HIGHLANDER The Series: RETROSPECTIVE “There can be only one… …UNLESS WE CHANGE OUR MINDS.” Amazingly, it was way back in 1986 when Highlander came to cinemas everywhere, starring mumbling Christopher Lambert as the eponymous hero Connor MacLeod, sporting what has to be the world’s worst Scots accent, and, ironically, the ever-handsome Sean Connery as the only Egyptian in history to sound like Rab C. Nesbitt. Despite “director” Russell Mulcahy’s excruciating camera shots (a former music video director, he filmed the thing like it was a big screen version of Miami Vice, which had been designed as an all-style-no-substance cop show for “the MTV generation”), plus a total lack of anything resembling a coherent plot, it was a hit. The movie’s combination of baby-oil muscled men, scantily clad, big breasted women and messy decapitations in its fantasy tale of Immortal warriors battling each other through the aeons for world domination, became a huge hit with movie-going audiences. (It was the Eighties, after all). Recognising a golden goose when they saw one, TV executives implemented plans for a TV spin-off franchise, which became Highlander: The Series. Knowing that getting Christopher Lambert to do a “Michael J. Fox” and turn to TV wasn’t an option, they chose the tall, dark and broodingly handsome British-born Adrian Paul to be Duncan MacLeod, Connor’s “cousin”. Though Immortals have no blood relatives, in real life Scotland when several families joined together to form a Clan, the members of the clan considered the other members as family even if there was no blood tie. Lambert guest-starred in the pilot episode, set in the fictional city of “Seacouver1”, which concerns a young thief/street kid (Stan Kirsch as “Ritchie Ryan”) witnessing a battle and discovering what Duncan is, and Lo! a TV series was born, Highlander: The Series, running for 5½ seasons and featuring a wide variety of notable guest stars including Roland Gift (Fine Young Cannibals) as evil Immortal Xavier St. Cloud, and Roger Daltrey of The Who as good Immortal Hugh Fitzcairn. Adrian Paul as Duncan Season 1 of HTS was what I call “S.T.F” – Standard Television Fare. Duncan, with his lover Tessa Noël (Alexandra Vandernoot), and now their protégé Ritchie Ryan (Stan Kirsch), faced off against the “villain of the week”. Just as with Star Trek, it was possible to switch the TV on for the first ten minutes, see the baddie make his appearance and be nasty, then go and do the ironing before returning for the last five minutes to watch him get the chop, literally, from Duncan, without really missing any important plot details. In other words, traditional, mediocre hokum that would appeal only to a certain type of male adolescent fan base. Therefore the scriptwriters began to expand the original anorexic “plot” of the movie – Immortals can only be killed by decapitation and cannot kill each other on “holy ground” - that had taken a back seat to the aforementioned over-muscled beefcakes, buxom wenches and gory fights to the death with close-up camera shots of spurting blood. Season 2 introduced a story arc with a new element – The Watchers, the unoriginally titled first episode being of the same name. The Season 1 finale, The Hunters, had MacLeod’s Immortal priest friend Darius (played by Werner Stocker, who was seriously ill and sadly died during filming) decapitated inside his own church – sacred ground and therefore the biggest Immortal no-no. Discovering Darius was murdered by a gang of mortals uncaring of the sanctity of holy ground, MacLeod’s quest for vengeance leads him to a disabled antiquarian bookstore owner named Joe Dawson (Jim Byrnes). Dawson doesn’t appear to be a physical threat (a Vietnam vet, Dawson lost both legs below the knee in that conflict and so can only walk with prosthetics and a cane), but clearly knows more than he will admit. MacLeod discovers that Joe Dawson is a “Watcher”, specifically, his Watcher. Immortals have been around for 6,000+ years but Watchers “only” 4,000 years. Basically four millennia ago a person noticed something odd going on, putting the Immortal he or she saw under surveillance and thus becoming the First Watcher. Organising others to carry on his or her work, this First Watcher thus founded the society that Dawson belongs to. The vast majority of this information is not explicitly revealed but told through heavy implication and throw-away lines throughout Season 2 and beyond, the name of the First Watcher nor the name of the Immortal who was unbeknownst to him/her noticed is ever given (see below), the writers thus avoiding the continuity trap of maybe giving those characters the wrong name in a later season (see the article, The Sentinel: Retrospective by C. D. Stewart). Identified by the tattoo on their wrists, the Watchers are a secret society that records the lives and deaths of Immortals in Chronicles. Divided in sub-sections governing each continent and ruled by a Council, there are field Watchers (one Watcher is assigned to one Immortal, though Dawson eventually becomes Watcher to MacLeod, Ritchie and Methos) and research Watchers. They are detached scholars whose job is to observe and record only, any interference being strictly forbidden. The task is also hereditary: Joe Dawson, his sister (whom we never see) and her husband (Horton, the baddie) are Watchers, the children of Watchers; as are their children; Horton’s daughter and her fiancé are trainee Watchers By the way, if all the above is sounding naggingly familiar, cease thy furrowed brow! The entire “Watcher mythology” reappeared whole and complete during the 1990s in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and it’s spin-off Angel – ruled by a council, with field and research operatives, forbidden to interfere, with the position passed down through the family (in Season 1, Giles tells Buffy that he is the last in a long line of Watchers, naming his father and paternal grandmother as immediate predecessors; in spin-off Angel, both Wesley Wyndham-Price’s mentally/physically abusive mother and father are Watchers). I must stress that in no way was Joss Whedon guilty of plagiarism – the “secret society of watchers” idea has been around so long that it is a “generic” part of SF/Fantasy fiction, like the wicked stepmother, fairy godmother and Orcs. Together, MacLeod and Dawson discover that the latter’s mentally unstable brother-in-law, James Horton (Peter Hudson), has slipped into psychotic paranoia and is murdering