selenak

During a looooooong train journey (seriously, folks, Hamburg-Munich means you're in the train for most of the day, and that's an ICE, aka the fastest train we have), it's nostalgia time for me. Firstly, in the form of a Doctor Who vid rec:

icsbanana has created a terrific Ace character portrait, which captures so much of what makes Ace one of my favourite Classic Who companions, and what makes her arc on the show so good. In conclusion, Aaaaaace!

Secondly, I finally got around watching (some) of my Highlander, season 5 dvds which I aquired a good while ago, prompted by various nostalgic conversations. And came to the conclusion that it's not just nostalgia: Highlander: The Series holds up pretty well, even revisited more than a decade later.

S5 was where the show hit its creative peak, (and where it should have ended, the fun of Indiscretions in s6 aside), and watching episodes I had not seen since the original broadcast because at the time because of my lack of interest in their focus back then (to wit: Richie episodes, will explain in a moment), I was struck by not only a feeling of general fondness, which now included Richie, but how I actually found, say, End of Innocence interesting, not in a "will tolerate this for the sake of old fandom" but in a "ah, yes, I can see what they're doing there, and it's good character stuff" kind of way.

Explanation of the Richie matter: back in the day, I was almost non-stop irritated by him. This was because I was in a serious anti-wisecracking male teenage sidekicks mode, caused by a mixture of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and the Doctor Who movie of doom, and so when I saw Richie in s1 of HL, I thought "oh no, one of those!" and never really stopped thinking that. So I, err, did not grieve during a certain event in Archangel. Many years later, I get the point of Richie, and the way the show contrasts him as a product of the late 20th century who wasn't born into an age where lethal hand-to-hand-combat was normal, as opposed to all over recurring Immortals, and has to adjust not only from mortal to immortal life but also to a state of mind where you have to kill on a semi-regular basis when this is anything but what you want works as good storytelling. That the initially reluctant Richie responds to the s4 Dark Quickening events, whererin his previously hero-worshipped teacher goes Darkside and tries to kill him, with a phase where he's actively seeking out duels, trying to prove his tough guy indifference, and that this comes to bite him when confronted with the reality of the people he killed via their friends and widows makes psychological sense, as does a repentant Richie in mid-s5 then eagerly believing the pacifist approache of Fake!Methos in The Messenger.

The dvds offer five audio commentaries, extended and cut scenes for all episodes, interviews with actor, scriptwriters and producers for all episodes, as well as bloopers. For Glory Days, Donna Lettow remarks on how because Jim Byrnes was so amazing as Joe they tried to give him more and more to do instead of just letting him be exposition guy, and it works beautifully. (Not just in Glory Days, which is the Joe-centric episode of the season.) It's both great and slightly depressing to contemplate that Joe Dawson still hasn't a current day equivalent on tv I can think of: a series regular who is a double amputee but who never gets patronizied as the "handicapped" character, whose relationships with the other characters are treated as equally varied and important, and whose being disabled isn't utterly ignored, either, because that would be just as dishonest. The way they deal with it in Glory Days is a case in point; Joe is initially reluctant to see his high school love again because she remembers him pre-Vietnam with both legs, but as it turns out this actually is not the problem. The longing for the past and the nostalgia combined with the rueful realization that life has moved on in more than one way, and there are other relationships now, comes across very well in the climax and tag scene, which ties with something the show overall did splendidly, and the current day shows, and their fandoms, could learn something from: to wit, the treatment of relationships both for mortal and immortals, in all combinations (mortal/mortal, mortal/immortal, immortal/immortal).

