Adrian and Roger? This I gotta see. Anyone know which season/episodes i should look for?
{ We have a public library that, though it’s small, has a wealth of old TV shows. So I get my old TV fix for free, esp. old british stuff: Danger Man/Secret Agent, the Champions, Morecambe and Wise, The Prisoner, Coronation Street, The Avengers, etc. Why doesn’t the RIAA and the movie studios try to shut down libraries? }
Here ya go. I liked the golf one, mainly because unlike some other eps it didn’t try too hard to be profound or something.
I was someone who really enjoyed the original Highlander movie when it came out in 85, and I watched Highlander: The Series when it was first run. However, my memory of watching it during the initial run is that it could be hard to follow it because it was a syndicated series and was sometimes aired in weird ways. You might for example have 2-3 cable stations that actually air the show, and only one of them would be airing the most recent season generally, and sometimes the schedule was irregular.
In an age before DVRs and myself always being a very “inconsistent” television watcher (it’s only because of DVR that I’ve been able to closely follow great shows like Breaking Bad, Dexter and etc in recent years) I found that I missed out on a lot of the chronology when I watched the series back in the 90s.
This thread is oddly topical because Netflix Watch Instantly has the whole series now, and because of that and a desire to revisit a show I hadn’t thought about in probably a decade just a month or so ago I watched the entire series.
I think if you enjoyed the original Highlander movie, and those other series you listed, you’ll enjoy Highlander: The Series. The show suffers immensely from basically going about two seasons past the point it should have. The writing and acting and generally the entire show just gets really bad the final two seasons. However, I toughed it out and watched the show through to the bitter end. There are still a few gems in the final seasons that are reminiscent of the show’s past charms.
I never regretted watching any of the episodes in seasons 1-4, they were of varying quality but always worth the single watch-through. The general consensus amongst die hard fans is the show starts off “okay” with season 1, gets really good in 2-4 and then drops off hard. I think a lot of people consider season 3 to be the best of the series. Unlike some shows, season 1 of Highlander is still pretty good. It isn’t a pain to get through it, and some of the individual episodes are extremely good.
To clarify a few things without trying to spoil anything:
It is set in a different universe than the first 2 films. They are totally separate. Connor MacLeod, The Kurgan, Ramirez, et cetera all “existed” in the Series universe, but the key difference is there was no Gathering in 1985, 1985 was just a confluence of a lot of Immortals and there are still many Immortals left in the world of the Series.
The series was always shot in Vancouver and Paris, every year. Some people think the series moved to Paris in later seasons, this isn’t the case. Every season is roughly divided in two, with half the episodes being set in the Pacific NW and half being set in Paris. There are obvious exceptions, sometimes the “Paris” episodes are set elsewhere in Europe, and the Vancouver episodes might be set somewhere else, but filming was divided half and half for the entire series.
The storyline reflects the move. However, for the Vancouver filmed episodes, the storyline is that Duncan is living in some nameless American city in the Pacific Northwest. The strong indication is that it’s Seattle, but since it’s never named and because of the fact it was actually filmed in Vancouver, fans of the series always refer to it as “Seacouver.”
Essentially, unless you truly kill them (by beheading) in the movie, Immortals cannot die. They also really can’t be stopped, either, unless you just overpowered them and chained them up.
In the series, anything that would kill a person, will put an Immortal into a “death state.” Meaning they appear for all intents and purposes to be dead, they have no pulse, they can’t move, can’t defend themselves etc. Medical professionals can take a quick look at them and say “this guy is dead.” Then, some time later they will heal and “gasp back to life.” It’s a very, very persistent plot device and is one of the key differences between the movies and the series that is never explicitly explained or anything, it just is a difference in the universes.
Immortals in the series definitely cannot breathe under water. If you were to throw one that couldn’t swim into the water they would drown and would remain dead until their body came back out of the water.
The time for an immortal to recover from a “death state” in the series is highly variable, sometimes it’s a few minutes and sometimes it’s a few hours, which is slightly annoying but take it for what it is. In truth it’s variable based on the needs of the plot.
There’s a kind of throw-away story by one Immortal about being dropped on a desert island. First he chased down and ate all the birds and rats. Then he ate all the bugs. Then he starved to death. Then he woke up again. Then he starved to death again. Over and over again until he was finally rescued, by which point he was completely insane from the torment.
Then there’s the kinda jokey “where the hell do they keep their swords?” since they all just magically pull them out of their coats, even when the sword very obviously would NOT have fit or been concealed under their coat, or as I recall (perhaps wrongly) after having gone through a metal detector without discovery.
Was that the story where Mc Leod gets captured and locked in a cell (in an abandoned cargo ship if I remember) with supplies for the next twenty years but condemned to be caged forever? (I only saw this episode once and had missed the beginning). I think it was tied to The Hunters’plot and their leader (ha the nineties, when you could watch a series in complete disorder).
Different story lines.