Immortals with a cadre of thugs/fellow lunatics, Horton having labelled all Immortals “perversions of nature”, to the extent that he murders his own daughter’s Watcher fiancé when the youth begins to question Horton’s bigoted rhetoric. Throughout Season 2, they manage variously to thwart Horton (though he survives to make several improbable escapes), but now many Immortals know about Watchers, who had previously managed to keep their existence secret and this uneasy mutual awareness is used to open up several more story arcs in subsequent seasons. Halfway through Season 2, in the two-part Unholy Alliance, Duncan kills villainous Immortal Xavier St. Cloud, (a recurring baddie very well played by Roland Gift of the Fine Young Cannibals) who had entered into a deal with Horton. Another change also occurred: a mugger kills Tessa Noël and Ritchie Ryan, the former dying and Ritchie becoming Immortal (you couldn’t see that coming, could you?) as MacLeod, since Immortals can sense pre-Immortals, knew he would. Actually, it was a positive move forward, since Tessa’s character had nowhere really to go development wise and Ritchie couldn’t remain the cute-yet-vulnerable street kid forever á la Beverly Hills 90210, particularly as the show was striving to become less stand-alone and more inter-linked episode wise. Tessa’s death also led the way to the Season 2 two-part finale, Counterfeit Part I & II, in which James Horton uses cosmetic surgery to transform Lisa (played strangely enough by Adrian Paul’s estranged wife, Meilani), a murderess as mentally deranged as himself, into the mirror image of the dead Tessa Noël (guest-star Alexandra Vandernoot reprising her role). The showdown occurs at the real Tessa’s grave, and this time James Horton really does get killed, preventing yet another unbelievable miracle escape. Season 3’s story arc concerned the evil Immortal Kalas (David Robb), a megalomaniac who was thrown out of his safe haven – a monastic sanctuary for Immortals - hundreds of years earlier when MacLeod discovered that when Immortals who used the monastery for respite left it, Kalas followed them and killed them before they realised the danger. Crossing Kalas’ path again in the 1920s (the cast really seemed to enjoy doing the Prohibition/flapper flashbacks) MacLeod fights Kalas and though not managing to kill him, robs the other Immortal of his most prized possession, his beautiful singing voice, by cutting his throat. The mid-Season 3 episode - unoriginally entitled Methos – introduced fans to the world’s Oldest Immortal at the same time as the second episode in the story, Star Crossed, produced the biggest mistake HTS ever made. In part one of the two-part showdown, Methos, Kalas begins attacking Duncan’s friends while seeking to find and kill Methos, the legendary Oldest Immortal whom most Immortals and Watchers believe to be a myth, in order to take his Quickening and become virtually invincible. The second part of the story, Star Crossed, saw Kalas murder Duncan’s Immortal friend, Hugh Fitzcairn (played by The Who’s Roger Daltrey). Unlike most rock stars turned thespians, Daltrey could not only act, but also act brilliantly (in 2002 he guest-starred excellently as a truly sinister villain in the Sci-fi Channel’s Witchblade series). More to the point, he was brilliant as Englishman “Fitz”, a perfect foil for the dour Duncan MacLeod, and Roger Daltrey had glowing “chemistry” with Adrian Paul. Possibly already realising that they had just shot themselves in the foot, producers focussed the action on Methos, the witty, intelligent, strangely vulnerable Oldest Immortal, superbly played by genre actor Peter Wingfield (who guest-starred in The Sentinel as an Australian terrorist and had a recurring role in Stargate: SG1 as Tok’Ra/Goa’uld Tanith) sees Duncan discovering that Methos is alive and well in the 20th Century, with Kalas hot on his heels after him for his power. Directed by Joe Dawson to seek the aid of his friend, a research Watcher named Adam Pierson, Duncan arrives at the man’s home to find him to be none other than Methos, who has very cleverly hidden himself in the dusty archives of the Watchers themselves! Since being a Watcher, like in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, is a position passed down through families for generations – remember, Joe Dawson, his unseen sister and James Horton were all scions of Watcher families - Methos dons his ‘Pierson’ persona every few decades and re-infiltrates the Watchers anew, even researching his own Chronicles! In order to prevent Kalas from gaining his power, Methos tries to provoke MacLeod, as a good Immortal, into killing him instead. Unfortunately that was the most unbelievable plot idea in the entire story arc – an Immortal who managed to live for 5,000+ years in the face of all sorts of adversities simply collapsing like a house of cards because of one beefy Immortal thug? Considering that in later episodes Methos casually wiped the floor with Immortals who made Kalas look about as lethal as a teddy bear (Kronos, anyone?) watching this story arc again does it no favours. Kalas is eventually disposed of at the end of Season 3, in Finale part II. Duncan’s Immortal lover/friend Amanda springs him from prison with the intent of killing him for MacLeod, only for Kalas to escape. Somewhat unwisely, Methos in his Adam Pierson persona has created a computer database of Immortal/Watcher history, which is seized by Christine Salzer, the widow of Kalas’ Watcher whom he murdered. Impervious to the pleas of Joe Dawson and her old friend “Adam Pierson”, whose revealing of his Immortal status enrages her as a “betrayal”, Christine decides to expose the Immortals and Watchers to the world after Duncan and Methos prevent Joe from shooting her. She is murdered by Kalas who keeps the CD-ROM, having uploaded it onto computers and threatening to expose Immortals and Watchers to the world himself unless Methos sacrifices himself. Fortunately, Kalas is killed in a climatic fight atop the Eiffel Tower by Duncan (now there’s a plot twist); the lightening from Duncan’s Quickening conveniently deep-frying the computers that would have spread the information. At the end of the episode, however, a CD-ROM is shown to still exist in Salzer’s store, which gave rise to a couple of continuity mess-ups, as well as later episodes in Season 4 and 5 completely contradicting the ‘legendary Oldest Immortal’ premise of Methos, since there were at the very least