Highlander The TV Series

[Paul Clement]

I've recently got the first three seasons on dvd, and I've started to watch them so I thought I'd post y opinions on each story:

The Gathering

To kick the series off, and to help introduce the new immortal Highlander, Duncan Macleod, this first episode also has Christopher Lambert guest starring as the film version hero Connor Macleod. This helps immensely, with most viewers probably having seen at least the first film prior to the series being made. It gives the watching public someone to identify with while the new characters start to grow on them.

Duncan is joined by two regular characters at the start of the series, long-term girlfriend Tessa and the streetwise teen Richie Ryan. At this stage, Richie comes across as a very annoying cliche of a character, all attitude and cheekiness. Tessa, on the other hand, helps ground the immortal Duncan into a reality that the viewer is far more able to relate to. She also serves as a point of weakness to his character by being someone he needs to protect, and the opening episode makes use of this by having her threatened on more than one occasion by the guest villian/evil immortal Slan Quince.

Slan comes straight out of the Kurgan school of villainy, being little more than a weaker clone of the enemy of the original film. You would assume that this would be a bit of a problem, but as the purpose of this opening episode is to introduce the series and the characters who feature in it, the bog standard villain role means that there isn't a great deal of background detail for new viewers to have to take in. Slan is a by-product of the story, not the raison d'etre.

The focus remains almost all the way through on who Duncan is, and what he has done in the past, and this again is where having Connor in the story helps. The two characters have conversations that link to their joint past, ably emphasised by some very nice scenes from the past. We learn that Duncan has been away from 'The Game', (the taking of other immortal heads that is a big part of an immortals life) for quite some time and a few of the old rules are reiterated for the viewer.

The story finale is fairly predicatable with Connor initially going after Slan Quince but with Duncan finally arriving to finish the evil immortal off. The story ends with the two men going their separate ways and Duncan agreeing to keep an eye on Richie who has learnt their secret during the course of the episode.

Overall, this is a good, if unspectacular tale that achieves a lot of what an opening episode sets out to do, but fails to deliver other things as many other initial storylines do.

7/10

[Paul Clement]

Family Tree

For a series that is centred around the battle amongst the immortals to be the last remaining, it is perhaps a touch surprising that the first story to not feature a guest immortal character is the second one in. Obviously, at some stage it was bound to happen, but the fact they chose such an early episode seems to suggest that the production team wanted to place more of an emphasis on character development than on action.
Family Tree's purpose is to give some backstory to the character of Richie Ryan, and there seems to have been some time passed between the events of the Gathering and this story, as Richie now lives with Duncan and Tessa. It's revealed that Richie grew up in an orphanage, and the story revolves around his search for his family.
Richie finally finds a man who claims to be his father, but Duncan doesn't believe the man, and starts investigating exactly who he is. It turns out that Duncan's right about the man, who is a petty conman in trouble. Having found out that Richie lives with a couple of antique dealers, he assumes he can con Richie into providing the money to get him out of a hole with some people he owes money to.
Eventually the truth comes out, after Richie's supposed father steals a priceless antique and then decides to flee with it. He's about to leave, when he realises Richie has been captured by the people he owes money to. Rather than leave Richie to it, some paternal feeling in him makes him go to the people and offer them the antique on the basis they release Richie. The ending is somewhat unexpected considering that we know by this stage that the man isn't really Richie's father, and the actions are opposite to everything we know about him.
The stories biggest success is that it manages to make Richie seem a bit more likeable, although there are still moments when you want to reach through the screen and wring his scrawny neck.
All in all, I'd say it was a brave move to have this immortal-free story so early on, and the story, although intriguing in places was too bland to get by without one.

6/10

[Jeff]

I've only got the first season on DVD so far, and have been working my way through it very sllllllooooowwwwlllllyyyyy over the last few... years. Which means I watch an episode or two and then go months without getting back to it. I keep getting distracted by DW and Red Dwarf offerings, and now I have all the Bond films and The Transformers complete G1 series to distract me further.

