switchbladeeyes

Last night, I busted out the Lactaid and dished up some emotional support ice cream for Mr. SwitchbladeEyes and myself so we could knuckle down to watch this gut punch of a series finale.

I'm sure I have nothing to say about “Last Knight” (LK) that hasn't already been said by many other people. Nonetheless, I'm going to say my piece.

I just really don't understand why the show had to end on this note.

Even though Urs and Vachon died in "Ashes to Ashes" (A2A) and LaCroix had the trauma of everything related to Divia, that episode actually ended on a kind of hopeful note vis à vis Nick. Nick struck me as freer than ever to work on Project Humanity after his discussion with LaCroix at the end of the episode. LaCroix seemed as okay with Nick as he ever going to get by the end of A2A. ("For once, I'm glad of your incessant search for your humanity.")

So the only thing that made sense to me in LK was LaCroix preparing to move on. After everything that happened in A2A and that he, imo, has essentially made his peace with Nick's choices, I get it. What's he sticking around for? If Nick wants to come along, great, but if not, that's okay. ("I'm leaving with or without you.") This works for me for the final episode. Nothing else that happened does. Everything else is a fiery train wreck.

I forgot about all the weird camera angles in this episode that give parts of it a "dreamy" quality. So if you want this whole episode to have been a dream, it can be!

I just do not ultimately buy Natalie in this episode. Certainly, I buy her despair and grief over her friend, but not where it goes.

I wished they'd given us a hopeful and meaningful ending. This season really got away from the whole quest for humanity. This would have been a good opportunity to revive it. I'm not saying they needed to cure Nick, just that the hope is there.

Killing off Tracy = 100% unnecessary. (I mean, so was killing off Schanke. I'm still not over that. Stop killing off Nick's partners!) "You could have trusted me." Ugh, right in the feels. LET HER RECOVER FFS.

Nat's asked to be brought over before, but that was literally (as far as she knew) at the end of the world. Extreme, outlier circumstances, I can buy. Not this. How can she not be thinking about what happened to her brother and how dramatically he changed when Nick turned him? The scene where she finds Nick vamped out next to Tracy at the hospital was like the perfect context to bring this up. Not only does Nick not know what Tracy would want, he also doesn't know what turning her will do to her. The situation is a lot like Richard and turning Richard was a collassal error. It's so similar, it's inconceivable to me that that's not what's on Nat's mind and actually impacting her decisions about herself (in such a way that she wouldn’t be asking Nick to make her a vampire!) But instead she's harping about Nick being unwilling to turn her. Ugh.

In the original scripted version, there was a flashback to "I Will Repay," but I get why they cut it because if Natalie had been thinking about it (which she should have been!), I don't believe she'd be pressuring Nick to bring her across.

The final scene between Nick and Nat... ugh, ugh, ugh. Nat with a death wish like this just doesn't work for me. At all.

And Nick caves. Sigh. He immediately screws up. He has no self control, like he should have freaking seen coming. Disaster. Nat's dying. F THAT.

The final dialogue between Nick and LaCroix would almost be touching if it weren't so incredibly fucked up. For like a second there in A2A, they had a healthy relationship. But now Nick's got his own death wish and turns the emotional manipulation screws on LaCroix by telling him something he's probably really wanted to hear for a long time while simultaneously making it contingent on LaCroix doing something there's no way he wants to do. It's basically, "I love you and if you feel the same, you have to kill me. " UGH. WHYYYYYY.

Everything about this ending was so unnecessarily tragic. I don't get it.

While I would have vastly preferred a hopeful ending, I could have accepted a tragic ending if it had been satisfying in anyway (something evincing character growth and perhaps a kind of heroic tragedy... but this was not that. This was the characters wallowing in fatalistic despair.)

Here's a selection of quotes from Mr. SwitchbladeEyes (lots of cursing ahead!) as he watched this episode for the first time:

When Natalie is pressuring Nick and kind of giving him an ultimatum at the morgue:

- "Natalie, like what the fuck, bro?"

(Yes, he referred to Natalie as his bro lol.)

- "What the fuuuuck?"

- "This is like the second time she's made a stupid fucking rash decision."

When Tracy gets shot:

- "Oh this is some bullshit! Whaaaat!? What the fuck!"

During something LaCroix was saying about Nick along the way:

- "You don't have to fucking rub it in, asshole."

When Natalie reports that Tracy died:

- "Ahhhh what the fuck!? Really? This is some bullshit... this is some fucking bullshit."

(He also reiterated his disapproval of Schanke getting killed off.)

When Natalie proposes she and Nick try Janette's "cure":

- "Seriously? The fuck?"

When Nick agrees:

- "Yeah, smack that booty Nick!"

(To be fair, Mr. SwitchbladeEyes thought at this moment, because the show was Going There, that this was meant to actually work.)

When Nick, distraught, says he couldn't stop himself from taking to much:

- "Oh fucking really, Nick? What the fuck?

When Nick tells LaCroix that LaCroix is his closest friend:

- "Awwwwwwwwwwwww..."

When the show is over:

- "That's some seriously fucked up stuff."

I asked Mr. SwitchbladeEyes how he would have ended it. He wasn't sure other than he wouldn't have had Natalie "go into a dark, depressive fit" or given her "that level of dark energy."

I also asked Mr.SwitchbladeEyes if, in the context of this episode and what we saw in it, he believed LaCroix would actually comply with Nick's wishes and he said yes, he thought LaCroix would. He said something was "different" about them here versus the past that made this believable to him. It also made sense to him, if this is how it had to end, that LaCroix was "the last man standing." (I did point out to him that Reese was also still standing.)

I discovered the fandom a couple months after the show ended. I didn't know anyone else who watched the show until then. So it was lonely to try and make sense of the ending until then. It was such an awful bummmmmmmmmmer. I cried (and I'm not even usually a crier, or to use the English version of a lovely German phrase

thefruitbat recently taught me, I'm not "built close to the water").

Even though there's just enough room here for Nick and Nat to have possibly lived, I sure didn't make that connection at the time I first saw it. Fandom discussions did that. Shout out to the old #foreverknight chat room on IRC (imagine something like the 90s version of Discord) where I first stumbled across the fandom and discovered there were many possibilities for the ending, including disregarding it.

As bad as that was, it could have been worse! Shocking, I know. The originally scripted ending clearly finished off Nick and Nat. Thank goodness someone at some point must have said, "You know, this season has been an absolute bloodbath (RIP Schanke, Cohen, Screed, Urs, Vachon, and Tracy... possibly Janette too), maybe we should leave the fans with just the TINIEST shred of hope that Nick and Nat made it through. Also, what are we going to do if the show gets revived?"

Here's the originally scripted ending (picking up just after Nick realizes he's damn near killed Nat):