stilling living four Immortals – Kronos, Silas, Caspian and Cassandra – as old as Methos, if not older. Seasons 3-5 of HTS were a very mixed bag with intense, angst-ridden episodes contrasting with fluffier ones. Partway through Season 4, in Something Wicked, we are introduced to a Dark Quickening, wherein the evil overtakes the Immortal - an insane MacLeod tries to kill Ritchie at the dojo, the youth being saved by Joe Dawson, who shoots MacLeod “dead”, actor Stan Kirsch disappearing for the rest of the season. The second part of the two-part story, Deliverance, had Dawson calling Methos back temporarily from where he was vacationing in Athens with Alexa, his terminally-ill mortal girlfriend (Timeless) to try and reach MacLeod. At considerable risk to himself, Methos attempts to get MacLeod back, but not before nearly ending up being murdered by MacLeod in a Church before he kills another good Immortal, Sean Burns (which will come back to bite MacLeod in the ass in Season 5’s Forgive Our Trespasses). The episode itself was excellent, with fine tension between Adrian Paul and Peter Wingfield, but the way Methos finally heals MacLeod, by taking him to a “magic” spring lost since the 7th Century, directly contradicts Methos and Joe Dawson’s ridiculously played-straight sceptical attitudes in Archangel (see below). Also, for whatever reason, Ritchie simply disappears for the rest of the season without explanation, without even trying to find out what has happened to Duncan. Instead there was suddenly a new story arc about a near war between Watchers and Immortals (that was barely developed before being wrapped up in the same season). In the two part Season 4 finale Judgement Day and One Minute To Midnight, Duncan and Joe’s own friendship had been stretched to breaking point when there occurred a series of Watcher murders that mirror the previous massacre of Immortals, but the rift seems initially healed when Dawson is kidnapped by the ruling Watcher’s Council, who are looking for a scapegoat on whom to pin the Immortal/Watcher murders originally instigated by James Horton, who though dead has had his evil work carried on by some of his equally as fanatic thugs. By “going native”, the scientific term for a researcher losing his objectivity and siding with his research subjects, Dawson has made himself an ideal target and fall-guy. In this Season 4 finale, the killer is revealed to be Jacob Gulatti, a Romany Gypsy Immortal whose Immortal wife, Irena, was murdered in front of him by Horton (incidentally contradicting the comic episode Till Death which implies that the Immortal marriage of the de Valicourts was unique). MacLeod comes to Joe Dawson’s rescue after he is sentenced to death in a Kangaroo court and the pair along with Methos struggle to avert outright war between Immortals and Watchers. They succeed by the skin of their teeth, but their relationships lie shattered as the three men – MacLeod, Methos and Dawson - are torn apart by conflicting loyalties to their friends in both the Watcher and Immortal worlds. At the end of One Minute To Midnight, Dawson has taken control of the Watchers to stop the spiral with MacLeod’s help, but Methos has disappeared for parts unknown and MacLeod leaves Dawson standing on the banks of the Seine after a brittle, bitter conversation. Which made Season 5 all the more unsatisfying, even though it contained episodes that, individually, were excellent television. Indeed, in retrospect Season 5 had a very disjointed feel, as if the writers only decided to ‘tack on’ the Ahriman plotline finale as a last minute idea, though obviously this wasn’t the case. After One Minute To Midnight, with MacLeod, Dawson and Methos separated by bitterness and grief, Season 5 starts with a decidedly damp squib, The Prophecy, a historical “flashback” episode with Stacy Scoggins (Lois & Clark and Babylon 5) as Cassandra, the “Witch of Doonan Woods” whom Duncan MacLeod meets during his pre-Immortal life. A feared prophetess, the implication was she was Cassandra of Greek legend, the Trojan princess cursed to be always right, but never believed. Of course, this opening episode was a primer for the Ahriman finale arc, but the entire Season seemed to entirely forget the Watcher-Immortal angst had ever happened. With the second episode we have the return of an embittered, angry Ritchie Ryan, who slaughters several Immortals on extremely flimsy grounds before making peace with Duncan. However, Stan Kirsch was to be summarily despatched in the utterly execrable Season 5 finale Archangel, more of which later, and in truth seems to only have been brought back for that reason, considering his sparse presence throughout the rest of the season. Apart from the comedic Ransom Of Richard Redstone he is barely seen and was certainly superfluous from a plot-line viewpoint, since in several of the season’s best and/or pivotal episodes such as The Valkyrie, Comes A Horseman, Forgive Our Trespasses and Revelation 6:8 he is not present. While Season 5 contained some great episodes if they are considered in isolation, as described below, there was an air of ‘business as usual’ about the whole situation. The Watcher-Immortal conflict that had been set up to simmer dangerously at the end of Season 4 was erased as if it had never been, the Watchers being abruptly reduced from their ominously all-powerful, all-pervasive presence throughout Seasons 2-4 to merely Joe Dawson in his Parisian bar (which takes centre stage in The Modern Prometheus, with Methos and MacLeod having to protect their Watcher from the poet Byron, who is in fact an…you don’t need me to tell you this one, do you?) Methos returns from the ether as if nothing happened, taking to dropping in on MacLeod for companionship, and both Methos and MacLeod seem happy to prop up the bar of Joe’s with seeming amnesia regarding the bitter rift between Joe and MacLeod at the end of Season 4, the three men forming a sort of triumvirate of co-leads; watch the trio at the boxing match in the opening scenes of The Valkyrie, or the three-way conversation/debate between them later in the same episode. The main problem that Season 5 suffered from were storyline requirements that the three men’s friendship - and particularly that between MacLeod and Methos - had to be seen by the audience to be as deep as it used to be pre-Judgement Day and One Minute To Midnight not just once during the Season but twice in rapid succession. Firstly, in order to give a full