter. Why does she want to kill him? Because he locked her in the Egyptian tomb twenty years after his death. Because she killed her own master, and it offended Lucius. Divia objects to the judgment, saying that her master sought to control her. He brought her across because hers was the purest evil he had ever seen - and then he wanted to use it for his own ends. Divia would have none of it. She wants no master. She wants to kill without limit, to transgress every boundary.

To fuck Lucius.

He's horrified. "You're my daughter!" "Daughter, mother, lover," she retorts, as he goes for a weapon. They're not human anymore, what does it matter? They have no law binding them. Lucius disagrees. Violently.

He chops her head off with a scythe and puts her in the sarcophagus, sealed with the symbol of the sun god. It worked on her like any other religious symbol. Hamid broke the seal, and since Lacroix put her in there with her head near enough to re-attach, well, too bad for Hamid. Too bad for Lacroix.

Too bad for everyone.

"What can be said about a man who kills his own daughter?" he asks Nick, rhetorically. Nick says he had no choice, and Lacroix says of course he did. He could have done what Divia wanted. "And hated yourself," says Nick, but Lacroix already hates himself. He committed unspeakable evil in the name of the Emperor. He passed that evil on to Divia. And then he couldn't stand to see it, and tried to kill her for it.

Well. I have someone you should talk to, Lacroix.

Nick wonders how she survived. Lacroix has no theories. "Will she come after you?" Nick asks. "Not quite yet. After all, there is more killing to do."

Back at the church, Vachon is asking Tracy to kill him. He's dying anyway, and he can't bear to have any more of Divia's memories. He tells Tracy there's a stake in a box. She picks it up. Vachon bares his chest to her. He tells her to bury it deep, that it has to go right through his heart. She refuses.

So he vamps out and charges her, and she does what anyone would.

She kills Vachon.

His last words are, "Wish me luck."

At the precinct, Nick tells Reese that Lacroix doesn't exist - at least, not as far as MetroPD are concerned. He's clean. His staff are clean. Reese insists that "the truth is out there", and they should keep digging. Nick says they can't, and Reese sort of shrugs, because that's true. Nick asks where Tracy is, and Reese says she went to see a snitch.

So Nick heads off to the church, and eavesdrops on Tracy finally telling Vachon that she loves him, and she'll take him to Screed, so he can be with his friend. Nick leaves, showing some consideration for once.

He goes to talk to Nat. Tracy has no one to talk to, and Nat says that she feels like she'll be in the same position any minute now. There's a girl out there with a hate-on for anyone close to her daddy - and no one's closer than Nick. Nick promises to be careful, and heads home.

Where he finds Divia, of course. She warns him that it will be worse if he fights her, but it's up to him.

And then she starts kicking the everloving crap out of Nick. Clawing, biting, throwing him into his fireplace at one point. She leaves him on the floor, on his painting of the sun, a broken, bloodied mess.

Lacroix is next, of course. He makes a crack about how she's grown; she says she could never have imagined that he would rise to the lofty position of "innkeeper".

She bats him across the room. He tells her that he always thought evil was "a finite entity" - at least until he knew her. She tells him he's as weak as their food. He tells her to kill him. She says she'll let him live with the knowledge that he's killed everyone around him - including his son.

"Your son is dead," she says, deflecting his blows. "Tell me how that feels. I want to know how that feels."

The girl playing Divia is amazeballs, by the way. Like, she's all of what, fourteen? She's got sneering villain on lockdown, and she sounds terribly like Lacroix himself delivering some of these lines.

She bats him around the Raven some more, smashing shit up, wanting him to tell her all about his pain. Which he doesn't, of course, because he's Lacroix. She demands an apology, a confession of love. Lacroix reminds her that if she kills him, his suffering will be over.

Divia's not sure if that's true. Maybe damnation is exactly what he deserves. She brings the scythe back for the killing blow -

And is staked through the heart by Nick.

She falls to the ground, all the vampire in her gone, and beseeches her father for help. Nick holds Lacroix back until she's unconscious.

Nick's humanity is what saved him, maybe. Maybe it was his age - Urs was very young, and Vachon was only a few centuries old. Nick and Lacroix take Divia's body to a junkyard, to set her afire on top of a car. Nat has taken care of Urs's body; Tracy buried Vachon next to Screed. Nick asks Lacroix to mojo Tracy so that all she'll remember is that Vachon was a good friend who moved on. Lacroix's been able to overcome resisters before, it seems.

Nick offers his condolences, his thanks, his support. And he leaves.

Lacroix lights the pyre.

Next week: The end.