Nick
Knight was a good-looking young homicide detective who worked the night
shift out of necessity, not by choice. He could not work during the day because
he was an almost 800-year-old
vampire. It was while fighting in the Crusades that Nicholas had been lured
by Janette, a vampire, into becoming a disciple of the immortal Lacroix, who had made him a
vampire in Paris in the year 1228. Now Nick
worked on a modern big-city police force while trying to find a way to
end the curse of the undead. There were a couple of advantages to his condition
- he had infrared vision,
could fly (although he didn't turn into a bat), and was inhumanly strong. Nick drove a 1962 Cadillac
with a big trunk in which he used to hide from the sun in emergencies. Unwilling
to drain others of blood, he kept bottles of cow's blood chilled in
his refrigerator. The
only person who knew Nick's secret was his friend,
Natalie, the medical examiner who was trying to formulate something that would
return him human form. Det. Schanke was Nick's corpulent partner, and
Capt. Stonetree was their boss. His old friend Janette ran The Raven, a
club where other local vampires hung out, and his nemesis Lacroix kept turning
up to torment him. In fact, while working on cases, Nick would
have flashbacks to incidents that had occurred during his eight centuries
as a vampire.
Forever Knight originally aired on CBS during
the 1992-1993 season and was rerun the following year. When it moved into
first-run syndication, with new episodes, Nick and Schanke had been transferred
to a different precinct and were now reporting to Capt. Cohen. Lacroix
was working as a late-night radio personality, and early in the season, Schanke
found out Nick was a benign vampire.
In the fall of 1995, Nick was
temporarily partnered with young detective Vetter, who was touchy because her
father was the police commissioner and she was insecure about what people
thought about her. Their partnership became permanent when a plane on which
Schanke and Capt. Cohen were traveling was blown up by a bomb. Janette had left
Toronto, and Lacroix was now running The Raven. New to the cast were Vachon,
another vampire with a mission to do good who was in love with Tracy, and Capt.
Reese, who had replaced Cohen.
The final original episode
brought closure in a number of ways. Tracy died after a crazed gunman's bullet
went through Nick's body and fatally wounded her. Natalie wanted him to bring
her over to the world of the undead, but after he started to, he couldn't
finish, and she died. As the episode ended, he had convinced Lacroix to end his
eternal suffering by driving a stake through his heart.