emotional ‘whammy’ to the episodes Comes A Horseman and Revelation 6:8, when Joe and Mac discover Methos’ history as a mass murderer – Joe is disappointed but deep down not that surprised, but MacLeod is horrified and in denial. The confrontation scene where a desperate MacLeod obviously wants Methos to prove Cassandra’s identification of him is a mistake, through his shock when Methos confesses he was such a creature to where Mac furiously repudiates Methos’ friendship and walks away from the devastated Immortal is a powerful, moving bit of television that is a cautionary warning - how well do we know those closest to us? Methos admits that he did not tell MacLeod because he knew that the Scotsman’s sense of integrity meant that, “What I’ve done, you can’t forgive.” In subsequent episodes forgive, and seemingly without much difficulty, is quite clearly what MacLeod has done, making nonsense of much of these two episodes’ deep angst about Methos’ great fear of losing MacLeod’s friendship when he knew the truth. The only oblique reference that there had ever had been such a deep rift between the two men comes in the closing scenes of Forgive Our Trespasses, in which MacLeod’s opponent is ‘Good Immortal’ Stephen Keane (whom he doesn’t kill) wherein Methos says that they all have, “mistakes to forgive,” a subtle reference to his shameful past. Apart from a sharp glance, MacLeod glosses over Methos’ words in the presence of Amanda (who seemingly is unaware of Methos’ past) and has clearly no intention of following through on his ‘I’m never going to acknowledge you exist ever again’ stance in Comes A Horseman. It’s deeply annoying because this take-reconciliation-as-read scenario that had persisted from episode one of Season 5 was so obviously contrived to let the show get on with this new story arc without bothering with the old one, and just a few episodes after Revelation 6:8 Methos and MacLeod’s friendship undergoes another spat followed by instantaneous reconciliation during the Archangel storyline. However, the series also began belatedly to try to develop a few less grimly bleak storylines, showing a much-needed lighter side to the show and providing some hilarious television in the process. Seasons 4 – 6 had several comic “jewels”: any episode starring Adrian Paul & Roger Daltrey is a joy to behold, but particular examples are Till Death (Season 4), The Stone of Scone, Dramatic Licence, The Ransom of Richard Redstone (Season 5) and Unusual Suspects (Season 6). The wonderful Till Death showcases the comic trio of Peter Wingfield, Roger Daltrey and Adrian Paul to great effect. MacLeod bullies a vehemently protesting Methos into assisting with Duncan’s plan to rekindle the love of his two Immortal friends Robert (Jeremy Brudenell) and Gina (Cecille Pallas) de Valicourt, who are due to celebrate their 300th Wedding Anniversary - assuming they don’t decapitate each other first. Having been initially introduced by Fitzcairn and MacLeod in the late 1600s, the pair are going through a marital crisis, with Gina declaring she wants a divorce, until Duncan strong-arms Methos into pretending to be an evil Immortal out for Robert’s head, at the cost of giving the Oldest Immortal his prized houseboat on the River Seine. The plan works like a charm, until Robert informs Duncan that Gina has gone after Methos, and the Scot races back to the barge in a desperate attempt to save Methos from the vengeful Gina! The Stone of Scone, easily the best comic episode the series ever did, shows the inauspicious first meeting between the English Fitzcairn and the Scottish MacLeod, underneath the Houses of Parliament. MacLeod is there to steal the Stone of Scone back for the Scots, while Fitzcairn is in the process of coating the area with gunpowder to blow up King George I because he wasn’t English2. The scene where a drunken Fitz bursts into Duncan and Amanda’s bedroom to implore forgiveness of his friend is pure gold – well worth watching for the way Adrian Paul, Elizabeth Gracen and Roger Daltrey desperately struggle to keep their faces straight. This episode more than any other showed the idiocy of having killed of the Fitzcairn character so early in the show, and had he instead lived, there could have been some beautiful comedic episodes done utilising the trio of Methos-MacLeod-Fitzcairn. In Dramatic Licence, MacLeod discovers he has been turned in the brooding, Highland hero of a best-selling bodice-ripper romance novel and sets out to discover who the authoress is and how she got all that information regarding him, but has a race against time to do so when he crosses paths with the other Immortal man featured in the book; portrayed as a boorish, brutal villain, he also wants to find the authoress – to kill her. In The Ransom of Richard Redstone, Ritchie pretends to be a wealthy playboy by the name of Richard Redstone and is promptly held for ransom by a pair of inept con merchants, necessitating Duncan pretending to be a wimpy accountant in order to rescue him. The episode includes some minor titillation for the ladies with Ritchie tied to a big four-poster bed by the inept ‘bad guys’, only for him to be thus rendered defenceless while not only Holy Ground when he senses the “buzz” of an approaching Immortal. Unusual Suspects is ‘flashback episode’ done to bring back Hugh Fitzcairn; set in 1929, MacLeod goes to Fitzcairn’s aid only to find his friend dead and buried in the grounds of his stately English home, leaving behind a grieving widow and various servants/hangers on. Fitz is in fact lurking in the grounds and demands that MacLeod investigate – because Fitz has in fact been ‘murdered’ by member of his own household for his money. Nevertheless, the darkness was never very far away, unsurprisingly considering that the show’s central premise was death by decapitation and an endless war of supremacy between Immortals. In the two part story Comes a Horseman and Revelation 6:8, MacLeod’s friend Cassandra, the ‘Witch of Doonan Woods’ that we met in Season 5’s flashback opener The Prophecy, arrives at the dojo to warn him that four horrifically evil Immortals – the basis of the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – are regrouping with intent to destroy the world. Cassandra explodes with rage when Methos inadvertently walks in on the pair, and Duncan discovers that Methos is one of the Four Horsemen! Absolutely enraged to discover his friend is a mass murderer, Duncan’s sense of honour causes him to sever