Keep going though, and I may regain enough interest to watch along for awhile when you catch up, though I'm not much of a reviewer.

[MacNimon]

I watched (and enjoyed) the first season of this when it was shown on Sky about 15 years or so ago, but I lost track of it in later series. I've got to say that at the time, I thought Adrian Paul's acting was pretty wooden. I haven't seen the series for many years, so I don't know what I'd think of it nowadays. I'll follow your comments with interest, Paul.

[Jeff]

I doubt your opinion of his acting would have changed, but IMO the series itself got much, much, better from season 2 thru season 5 - not that I didn't like the first season, mind you, it was just better. And then the last season (6) in particular was supposed to be terrible with Duncan barely in it at all (didn't watch the last season myself).

[Paul Clement]

I've got to say that at the time, I thought Adrian Paul's acting was pretty wooden.

I found his acting ok, though soime of the dialogue lacks that something special. I'd say the series got better as it progressed from my last viewing, but I'll be watching them in order this time so things may differ. The next couple of episodes should go up soon, I watched Road Not Taken yesterday, and Innocent Man today.

[Paul Clement]

Road Not Taken

When a friend of Richie's dies after robbing a diamond store, the Police attribute his beserk nature and ferocious strength during the robbery, as well as his sudden death to taking drugs. Richie won't believe this as his friend never used drugs despite growing up in an area where drugs were freely available.
Duncan doesn't think it's as straightforward either, as marks on the body remind him of something he'd seen many years before.

And so we get two little story strands that take us to the episodes conclusion. In one part, we see Richie trying to trace his friends activities and find out what's happened. We gain a little bit more basis to Richie's character along the way, and are introduced to another of his friends. What doesn't work as well is the way Richie no longer seems able to fit in back at his old neighbourhood. Now, as I mentioned at the start of Family Tree, some time seems to have passed since the end of The Gathering, Richie is now living with Duncan and Tessa. What I find hard to accept is that enough time has passed that he would be out of sync with his old life so quickly.
Richie learns that his friend had started working for a Chinese gangster, Chu Lin, who was behind the diamond job, and sets off to find him.

Meanwhile, Duncan is searching the city for another chinaman. Helped along by a couple of flashback scenes, the story unfolds of an immortal, Kiem Sun who was trying to perfect a drug that would make men more obedient and able to endure more physical pain than normal so that they could win battles they wouldn't normally be able to. Duncan warns Kiem Sun that despite the other immortals best intentions, what he was doing to these people was wrong. Now, call me pedantic, but I couldn't see how what he was doing could be seen as anything other than wrong, but it appears that Duncan hadn't realised this until he saw an exhibition of martial prowess of two men under the use of the drug. When the men die, they have the same marks on the neck as Richie's friend would have, over three hundred years later.
When Duncan finally tracks Kiem Sun down, he is informed that the Chu Lin was a former mortal pupil of the his, who stole the drug from him for his own purposes. Kiem Sun had spent so long hiding on holy ground, he was too afraid to leave his sanctuary to go after the man and drug. Duncan offers the Kiem Sun his protection and they ehad off to find Chu Lin.

By now, Richie has tracked down Chu Lin himself, and is in the process of getting a battering when Duncan and Kiem Sun tun up. Duncan defeats Chu Lin in a swordfight, but stops short of killing him. Kiem Sun then kills Chu Lin himself and with that act, ends his friendship with Duncan, who announces that Kiem Sun has now, 'crossed the line'.

All told, the story isn't the best on offer. The plot is a little bit woolly with a couple of problems such as the lack of anything remotely beneficial to man in Kiem Sun's experiments from the outset, and Richie's inabaility to cope with the streets he grew up in after a short absence away. I do like the fact that the story ends with the breaking of the friendship the two immortals once had, without the need for one to die. Ultimately though, this has been the worst story of the season so far.

5/10