What I mean: both the show's main character, Duncan MacLeod, and the various recurring characters have romances and friendships of varying intensity. There is, however, no such thing as a One True Love. Duncan at the start of the show is very much in love with his mortal girlfriend Tessa, who dies in s2, and by time the show ends it's clear that in some ways, he's still grieving for her. As he is for various other people he loved and lost in the course of centuries. This does not mean he's not capable of loving other people as well; people who care for one person and one person only on this show are usually psychopaths. Methos, the oldest living Immortal, might or might not have been joking about having had 68 wives, but the brief relationship he forms with the dying Alexa Bond in Timeless is shown to affect him deeply in subsequent episodes; at the same time, he's moving on and settling back in Methos, Arch Survivor And Cynical Wisecrack mode (until a quite different bit of his past comes to haunt him, more about that in a moment). There are, gasp, mortal exes around who did just fine after the relationship with Duncan ended for various reason, often, but not always due to the immortal lifestyle (i.e. the non-aging and the headhunters showing up so often). There is never an implication that once you've been in love with an Immortal, you can't possibly love anyone else. It's even possible, double gasp, to have a civil relationships with your immortal ex (one reason why I liked that the show brought Anne back repeatedly after her affair with Duncan ended). And one of many reasons why I adore the Duncan/Amanda relationship so much is that these two Immortals know very well they couldn't live with each other on a day to day basis; eternity with each other would be a very short one as they'd drive each other insane. (I found it amusing that the best scene in the s5 comedy episode Dramatic License, where they talk about this, was a last minute unplanned insert because the episode run short.) Instead, they have a friends-with-benefits arrangment which gives both of them space and ensured they kept returning to each other over the centuries. This always struck me as extremely realistic and not just for Duncan and Amanda, but for Immortals with each other in general.

S5 contains my favourite HL comedy episode (The Stone of Scone, the only HL episode which is entirely in flashback, as the "current day" action takes place in the 1950s, and the brief flashbacks are to the early 18th century), with Amanda, Fitz and Duncan being absolutely hilarious together, my favourite HL moral dilemma episode - and indeed the single Highlander episode which I would choose to demonstrate what this show is all about to newbies who think the point is that there's a beheading at the end), Valkyrie, and of course the epic Horseman two parter, Comes a Horseman/ Revelations 6:8. (The reason why I wouldn't choose CaH/Rev to introduce anyone to Highlander, despite this being obviously the great HL movie that never was, is that a) the emotional impact is somewhat different if you're not familiar with the various characters and their friendships already, and b) the main charactere here is Methos, which is not representative for the show. The Only the Methos episodes are good claim is a pet peeve of mine anyway.) Before we get to the Horsemen eps revisited, let's talk about Valkyrie revisited. (I hadn't seen either for a decade, though back in the day I must have watched them five times at least.)

Valkyrie is a good example of why I'm able to handwave inaccuracies if the story is right. Duncan's German in one of the flashbacks is atrocious (Adrian Paul in the audio commentary: "I had no idea what I was saying"; self: "Yes, dear, one notices"), the idea of a British spy having to explain the layout of Hitler's bunker to Stauffenberg is headdesk-worthy as is the idea of any type of British involvement because the Brits, as Adam von Trott found out in the years before the July 20th conspiracy when he tried to contact them again and again, did not first believe in a genuine anti-Hitler stand and then saw it as nothing more as a distateful fallout between thieves, and so forth. And yet, I don't care. Why not? Because of everything else. Our guest star in this episode is female Immortal Ingrid (played by Musetta Vander who is great in the part), involved with the July 20th conspiracy back in the day, haunted by her failure to kill Hitler and having arrived at the conclusion that it's better to kill potential genocidal dictators before they ever reach that stage. So she travels the world and assassinates racist demagogues on the rise, be it in Russia or the US. This episode at no point demonizes Ingrid and makes her a very sympathetic character. She's not shown as insane; she knows exactly what she does, and why. And yet the episode is never is on the "let's take out racist scum, yeah!" train, either. Not "just" because Ingrid can't possibly know for sure who of the people she takes out would actually have become a historic menace otherwise, and who would have faded away into obscurity; as assassinations go, and indeed as the attempts on Hitler's life did (something the episode lets Ingrid point out to Duncan), it's not only the life of the demagogue that was/will be taken, but often the lives of bystanders as well. Just how many people is it okay to kill to prevent a potential tyrant? And yet the episode doesn't come down on a simple "Ingrid is wrong" judgment, either. There is another marvellous guest character, the Interpol inspector who is hunting her, and who spends the early part of the episode trying to convince Duncan his old friend has crossed the line and needs to be stopped, whose father was a poet killed in Romania for writing non-conformist poetry. After the inspector thinks he killed Ingrid (he doesn't know she's an Immortal, after all), he sits with Duncan in a bar, sort of sums up the moral of the show with "when I was a boy, everything was black and white; now I look around, and there are nonly shades of grey"), and says that if the American politician Ingrid tried to assassinate before the Inspector stopped her, Wilkinson, should become President of the US in twenty years, how will he be able to live with himself? And yet, there was nothing else he could do.