their friendship when Methos tries to run away from Kronos rather than face up to what is happening. When it seems that Methos then rejoins the Horseman, MacLeod turns to Joe Dawson for help in stopping him and Kronos, Silas and Caspian, the other three Horsemen, who have now kidnapped Cassandra, one of their earliest victims from way back in the Bronze Age. Kronos needs Methos since they two were the driving force behind the Horseman - indeed, Methos planned most of their atrocities – and he has to decide whether he’s going to rejoin the Horsemen when MacLeod arrives to free Cassandra and kill Kronos. Eventually, Methos sides with Duncan, helping him to free Cassandra and killing Silas while Duncan kills Kronos, only for Duncan in turn to have mercy on Methos by persuading Cassandra to spare his life, but their relationship was still greatly strained at the end of the episode. Once more, however, the series would press the ‘reset button’ regarding the MacLeod-Methos-Joe friendship for the remainder of season 5 and the abbreviated season 6. Just as in Season 5 the three hang out together with no apparent memory of the estrangement at the end of Season 4, so too in subsequent episodes of Season 5, MacLeod and Joe seem to have recovered fully from the distress of having one of the biblical Four Horsemen as a best friend and continue as a ‘triumvirate’ with MacLeod having seemingly forgotten all about the fact that he had severed his friendship with Methos. Highly implausible true, but all this of course was necessary for the plot arcs of the remainder of Season 5 and for Season 6, which required that Joe and Methos still have a strong friendship with MacLeod (for example, Forgive Our Trespasses, Archangel, Avatar, To Be). Which leads us nicely to the disaster that was the Season 5 finale, Archangel. Fundamentally, Highlander’s “fatal flaw” as a TV show was its roller coaster nature with regard to the various plot threads of each season. Like the old nursery rhyme, when the stories were good, they were very, very good, but when they were bad, they were painful. The main two problems for Highlander were the wafer thin original premise, and that there was no Übermeister over scripts and plotlines. No story should be micro-managed and needs to be flexible, but - never that coherent to begin with - Highlander mythology lacked all bar about one or two “pivotal non-negotiable facts”, the foundation or “baseline” of what could or couldn’t happen in that universe. For example, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Slayers are ONLY EVER FEMALE. (Ditto the Witchblade wielder). This is a pivotal fact that cannot be changed by the writers, but as soon as a Slayer dies, a new one is called, thus providing the option of recasting the role as and when necessary – in point of fact, Buffy has two living Slayers, Sarah Michelle Gellar playing Buffy and the other being Faith (Eliza Dushku). In The West Wing, a US President can only serve two consecutive terms in office, a maximum of eight years (it has taken 3 seasons to get Bartlett’s first term out of the way, and they could easily make another 3-4 out of his second term). This is a non-negotiable fact – the only way for someone to resume the presidency is wait a term, then re-run for election. It’s highly implausible, but has been done in “real life” by Grover Cleveland, who was the United States’ 22nd and 24th President. Shows like Buffy and The West Wing also have Joss Whedon and Aaron Sorkin firmly at the helm, who generally keep things reasonably rational and ensure these ground rules remain unbroken even if slightly dented (Buffy died again, but no new Slayer was Called). Likewise Stargate: SG 1, Farscape and Andromeda, all of which have but one or only a few hands at the helm. Apart from “Immortals can only be killed by decapitation” and “they can’t kill each other on Holy Ground”, Highlander’s stories were left open to ridiculously broad interpretation, and without some central guidance, the show’s mythology gradually coagulated into a mish-mash of conflicting, confusing plot-threads that simply could not be reconciled. Lacking coherency, the show’s scripts became the written equivalent of a plate of spaghetti thrown against a wall in violent temper (no, that is not the voice of experience). Eventually, just like Dr Who and The X-Files, Highlander was crushed under the avalanche of it’s own irreconcilable inconsistencies, culminating in the appallingly bad fifth season final episode, Archangel. The loss, with the “death” of Hugh Fitzcairn, of the excellent Adrian Paul/Roger Daltrey double act was quickly realised to be a mistake, to the extent that they brought Fitz back repeatedly in “flashback” episodes, even in the shortened Season 6 (Unusual Suspects). In other articles I have already explained why, how and when – and when not – to kill off your characters, and there is no need to repeat all that here, but the yo-yo appearances of Roger Daltrey in the show after his “death” are a good example why it’s necessary to really think about what you intend to do. While these post-Star Crossed episodes were very good, especially Till Death and the hilarious Stone of Scone, any dramatic impact or pathos caused with “Fitzcairn’s” murder by “Kalas” was quickly lost by this repeatedly restoring the character to the screen, no matter how funny the episode. Highlander thus joined the long list of SF/Fantasy TV shows that proved incapable of REALLY killing a character and letting them STAY dead, even though they had beheaded the guy! Then there was Methos. In the episode of the same name, MacLeod walks in to find Watcher researcher Adam Pierson, really Methos, sat meekly waiting for him. Is that really how he survived 5,000 years on a planet packed with Immortals, including his three fellow Horsemen? Methos was a hugely popular character, and Peter Wingfield played him brilliantly, but he never lost that peculiar – and very implausible - subservience to MacLeod, who at a mere 300 years old was a toddler in comparison. Indeed, in the episode Through A Glass, Darkly, Methos slyly refers to this discrepancy when he asks, “‘How did someone so young get to be so smart?’”, and in The Valkyrie, Methos again highlights his immense age (five millennia) by referring to Joe Dawson – a sexagenarian – as a “smart kid”. But Methos’ first actions after their first meeting were to try to goad MacLeod into killing him so Kalas would not have his Quickening, yet surely