Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 117

F o r e v e r K n ig h t

and

T he In visib le M an

113

tion in the scripts” (79). Some of Schanke’s idiosyncrasies include the following:
listening to polka music at a deafening volume in his partner’s 1962 Caddy (seen
in the pilot “Dark Knight”); going out to his favorite Polish bakery in Toronto,
Canada; trying to give up his nasty smoking addiction; becoming a private inves
tigator and working for his childhood buddy in the United States where he can see
some really good baseball (“The Code”); being discovered as a serious actor after
his segments air for a popular, police reality drama (“Amateur Night”); cheating
on his never seen wife Myra by becoming intimate with a female vampire at The
Raven nightclub and then confessing his sins the very next day (“For I Have
Sinned”); and moving in with Knight when he decides to separate from Myra for
the duration of an entire episode (“Partners of the Month”).
Interestingly, after almost two seasons Schanke finally figures out that Nick
Knight might be one of the undead (“Close Call”). Of course, there are thousands
of clues right under the experienced detective’s nose, such as his partner storing
cow’s blood in a refrigerator and never leaving the confines of his apartment until
dark. But when he actually sees Nick flying through the sky and shaking off bul
lets as he apprehends a heavily armed criminal, the television fool starts putting
two and two together and coming up with the only logical answer: “My buddy boy
Knight is a vampire.” It takes the will of the master vampire, LaCroix, to convince
Schanke that he has reached an erroneous conclusion and that he should return to
his naive, unquestioning position.
The Inspector Clousseau-like antics of Donald Schanke on Forever Knight
have generated some classic moments of any vampire series to date, but when the
powers-that-be decided to kill off this comical partner at the start of the third sea
son, the fairy tale magic quickly dissipated and contributed to the show’s eventual
cancellation. Without the presence of the comical partner to guide him through the
rough times, our hero Nick became much more vulnerable to attack, both psycho
logically and externally, in the final teleplays.
Agent Bobby Hobbes, on the other hand, would remain a central partner in
The Invisible Man's exploits throughout its two season run, ensuring that the tonguein-cheek humor of the series would be maintained. Jewish and proud of it, Hobbes
comes across in the pilot as a smart-ass, cynical “company man” who is a veteran
of such high-profile wars as Desert Storm (see The Invisible Man Web Page at
www.scifi.com/invisibleman for more details). Hardly a flag-waver, he still real
izes that the United States needs to be defended from any number of “cornball”
terrorists who would threaten the country, hence the reason why he aspires to be
the perfect, James-Bondian spy (although he is more like a quirky sort of Maxwell
Smart). Another Starlog writer, Marc Shapiro, regards Hobbes as “the antagonis
tic thorn in Darien Fawkes’s side. In a perfect world, Hobbes would not have
chosen Fawkes as his partner. Darien is new to this agent-spy business, and so