(Sidenote: Wilkinson's speech which we hear fragments of during the episode sounds like the current day "tea party" rallyes. I got the chills.)

Since Ingrid is immortal, Duncan, who likes and respects her, is the one who actually ends up having to stop her. Incidentally, what baffles me is that when this episode gets summarized the sentence "Methos explains the shades of grey to the black and white seeing Duncan" or a variation thereof usually ends up in it, because this is more or less the opposite of what happens on screen. Methos tells Duncan he'll have to kill Ingrid from the get go, doesn't budge from that for one moment, and in reply to Duncan's "she thinks she's making the world a better place" draws the episode's darkest comparison by replying "Mac, that's exactly what he believed - Adolf something or the other". The one point where he relents a bit as at the end, in the final exchange with Duncan, which does highlight that this is an episode without a "good" choice to make:

D: Ingrid asked me something before she died. She asked what the difference was between her judging them and me judging her. (...)
M: Stepanek killed, and Ingrid judged him. Wilkinson killed, and Ingrid judged him. Ingrid killed, and you judged her.
D: So who judges me?

In addition to not giving any easy replies to its central question, the episode also does a neat job of bringing up something usually overlooked when genre shows do a variation of the "if you could travel back in time, would you kill Hitler?" type of story, in the bar scene with Joe, Duncan and Methos, to wit: history as decided by individuals versus history as decided by various sociological developments. Methos, with his 5000 years perspective, makes a case that one individual does not decide history; if it hadn't been Hitler, it would have been someone else causing similar events. Similarly, Ingrid killing demagogic politicians is pointless because they will simply be replaced by others. Duncan, not surprisingly, champions the cause of personal responsibility. (Joe stays out of it whereupon both of his Immortal friends declare him a coward.) (Of course, Methos has a personal reason to favour the it-was-the-spirit-of-the-times approach which we'll discover soon.) It's an entertaining three ways character scene which is a philosophical debate at the same time, and how many shows can pull that off?

Lastly: in most cases, it annoys me that female Immortals are generally depicted as not so good fighters (it's one of the HL flaws, with the exception of the last season, where they were trying to pitch a spin-off around a female Immortal, and suddenly good female fighters showed up in every second episode, sadly not often together with good scripts), but here it works that the question doesn't even come up because Ingrid refuses to fight Duncan, doesn't draw her sword but makes him kill her the same way she kills her victims, one-sided. That there are tears in both their eyes during that last meeting similarly heightens the tragedy and avoids gender being an issue here.

In conclusion: this episode is why the show still rocks.

Now, on to the Horsemen. I was really curious how the Big Epic of Epicness would strike me this time because so many things have changed since my original watch. Back then, I, like 99% of the fandom, was all aglow in Methos adoration. While the initial fallout was enough to alert me to the problem of gender double standard and vilification of female characters for the first time, but my early rewatchs were still Methos-dominated. Since then, I hadn't only gone through various other fandoms but through countless repetition of the "this woman comes between our slash couple?!?" and/or "This woman hates our beloved character?!? - SHE IS THE EVIL AND MUST DIE!!!!" phenomenon. Not to mention that even fandom aside, original sources taking the easy route with moral ambiguity by downplaying the darker deeds of the ambigous character and highlighting his good sides. So, what did my jaded eyes behold this time around?