someone over five millennia old had faced nastier Immortals and come away unscathed? He had because he was one, and we meet three more of them in Comes a Horseman and Revelation 6:8. As I’ve explained above, the introduction of Joe Dawson in Season 2 and Methos in Season 3 also rendered Ritchie Ryan’s “sidekick” role considerably smaller and increasingly less relevant as the three older men formed a sort of triumvirate in their characterisation. After Season 4’s Something Wicked, Stan Kirsch disappears for the rest of the season after MacLeod tries to kill Ritchie Ryan while maddened by the Dark Quickening. It was a long overdue departure. Not that the actor was bad by any means, but Ryan should have been allowed to “spread his wings” as a fully mature Immortal in his own right about a Season and a half before that, probably moving out and getting his own apartment kind of thing and returning to the series as a recurring character, along the lines of Elizabeth Gracen’s recurring guest star character, the Immortal thief, Amanda. Especially after the introduction of the Joe Dawson and Methos characters, all too often Ritchie Ryan’s only function was to stand there looking cute, or get himself into “silly” situations requiring rescue that Ritchie Ryan wouldn’t really have ended up in, but the writers needed something for the character to do. Tellingly, when Stan Kirsch was absent for the remainder of Season 4, the Ritchie Ryan character wasn’t ‘missed’ in the sense of being needed for any storylines, even the pivotal Judgement Day and One Minute To Midnight, showing how extraneous the role had become. Nowhere is the lack of solid mythology foundation more woefully apparent than the terrible last episode of Season 5. (Supposedly the last episode, it was followed by an abbreviated Season 6 which in turn culminated in an even more excruciatingly bad TV movie, Endgame, for which Christopher Lambert was roped in as Connor MacLeod). Archangel basically tries to provide a reason for the existence of Immortals. MacLeod discovers he is the “Chosen Immortal” destined to battle the demon Ahriman, who returns every 1,000 years and has to be vanquished by an Immortal. Since Immortals have existed over 6,000 years, MacLeod is the 6th Chosen One. Actually, this extreme change of plot direction COULD have worked, if only the audience had been led gently to it with a series of clues and hints through the previous 5 seasons. However, the idea was dropped on us from a great height. With all the subtlety of a half-brick through a jeweller’s window, the Ahriman premise blatantly contradicted about half the previous 5 seasons’ story lines. Why are Dawson and Methos so quick to believe that Duncan could have burned an innocent young woman to death, when in previous episodes they would have staunchly known him to be utterly incapable of such an act? Remember Duncan’s reaction to Methos being revealed to be a mass murderer in Comes A Horseman? Despite having witnessed a great deal of supernatural phenomena themselves, such as the magic spring that defeats MacLeod’s Dark Quickening in Deliverance and the Methuselah Stone in Methuselah’s Gift (aren’t Immortals themselves supernatural phenomena?) Methos and Joe Dawson immediately start declaring that MacLeod is mentally ill, in attitudes totally out of established character for both of them. The existence of demons in general, and specifically Ahriman, is dismissed as lunacy, yet Immortals are “forbidden” to kill each other on holy ground - which is by definition a place/site belonging to a deity! Since Immortals believe enough in the existence of divine beings/spirit entities not to break what is actually a completely unenforceable law (even Kronos, Kalas, Xavier St. Cloud et al would not kill on holy ground), why does Methos instantly dismiss the idea of an evil spirit creature as preposterous? Methos also declares that he has never come across this “rising” despite being over 5,000 years old, which again, is simply unbelievable (exactly the problem). Three hundred years before, MacLeod met the previous Chosen Immortal (#5), who committed suicide by forcing MacLeod to kill him so he would gain the knowledge needed to defeat Ahriman through that Quickening. It is simply not feasible that all 5 previous Champions managed to keep the affair totally secret from other Immortals, for when/if they were killed, that Immortal would gain their knowledge and memories – including their battle with Ahriman, and would relay this information on to other Immortals ready for when Ahriman threatened them again. Likewise, the mortal scholar waited until the last minute to warn MacLeod about the demon, just in time to get murdered before he could tell MacLeod what to do. Since the scholar knew for years about MacLeod’s destiny, logically he should have been preparing MacLeod all that time. Perhaps the worst part of the whole cringingly pathetic episode was where MacLeod, fighting phantoms sent by Ahriman, accidentally kills Ritchie Ryan and takes his Quickening. MacLeod has spent five minutes flailing at these phantoms, which he KNOWS are not real (and therefore no threat), so why does he continue? Why does Ritchie Ryan, a well-taught, sensible Immortal, make the blindingly stupid mistake of walking down the narrow corridor to where he can see Duncan lashing out wildly with his sword, and compound this idiocy by coming up SILENTLY BEHIND MACLEOD without announcing that he is there? The scene is a pure rip-off of Something Wicked. Instead of the gym, they are at the racetrack, instead of Ritchie surviving, he dies, but all the writer did was recycle that bit of the Season 4 episode. The whole episode is utterly preposterous, with everyone acting completely contradictorily to how their established characters would really react and with terrible writing that totally contradicts a dozen previous episodes. In the short ½ Season 6, MacLeod polishes off the supposedly near-invincible Ahriman in a couple of episodes (Avatar and Armageddon) without breaking a sweat, then goes back to business as usual with Joe and Methos as back-up, including yet another Fitz-flashback episode, Unusual Suspects. Several episodes barely contained Adrian Paul in them at all. At the time it had been pretty much decided to continue with a spin-off featuring a female Immortal, and most of these episodes featuring hitherto unknown women that MacLeod was very good friends with, etc., were in effect de facto pilot episodes