Det. Knight attends a Twelve Steps meeting to uncover a killer.
A twelve-step program is a set of guiding principles outlining a course of action for recovery from addiction, compulsion, or other behavioral problems. To encourage participation without fear of repercussion, those attending such programs typically use only first names to maintain anonymity. New members in twelve-step programs are encouraged to secure a relationship with at least one sponsor—a more experienced person in recovery who guides the less-experienced member through the program.
In the episode, "Feeding the Beast", someone who has just attended such a Twelve Steps program is murdered; but the other members' insistence on anonymity hampers the police investigation. Detective Nick Knight therefore goes undercover in the hope that, by joining the group, he can work from the inside to try to identify the murderer.
At none of the meetings he attends does Knight reveal the precise nature of his problem. However, he actually hopes that the program will help him to cope with his reliance on blood for sustenance. To this end, he follows several of the steps. In particular, he informs his partner, Don Schanke, that he is an addict (though Schanke remains in denial of this revelation); and he pours down the drain all of the bottled blood that he has in his home.
When Nick realizes that his sponsor is herself backsliding in her own addiction to sex, he becomes profoundly disillusioned. After the murderer is caught, he does not return to the program.
Origins[]
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) was founded in 1935. The "Twelve Steps"—its guiding principles for recovery from addiction to alcohol—were first published in the book, Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered From Alcoholism (1939). The method was subsequently adapted for other twelve-step programs such as Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Co-Dependents Anonymous, and Debtors Anonymous.
List of Twelve Steps[]
These are the original Twelve Steps as published by Alcoholics Anonymous:
- We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
- came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
- made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
- humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
- made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
- made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
- continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
- sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
- having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
In some cases, other twelve-step groups have altered these guiding principles to emphasize principles important to those particular fellowships, to remove gender-biased language, or to remove specific religious language.
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Twelve-step Programs.