I dunno–I kind of felt cheated when we didn’t get a good duel and beheading at the end of an episode.
Elizabeth Gracen is the actresses’ name. She was once Miss Arkansas, and was briefly one of Wild Bill’s girlfriends.
Yup, cheesy fun. I liked Methos, I especially liked Roger Daltrey’s Fitz character. Heck, I even modelled a high level wandering Bard NPC in a D&D game around him.
One of the problems that I had with the series was that 3/4 of the episodes were about Duncan going after a bad guy and killing him. BUT, about 1/4 were about encountering his old friends who were doing the exact same thing, and Mr. Hypocricy would interfere or spout off about how they shouldn’t do it, it was wrong, blah, blah, blah. Hellfire man, you’re doing it every fucking week! Don’t be pissing all over other people doing the same damned thing!
But Duncan didn’t go around seeking other immortals to take down. He usually only responded in defense of himself or his friends. It appeared that many other immortals did search out others to fight (the quickening and all that mumbo jumbo). IIRC, Duncan was gaining something of a reputation among the immortals as being fairly “powerful” due to his many victories, despite being relatively young compared to similarly powerful immortals like Methos. That made Duncan a target.
I can’t believe I am trying to defend internal logic in the Highlander series!
Oh, Methos didn’t want to fight (and I wish he’d gotten more good acting jobs since then). I just meant that if it came down to it, you were screwed. And Richie is really not an impressive immortal name.
Did they ever explain why two guys from the same clan were immortal?
Was there ever an explanation about what kind of power an immortal received from a Quickening? How was Duncan “powerful” as compared to other immortals?
I don’t know if the series was ever really clear on that, though they were supposed to gain something from the quickening of a recently fallen immortal. I think they talked about “knowledge and power” but were pretty vague about what that meant. And the more experienced the recently fallen immortal was, the more there was to gain. I remember clearly in one episode where some humans (rogue Watchers maybe?) were going around capturing and beheading immortals and Duncan talked about the lost quickenings as such a huge waste.
They didn’t seem to have any supernatural powers (aside from immortality). Maybe they gained strength, stamina and improved reflexes? Maybe they increased their Hit Points? 
Wasn’t it something like you gained their knowledge and experiences? I vaguely remember an immortal who was going nuts from the people in his head that he had killed…
Or I’m completely off the ball on that one.
I loved the show, but like many other shows I didn’t see much of them when they aired (like Pretender). I wonder if they’ll ever come out on DVD (or are they? I’ve never seen them)… I longed to buy the VHS, but it was way too expensive for a poor high school student.
ETA and a quick google shows it did make it to DVD. Hmm ponders
I believe you’re right. I need to rewatch the show. Looks like hulu does have all the episodes online!
I’m pretty sure this is right. Knowledge and power is mentioned, I was just wondering if there was anything specific and canonical. Say an immortal was only 50 years old and had no fighting experience, and he/she killed an immortal who was a 700 year old martial arts master, would the younger immortal now be a master with 700 years worth of ability? Or if an immortal doctor was beheaded, would the victor now be able to perform surgery?
Wasn’t that in one of the movies? Or am I off the ball?
Pretty sure the Conner/Duncan movie touched on the subject. The ending kind of depended on the acquisition of powers, didn’t it?
I wish I could Hulu it, but I’m not in the US so I’m SOL on that one.
I can’t remember where I saw it, but I’m pretty sure it was the TV show, and Duncan (Adrian, he was my big crush in high school) killed the guy and then proceeded to go a little crazy himself. Or maybe I’m mixing up a couple episodes.
There can be only……ok, there can be a lot of them I guess.
No. It would be very kool if it was that way though. It was kind of a plot device to lead to what the episode called for.
There was an immortal friend of Duncan’s who killed evil immortals, absorbing their badness into himself to spare the rest of the world but he apparently had a limit and killed one too many, turning evil himself. Duncan was forced to kill him and also became evil for a while. Evil Duncan tried to kill Richie and did kill a psychiatrist immortal friend who was trying to help him. Methos eventually helped Duncan defeat his dark side and turn back to good again. The story arc went on for more than one episode but I don’t remember how many.