for the proposed spin-off series. Eventually of course this developed into Highlander: The Raven, which ran for one season with Elizabeth Gracen reprising her role as ‘Amanda’. The anomaly in this batch of non-Adrian Paul episodes was the episode Indiscretions, which focussed on Joe and Methos working together to untangle the mess they found themselves in. The abbreviated season ended with a two-parter, To Be and Not To Be. These two episodes were straight out of Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. An Immortal who happens to be a former Irish terrorist decides to destroy Duncan by killing his friends – something that had already been done to death, no pun intended, by Kalas, Horton and finally Ahriman, a far more dangerous figure, thus these episodes lack any drama or tension whatsoever. To Be finally ends the teasing and informs us that that the First Watcher was “Amalato the Akkadian” who became so when he saw Gilgamesh returning to life – it was apparently Amalato who made the look-don’t-touch non interference rules. Of course by this time the writers knew they didn’t have to worry about any future continuity cock-ups. The episode also introduces us to Joe Dawson’s illegitimate Watcher daughter, who is promptly kidnapped by the baddie, surprise, surprise. Surely no-one saw that cliché coming? Duncan offers his life in exchange for Joe Dawson’s daughter, but the exchange goes down the pan when Methos, determined not to let MacLeod’s sense of honour get him killed, follows the Scot to the meeting point and interferes. This again is hardly a plot twist as Methos has done such a thing at least twice before to protect MacLeod from himself, such as when he killed the deranged Kristin because MacLeod wouldn’t kill a woman, and in Forgive Our Trespasses when he shot MacLeod and took his place in a fight he feared MacLeod would have lost. Indeed, you’re waiting for Methos to pop up and stick a spanner in the works the instant MacLeod walks into the warehouse. Not disappointing the viewer, Methos indeed instigates a shoot-out, during which Duncan is knocked unconscious and carried away from the fight after falling onto a freight engine. He then wakes up to discover Fitz waiting for him. Fitz it transpires is an angel (I swear I’m not making this up) and has been sent by God to talk Duncan out committing suicide as he is needed. The remainder of To Be and Not To Be are taken up with Fitz showing Duncan the world as it would have been had the Scot never existed. Without Duncan to bring out her better side, Amanda is now a conscienceless “Black Widow” murderess who marries wealthy husbands and poisons them – she ends up one of James Horton’s victims, the deranged maniac alive and well in this timeline. Without Duncan to help him in the fight, Joe Dawson is an embittered vagrant in a wheelchair who lost the battle for the Watchers organisation to Horton, whose thuggish fanatics are still slaughtering any Immortal they come across. Since he never had to live up to Duncan’s code of integrity and honour (remember in Judgement Day and One Minute To Midnight how Methos comments that he spent centuries losing his conscience only for MacLeod to come along and find it again?), Methos remained the amoral opportunist/conscienceless sociopath he once was, teaming up again with Kronos to slaughter innocents. Without Duncan to be his mentor, the thief Ritchie Ryan does not understand what happened to him after he was killed during a botched burglary and so flees from place to place, blinded by terrible headaches and unable to understand why people he’s never met are always trying to decapitate him. Found by Methos and Kronos, he is killed by them when he fails to murder Joe Dawson, who in turn is tortured to death by Methos for information on James Horton. Without Duncan to help him escape, Fitz was beheaded for treason 280 years earlier by the headsman of King George I. Inevitably, Duncan chooses to exist, so the timeline is restored to the one we know, the baddie is defeated and the series concludes with a sort of “life goes on” message as we fade out on the loose quartet of Duncan, Methos, Joe and Amanda together in Paris. Attempting to wring a last few coins from the franchise, Season 6’s initial postscript was the short-lived series Highlander: The Raven, with Elizabeth Gracen’s Amanda character as the lead. Iit ran for one season and might have had potential if Peter Wingfield, Jim Byrnes and Adrian Paul had had recurring “guest” roles, or if the Ritchie Ryan character had been left alive and brought in as co-lead. It was followed by yet another painfully bad TV movie, Endgame, which tried and failed utterly to rationalise the hopelessly conflicting mythology and brought back Connor MacLeod briefly before gruesomely killing him off. Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming success of the DVD Season 1 Box Set of Highlander: The Series in the United States in 2002, the franchise has been resurrected with a new film being touted, tentatively entitled The Source3. One can only hope the thing goes straight to development hell. In actual fact, the woeful Season 5 finale Archangel and the abbreviated Season 6 were belated and futile attempts to “explain” the Highlander universe, unfortunately way, way too late – the Highlander “story” was tissue-paper thin to start with in 1986 and by Season 3 had holes large enough to fit the QE2 through even if you turned it sideways. For example: Immortals, despite being, well, Immortal, are nevertheless human, or at least when they end up into hospital they must have the same internal organs and physiology as everyone else because the doctors don’t get exited at their MRI and CAT scans. Every Immortal is a foundling newborn baby, yet surely one CCTV camera somewhere must have picked up a shadowy figure dumping a baby? Why do the baby’s mother and father abandon him or her shortly after birth? Immortals claim no blood relatives, but that is an anti-survival trait. Immortals themselves are sterile, yet new Immortals keep popping up, so the idea that a man and woman could produce only one Immortal child and then no more is not feasible from a numerical point of view; simple biological mathematics indicates that some Immortals have to have brothers and sisters. Also, since Immortals can tell a pre-Immortal, why are “evil” Immortals consistently foolish enough to let these children grow up? Since all Immortals are abandoned babies, the Immortals have