And now some happy: Highlander!

[sholio]

1x19 - Eye of the Beholder: THIS EPISODE. *flails* Buttons! Pushed!

This episode made me realize that they (the show's writers, I mean) rarely take advantage of Richie's special skill set -- he's got all these teen-hoodlum survival skills, but tends to get shoehorned into the role of comic relief, victim or "Duncan's young ward". It was really nice to see him get an episode where he gets to be brave, canny and resourceful. (In a well-meaningly faily sort of way. XD) And, well, see above re: button-pushing ... Duncan's protectiveness and just the character interactions in general. Richie play-acting Duncan with the sword: "I am Duncan MacLeod of Clan MacLeod!" HAHAHAHAHA. *squishes them*

"Not for things." OH DUNCAN. *pets* And the affectionate little half-hug at the end! Squeak!


1x20 - Avenging Angel: Despite a certain amount of WTF at the ham-handed "TV crazy", I like how this show explores different aspects of the world they've set up. Over the first season we've seen a lot of different people reacting differently to their immortality, well beyond just the show's basic swordfighting THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE! thing. Actually, I think one of the things I like about this show is that it uses a lot of vampire tropes and cliches, but turns them on their head and explores the things I always wished vampire shows/books/movies would explore with regards to immortality and power and its variable effects on ordinary human beings and their psyches.

I do kind of wonder what happens to an Immortal who takes really severe physical damage. Maybe the show gets to this in more detail later on, but it's something I've been sort of vaguely wondering about. They seem to be able to heal almost anything, but what if they get, say, half their head blown off with a shotgun, but don't actually get decapitated? Or lose some limbs, or get badly mangled in an accident? With all the shiny blades around, if they can't regrow things, you'd think there would be a lot of nine-fingered Immortals running around. (I'm just rambling here. Don't mind me.)


Also, a belated side comment on "Saving Grace": I really love Tessa's lack of jealousy here. ♥ I mean, she wouldn't be human if the presence of Duncan's immortal exes didn't bother her a little bit, but she's perfectly capable of being a grownup about it, and has enough trust in Duncan to allow him to be a good friend to Grace. I'm glad the show didn't make her catty about it. *loves*

Comments

[juniperphoenix]

Hello! I just subscribed to your journal. I've been a fan of your SGA fic for a while, and it's super fun to watch people discover Highlander for the first time. :D

[sholio]

Hello! :D I have a feeling that there will be LOTS MORE Highlander posts forthcoming as I work my way through the series. I'm really loving it so far!

[scrollgirl]

That's a really interesting point re the vampire tropes and how HL turns them on their head. I began watching HL not long after I got into Buffy, so I did a lot of compare/contrast between the two. HL-style immortality lets you walk in the sunlight; "drinking blood" is limited to other Immortals (the Quickening), not defenceless mortals; there are no generations of hot chicks with superpowers hunting you! OTOH, Immortals mingle with humanity a lot more than vamps do, and while Duncan has a loose network of friends/allies, it's not like the Buffyverse demon subculture where they're self-sustaining. Duncan has to worry about fake IDs, being recognised, etc. (I'm not familiar enough with other vampire shows/books like Twilight or Vampire Diaries to know whether those vamps also worry about ID.)

"Duncan's young ward"

Oh man, now I want to compare Duncan and Richie to Batman and Robin. But which Robin? Richie's got Jason's hoodlum background, but he's got Dick's cheerful, friendly nature.

I actually haven't seen "Saving Grace" yet! (Though I'm spoiled for it.) I should watch it now.

[sholio]

Yeah, though it's not so much specific vampire things that I'm thinking of as just vampires in general. One of the reasons why I don't really go for vampire fiction as a genre** is that people who write it don't seem to wonder about the things that I wonder about. Like, say, where all the iconoclast vampires are: the ones who don't care about nice clothes and hedonism, but rather spend 200 years in a garret (or possibly a cellar) learning to speak 50 languages or translating ancient Greek manuscripts or collecting antique china. Because, frankly, if you have eternity, why do 99% of vampires choose to do the exact same thing with it? And why do vampires always seem to bite gorgeous aristicrats? Don't any of them feed on -- and bring over -- lumberjacks or Amish farmers? I would watch the hell out of a show about an Amish vampire. :D

**I really need to stop saying I "don't really watch vampire stuff" because, well, it's not really true anymore, even aside from Buffy -- I'd say half of what I'm fanning on right now has vampires in it! And several of them are my favorite characters! So I suppose I ought to say that typical vampires don't do much for me.