Evil Duncan was helluva sexy though. Wow.
Damn, I missed it. I’m pretty sure the only episode of that story arc I saw was the start of it. I distinctly remember him going weird and hunting Richie.
Sooo very tempted to buy the dvd now…
Yep, I love the Highlander show too (I’m a Duncan MacLeod fan, not a Connor MacLeod fan; I like the series, but the first three movies, not so much; Endgame was okay, at least it had Duncan and Methos and Joe Dawson in it; the Source was just incoherent, even though it did have them all in it anyway). I’m currently in the midst of watching the entire series on DVD. I just got to season 6. My wife is enjoying it too. We’re even going to watch Highlander: The Raven when this is done (it wasn’t that bad, even though they should have made a Methos show instead of an Amanda show, dangit), and then Endgame and maybe even The Source.
What dwyr is talking about is the infamous “Dark Quickening” pair of episodes in season 4, “Something Wicked” and “Deliverance.” Duncan’s old friend Coltec was a Hayoka in his tribe – a man who absorbed evil so that it wouldn’t affect his tribe. He saved Duncan from falling into a neverending pit of rage and hatred when his Sioux wife was murdered by soldiers. But recently he stopped taking heads because he knew he was near his limit for absorbing evil. Unfortunately, he got involved in stopping a psychopathic immortal from robbing and murdering a shop owner, and went over his limit, and became evil himself. When Duncan was forced to take his head, the evil infected him, and he went nuts.
That was a VERY cool, and very disturbing, pair of episodes. It had many repercussions later, of course.
They never explained what precisely you gained from the Quickening – some felt it was the defeated immortal’s soul, some felt it was his memories, some felt it was his essence, whatever – but it did involve giving you some kind of power that would help you win fights; in fourth-season episode “The Immortal Cimoli,” Amanda and Duncan try to teach the newly immortal stage magician Danny Cimoli how to fight, making the comment that he’s going to get killed if he doesn’t do some heavy-duty learning. “Maybe if you’d been around for a while or taken a few heads,” says Amanda (paraphrased). Then at the end he decides to …
take Duncan’s head, in order to help himself fight off other immortals. Of course, he fails, and dies in Vegas at the hands of some other Immortal..
Also, Kalas was after Methos at the end of season 3 specifically so he’d have a 5,000-year-old immortal’s power and strength and be able to defeat Duncan. Methos even tries to goad Duncan into taking his head specifically so that “the two of them combined can beat him.”
And in Endgame, I believe Connor has Duncan take his head specifically so Duncan will have the power to defeat the bad guy.
But it’s been years since I saw Endgame, so I’m not sure.
I believe this is explained in more detail in some of my many Highlander: The Series books. I’ll have to check.
Hah, I thought I was alone in my appreciation of the series… I actually saw the series before any of the movies, and then went for them, enjoyed the first one, only to get horribly confused by that whole Zeist mess… Really, I never understood what whoever was responsible thought they were doing with that.
And yes to Methos being the best character on the show – I liked how they managed to both take his awesomeness to new levels and emphasize his dark side and literal inhumanity (I mean, what’s a couple of thousand human lives to an ancient immortal?) by making him Death of the Four Horsemen. As far as ‘dark secrets far in the past’ go, this one really takes the cake.
Also, I still sometimes use his quote from defeating one of his fellow horsemen – ‘I killed Silas. I liked Silas!’ --, when scrapping old electronics or the like.
I don’t understand this part.
There’s no such thing as “Zeist.”
Oh, I know that was a concept that they wanted to stick in some Highlander Christmas Special or something, but that never came about.
NEVER.
That just gave me this vision of a choreographed song and dance number where they dance around a christmas tree singing while waving their swords around. Ending with a couple of them accidentally cutting the heads off the others and falling into that whole lightning/quickening thing, the lights on the tree exploding…