only to keep a weather eye on orphanages and care homes to check any newly discovered infants. Something small and wriggling - whose only defences are the ability to smell bad and scream constantly for 24 hours - is far easier to kill than a homicidal twenty-something slashing at you with a stonking great sword! As if that were not enough, many Immortals – both good and evil – take pre-Immortal/new Immortals as students; they train them to survive in the Game. In Methusaleh’s Gift, we see Amanda as the student of Rebekah; Ritchie of course is MacLeod’s student, and he briefly has at least one other in The Immortal Cimmoli, as well as those he trains in various flashback episodes, like Jean Philippe in The Immortal Cimmoli. Warren Cochrane has a student in Through A Glass, Darkly. But surely this is the Immortal equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot? If there can ‘be only one’, why on earth do the vast majority of Immortals, good and evil, share this apparently suicidal impulse to take on the role of mentors and teachers to the ‘fledglings’ of their kind when common sense dictates that an Immortal should promptly kill any pre-Immortal or new, inexperienced Immortal they find? In Season 5 ‘clip show’ episode Double Jeopardy, we see how the thoroughly evil Immortal Xavier St. Cloud (guest-star Roland Gift reprising his role) found in his own words, ‘a newborn’ Immortal, Morgan d’Estang, laying in state on a bier in a church. Liberating the youth from his coffin (as MacLeod did Nefertiti), does St. Cloud do the sensible thing and decapitate the bewildered, defenceless Immortal? No, he promptly takes him as his student, and it is D’Estang who is the copycat tormentor of MacLeod in Double Jeopardy. It also seems that another one of those unwritten Immortal laws applies – it is a terrible crime for a teacher to kill his or her student. In Through A Glass, Darkly MacLeod’s old friend Warren Cochrane suffers traumatic amnesia after he has a furious argument with his student and unintentionally kills him in a blind rage. In Archangel, MacLeod is devastated when he accidentally kills Ritchie. Incidentally, Through A Glass, Darkly causes another rule-breaking cock-up. Warren kills his student in what is clearly an old church and after taking him back there to help cure his amnesia, MacLeod has no compunction about fighting Cochrane on what is holy ground, the cast and crew having seemingly forgotten this ultimate no-no in this episode. Yet still we could go on: What is the purpose of the Immortals? Why can there be “only one”? What is it that that Immortal is supposed to do once he or she has become the one? Logically, since Highlander is set during the “Gathering”, the prequel to the great battles to determine who is the one, there should be no more new Immortals – since the Gathering is to draw all those Immortals good enough to have survived until that point. Yet the constant emergence of new Immortals in the series (including, for instance, Spandau Ballet star Martin Kemp) meant that the eventual “One” would be trapped in an endless cycle of having to nip out and behead some new-kid-on-the-block upstart every few months. In order for the “there can be only one” idea to work, there has to come a point where no new Immortals are born and what you have is all you get. Is it really necessary to kill all other Immortals? If so, why are so many of them born in the first place? What would happen if, after all the fighting and Quickenings, the only Immortals left alive were the “good Immortals” – Duncan and Connor MacLeod, Methos, Amanda, Ritchie Ryan, Cassandra, Hugh Fitzcairn, Terence Coventry, the de Valicourts, Stephen Keane, etc., etc? These would not, especially Duncan, willingly turn on the others, blowing the “only one” idea out of the water straight away. I admit that the above probably sounds like an onslaught of criticism, which it certainly is not intended to be, since by far the vast majority of the series’ episodes ranged from good to very good, particularly throughout seasons 2-4. However, Highlander was doomed from the start because nobody took the time to sit down and ask the very questions that I have posed above, or at least find plausible answers to them. If they had, Highlander would have gone from being “good fantasy” to a legend on a par with the superb Buffy the Vampire Slayer, et al. A good exercise to really get the “sense” of this retrospective is to watch a couple of episodes at random from each season, and see how many contradictions/unresolved plot threads you can pick up. To start you off, I’ll give you one – the spare CD-ROM exposing Immortals we see in the bookstore after MacLeod kills Kalas is never referred to again, despite it being laughably easy to find by the next customer, it became another “forgotten storyline”. For example, in season one of Miami Vice, Rico Tubbs’ (Philip Michael Thomas) infant son is taken by his uncle, yet the child is never referred to again, even though the audience knows him to be alive. In Season 1 of Voyager, the Kazon take Commander Chekotay’s son by Seska, and again the series blithely ended without any reference to him. In the British soap opera Crossroads, legendary for its wooden acting, handyman “Benny” goes looking for a hammer and disappears for six months. These are all classic forgotten storylines. Highlander: the Series is most useful because it provides many excellent examples of how to introduce and develop a character, how to develop a plot arc, when to kill off a character (e.g., Tessa), but also how and when NOT to do those things, (e.g., Fitzcairn and Ritchie). © 2002, C D Stewart 1 Strangely, Seacouver, just like the city of Cascade, can be found in exactly the same position as Seattle. 2 Georg Ludvig, Duke of Brunswick & Lüneberg, Elector (King) of Hanover, inherited the throne of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland from his second cousin, Queen Anne of Britain. Anne’s grandfather, King Charles I, was the younger brother of Georg’s grandmother, Elizabeth, Queen Consort of Bohemia, Countess Palatine of the Rhine and Electress (Queen) of Hanover. Childless Queen Anne’s heir was Georg’s mother, Sophia, but she predeceased Anne by two months, so Sophia’s eldest son Georg came to the throne as King George I. He had virtually no interest in British affairs and preferred to speak in his native Germanic language, thus making him unpopular. 3 Information provided by SFX magazine, November 2002.