Dying for Fame

Heavy metal/hard rock icon Rebecca (Tracey Cook) thematically configures her latest album and world tour around the gimmick that she wants to murder her fan-base. She becomes the target of protests and death threats after releasing the single 'Fan Kill' (A kind of a Lee Aaron/Lita Ford-style tune). A blackout drunk, her own battle with alcoholism is entirely a threat to her well-being but not the only one.

Toronto police Detective Nick Knight (Geraint Wyn Davies) and his partner Detective Don Schanke (John Kapelos) are dispatched investigate a murder she is suspected of committing in the suite of her hotel. The murder is of a young male fan Rebecca spent the night with. Her finger prints are on the murder weapon - a knife she used in her stage show. Schanke thinks that she did it and is laughing at them.

Nick sees something of his own arc within Rebecca's plight. He too has kind of a drinking problem. But it isn't booze for him. It is human blood. Nick is an 800 year old vampire who has taken on police work as a penance for preying on humans for centuries. But that is the story the series was telling. We see almost none of it told here in an episode so completely outside the formula as to be a near complete outlier.

Tracey Cook appeared on season 1, episode 3 of this series as Alma - a minor vampire character who almost drains Schanke. Thus when I recognized the same actress upon tuning in to this episode I thought it was the return of Alma. But the character was an entirely a different character and while edgy, no vampire. It made for confusion initially and the teleplay then went in a number of unexpected directions taking this episode even more out of my reach.

The idea of a musician enacting the murder of her fans as a publicity gimmick makes for a dark satire of the music industry. But they don't go very far with that. It segues into what could have been an interesting murder mystery and they don't go very far with that either. It is difficult to see that point in time where this episode stopped making any sense in terms of plot or point or connection to the backstory.

Concurrent to that which they don't go very far with Nick begins having nightmares and hallucinations for no apparent reason. These result in dream sequences which include his vampire associates LaCroix (Nigel Bennett) and Janette DuCharme (Deborah Duchene) in what look like macabre music videos. LaCroix appears in the dream sequences as a soda jerk, a concert promoter and a jail guard. Janette appears as a truck stop waitress.

There are obvious comparisons to Queen of the Damned - an influential work of vampire fiction featuring a vampire rock singer. But that would be a flattering way of characterizing what is actually shown in this episode.

The real star of the episode is the music performed Toronto artist Lori Yates. Fan Kill is one song. But 'Dark Side if the Glass' is the other one and it is far more appealing. It was written Yates with Stan Meissner - an exceptional Canadian songwriter and performer. The song sounds like late 1980s Madonna.