Sunday, September 30, 2007

BLOODLINES

I had the identity of the killer in the pilot episode of 'Moonlight' sussed out before the characters left the cemetary scene. The purpose of the pilot was to establish the characters, so I could give it a pass on delivering a decent mystery. I'm an easy guy. But they better come up with more complex mysteries in future episodes.

One of the suspects was Christian Ellis, a mythological anthropology professor at Hearst College. Professor Ellis claimed to be a vampire, but one whiff of his scent was all that private eye Mick St. John, a real vampire, needed to debunk Ellis' claim. Which is a shame, because had he been a real vampire, Christian Ellis theoretically could have completed a Toobworld trifecta for the greatest of all vampires - Dracula!

Christian Ellis was portrayed by Rudolf Martin, and there's just something about Martin that screams "Dracula" to casting directors. For a TV movie, he played Vlad Tepes, the Romanian warlord who, according to legend, would become the undead Dracul after his death. And in an episode of 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer', Martin embodied the legend, updated in manner and style for the 21st Century.
Christian Ellis wasn't a vampire, but with the Toobworld science of telegenetics, we can still make a theoretical link to Rudolf Martin's appearances as Dracula. It's not out of the realm of likelihood that Vlad Tepes sired bastard offspring before he died. (As a vampire, Dracula shouldn't have been able to produce an heir, if my understanding of vampire lore is correct. 'Moonlight' seemed to suggest as much when Coraline kidnapped little Beth Turner to be embraced as a child vampire for her and Mick to raise as their own child. 'Angel' had a son, but I think a lot of technobabble went into splainin how that occurred.)

Christian Ellis could be the latest in a long line of direct descendants to Dracula. And with tele-genetics, an exact duplicate of his DNA could have been reproduced, even hundreds of generations later. Daughters as well as sons could have been in that direct line of descent, so the family name of Tepe - or even of Dracula - would never have survived. But even if it had, there could be a good reason as to why he bore the name of "Ellis": one Romanian ancestor arrived in America around 1900 or so and decided to cut off ties to his Romanian past and embrace his new life in America. To do so, he might have cast off the name Tepes or Dracula or Jipa, whatever, and took as his new name that of the island which was his port of entry into the new world.

The best part of this Toobworld theory? It can't be proven but since it's unlikely to ever come up again in 'Moonlight', it can't be debunked either!

BCnU!
Toby OB

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