The desert island incident happened in the Age of Sail. MacLeod was a crewman on a ship, the captain of the ship was also an immortal. The captain was a bit of a dick, and the crew mutinied and I think were actually threatening to kill him/decapitate him. MacLeod intervenes because he genuinely doesn’t want the captain to die for “real” since he hadn’t done any singular thing that was “that bad.” (It’s a consistent theme throughout the series, MacLeod is usually okay with assholes, but if you stray into his categorization of “evil” he’ll come after you.) Instead of killing him the crew maroons the captain on an island.
Fast forward two hundred years later and he’s in Seacouver looking for some revenge.
The incident where MacLeod was locked in a custom-made prison was over a WWI era feud. MacLeod was fighting for the British in WWI, near the end of the war they get word that the war is over. However, the commander of that unit (also an immortal, incidentally) disregards that the war is over, because he really wants to take whatever desolate piece of earth his men had been trying to take. Since it was WWI, the ensuing frontal assault is cut down by the German entrenched defenses, hundreds and hundreds of British soldiers die. MacLeod is outraged, since he tried repeatedly to stop the attack since he knew the war was over.
Later on, the commander is court martialed and they are inclined to sentence him to death (hanging.) MacLeod doesn’t want that because he thinks it’s too easy, instead he pleads for “mercy” before the court martial board and he’s sentenced to life in prison. He’s kept in a British prison for like 70+ years before eventually they no longer know who this crazy guy is and release him. He spends about 10 years planning his revenge on MacLeod.
Wow dude thank you, that was one complete answer, wish I could rep you there.
So, in truth I had not seen the first episode you mentionned and now that you sum it up, the second episode really comes back fully to my mind.
In one ep. an immortal Nazi war criminal is punished by some French loyalists by being dumped into the Seine in chains (they apparently knew he was an Immortal but figured death was too good for him0. It wasn’t firmly established whether he was in a coma-like state for 50 years, or if he drifted in and out of consciousness all the while. When inadvertently fished out he was pissed, tho.
I only saw the first movie and a scattering of shows from the series so there may be a nuance I’m missing, but why would Connor insist on being the one beheaded? If Duncan+Connor is enough to take out Big Bad, then Connor+Duncan ought to be, too. Even if the one gets all the knowledge, experience, and power of the other, it seems to me that Connor would be a better bet because he’s got 200 to 300 years on Duncan. More experience fighting, more experience assimilating a new Quickening, and less to assimilate so he’d probably take less time to integrate everything.
I think at the time that Connor was weary of fighting all the time and just wanted to be in peace. The whole plot was pretty whacked out, because they did some pretty screwy math. Supposedly the big bad had killed something like 1200 immortals, making him the baddest dude around. Connor and Duncan had, together, killed a total of about 1200 or so, which in the movie was supposed to make them equal if one killed the other, right? The math looks good on the face of it, except you realize that teh big bad has probably killed some immortals with several hundred kills to their names, too…so it’s nearly impossile to get a real feel for how much power each really has.
Anyhow, its too bad that the story got such hack treatment. The first movie was pretty good, but unfortunately they just wanted some quick and easy way to continue to cash in on the premise.
I saw the movie in the Theater in '86, it was a direct and prodigious follow-up, cloud rider, to the Terminator… there was a time in the 80’s when anything was possible… just look at Red Dawn if you want a zeitgeist. It was the sensibilities of the Octagon with some phantasm creativity. If you Want to do a double feature… with binary progression and a modern filmfest… Christopher Lambert and The Highlander Movie and Jet Li in 2001’s The One. Revamp and blatant premise stealer.
The whole thing about absorbing the power of the people you kill, along with the power of all the ones THEY had killed, never really made sense. Yet another one of those plot points that had to be glossed over for the sake of making a workable series.
This.
Seasons one and two were my favorites, but the others up until the 2nd half of six were still worth watching.
Highlander meant for me that good Friday night TV on FOX was over for the evening. It always came on after The X-Files and I knew everything was going to be downhill after that.
Naw. Connor & Duncan had both probably killed other Immortals with hundreds of kills, too. Did they ever explain how the Immortals knew how much power each had? It can’t be based on head count.
What I don’t understand is why the number of kills would matter in the first place. Those fights don’t seem to be won with power, they appear to be won with skill in armed and unarmed combat and luck.
I can see where getting the experience of the dead Immortals would be helpful, but did any of them ever do anything with all this power they absorb? Or do they just walk around like huge capacitors until someone lops their head off and they discharge spectacularly?
I just watched the first two on my Roku via Netflix.
Wow, Richard Moll is a bad actor.
The second one centered on Richie finding his mom and dad. Boy was that dull.
I recall hearing that outside the states more skin was shown by Tessa and others - was that true or just fanboy-wishful-thinking?
I remember watching the show in France (one of the co-producers), it aired every day (dont ask, only recently have the French realized that you dont air a weekly show every day) at around 6 pm, and was always agreably surprised by the “sex scenes” (and it’s France we’re talking about, we dont blip out curse words, nor blur boobs). It was “raunchier” that your average US series by far, so I wouldnt be surprised if the American version was censored on that aspect.