Actually, I have only one criticism of the two parter, which back then was made by a HL friend of mine, and which upon rewatch struck me as extremely sensible advice. To wit: Cassandra, being 3000 years old, should have been depicted as a better sword fighter. Now, the plot demands she gets disarmed by Kronos in part I and captured in part II, there is no way around that if you want subsequent events to unfold, and there is only so much screentime available. However, by cutting the Western flashback at the stort to a brief scene establishing Duncan knew Kronos from the 19th century as a mass murderer, which is its only point (and an important one because that means Duncan knows Kronos is bad news independently from what Cassandra and Methos say, and the viewer knows Kronos hasn't changed his ways even before they get to Bordeaux and the virus), you could have used the spare minutes to draw out the fight between Cassandra and Kronos and make it clear that she is good, and Kronos is simply better. No shame in that. This aside? Epic two parter is still epic. The bonus footage on the dvd are all the different takes of the famous "Jimmy scene" between Methos and Duncan which I found I could still recite along, even a decade later ("The answer is yes; oh yes"), and parts from the infamous cut scene from Revelations 6:8 which Peter Wingfield in an interview hoped in vain has been burned, showing Methos and Kronos in hilarious bad wigs in Greek times when the Horsemen broke up and Methos trapped Kronos in a cave. Sadly, new HL watchers probably will be spoiled for the big "Methos used to be a mass murderer" revelation, the internet being what it is, but back ye olde days, it was on scale with "Luke, I am your father" as far as emotional impacts on me went. (I.e. a shock, but one I could utterly believe, which made emotional sense and which made the overall story so much better.) Now, I admire that the show (as opposed to many a fan) really didn't pull any punches with this, because there is no Misunderstood!Methos in the flashbacks. (Recite with me: "I didn't kill fifty. I didn't kill a hundred. I killed thousands. I killed tens of thousands. And I was good at it. (...) And it wasn't for vengeance. It wasn't for greed. I killed because I liked it.") Here's where Cassandra as a character is really important as a part of this story. If we had simply seen Methos kill Bronze Age tribesmen in flashback, the emotional impact would have been quite different than thea dded personal viciousness towards Cassandra. "I'll kill you as often as it takes to tame you" and the hand wandering up her tigh are effective tv short hand for indicating the mixture of repeated deaths and rape in store for Cassandra (who, not knowing about her immortal nature yet, had to believe she literally lived and died because Methos wanted it so) until she is "tamed", i.e. brainwashed. I was a bit apprehensive about part II when Methos' claim that Cassandra was in love with him would come up, but actually the

C: I never loved you.
M: You thought you did. Stockholm Syndrome. Captives come to rely on their captors for food, for approval, for everything

makes it clear how it worked, and that this was not the HL equivalent of a bodice ripper glorification of rape. Anyway, I remember that Duncan not just dismissing Cassandra's accusation the way Joe does as clearly the lies of a madwoman caused a lot of ire at Duncan in fandom back then. (A man actually not calling a woman accusing another man of having raped and brutalized her a liar? How dare he!) Seen today, and in context with the overall show, it underlines Joe's double standard for immortals-I'm-friends-with instead, because in s3 you have the episode with Kage/Kirin, former brutal warlord, now trying to convince Duncan he has changed; there, Joe ridicules the notion someone like Kage could ever change and wants Duncan to kill him (Duncan doesn't). Whereas with Methos he first thinks Cassandra must lie and then tries to rationalize it by "times were different, we all did stuff we're not proud of". Don't get me wrong, I think it's psychologically sound because Methos is his friend, Cassandra is a stranger, but it still isn't, as many a fan claimed at the time, about Joe being more tolerant or a better judge of ambiguities than Duncan, but Joe responding differently to ex warlords depending on whether they are strangers themselves or good friends.

In the interviews for the episode, Peter Wingfield says in his opinion Methos was improvising the whole time, didn't have a master plan, and if it had looked as if Duncan was loosing would have gone along with Kronos, whereas Adrian Paul (who also directed Revelations 6:8) thought Methos was working against Kronos the entire time, or rather, that Duncan at the end needed to believe that. I like that the script never spells it out definitely. Speaking of the actors, I'm reminded again that Valentine Pelka is one of the actors who is extremely uncomfortable with slash and against homoerotic interpretations, which is his right, but as with William Russell being baffled at Ian/Barbara shipping in Doctor Who, I'm tempted to ask "But what did you think you were playing?" Because the Methos/Kronos relationship really makes no sense to me otherwise. Re: homoeroticism, the Double Quickening is still as explicit as this show ever got. No wonder the post-episode PWPs exploded back then.

In conclusion: when this show was epic, it was epic. Princes of the universe, indeed.