I guess the thing about most vampire stuff is that it's about a certain fantasy -- these gorgeous, haughty creatures of the night -- which obviously appeals to its target audience, and there is nothing wrong with that! I have plenty of my own beloved tropes that I prefer to be played straight rather than subverted. But when it comes to vampires, I'm more inclined to look at it and go, "But what else can you do with immortality? What other stories can you tell besides 'nobleman goes on a killing spree'? What about the vampires who made bad investments and ended up living in poverty? What about the nerdy vampires?"

And Highlander is tailor-made for those sorts of ponderings, because they actually take the idea and run with it -- ordinary people who turn out to have this immortality thrust upon them, who then choose to do (or are forced to do) different things with their endless lives.


Oh man, now I want to compare Duncan and Richie to Batman and Robin.

*giggles* That's exactly what I was thinking, actually. And I was thinking of Dick, probably because of the personality or maybe just because that's the Robin I'm more familiar with.

[scrollgirl]

A few months back there was an article that criticised TV geniuses (Spencer Reid on Criminal Minds) for lack of realism wrt how knowledge is gained over time. And I argued that what HL does, better than any other show I can think of, is the realistic portrayal of how it takes time--years, even--to learn and master a wide range of skills. Like, I can easily believe it took Duncan ages before he figured out how to work the stock market. And I can easily believe he's lost a fortune or two on bad investments. The upside of Immortality is you've always got time to rebuild. You can reinvent yourself, over and over.

Honestly, I don't get the vampire thing. I love the Buffyverse, and I can even say I loved the Fanged Four, the mystique behind these (as you say) gorgeous, haughty creatures of the night. But it was mostly Joss that made the supernatural stuff tolerable. I tried watching True Blood and The Vampire Diaries and gave up very quickly.

[sholio]

Oh wow, yes, I agree so much about realistic acquisition of skills -- despite my fondness for super-competent characters, one of the things that is likely to kick me out of a story or at least make it harder for me to engage with it is a failure to demonstrate the story logic behind a character's competence. I hadn't thought about it specifically in context of Highlander, but now that I think about it, I think the reason why I hadn't thought about it is because it's just there, showing through the interstices in the story. And that's super neat! :D Not only has Duncan had plenty of time to pick up his badass fighting skills -- and we even see him training occasionally throughout the episodes -- but he also strikes me as completely consistent in his characterization as a person who is interested in learning new skills and new attitudes as he moves through the centures. He is just the kind of person who would do that; Duncan would know how to use computers (I imagine teaching your average Immortal -- or vampire -- to use a computer would be like teaching the most technologically illiterate 90-year-old person you've ever met PLUS 500 YEARS OF ADDITIONAL TECHNOLOGICAL ILLITERACY OH MY GOD). (For that matter, where are all the grumpy-old-man vampires, anyway?) But Duncan reads quite realistically as a person who would pick up computers and cell phones and such.

... Actually, I suspect that one of the things that forever changed my ability to not nitpick vampires and other immortals was reading Gaiman's "Sandman" in college. Of all his little side stories, the one that probably stuck with me most of all was the story of the guy who's been alive since the last Ice Age and keeps meeting the protagonist in a series of inns and bars -- so you get a series of snapshots of him at different points in his very long life: he's been rich and he's lost his shirt, he got involved with the slave trade and then a century or two later came to regret it, stuff like that.

And Highlander is written much more in that mold than in line with most of the other portrayals of immortal characters that come to mind -- vampires being the most obvious example.

On the topic of vampires, the vampire stuff that I like is usually subversions or rather different takes on it. I like Tesla in Sanctuary (... can't help myself; I think it's a combination of Jonathon Young + the fact that smart & sarcastic has been a bulletproof kink of mine ever since I fell for Spock at the age of 8). I really like Jim Butcher's vampires. I love "Forever Knight" (old-skool vampire show, about the same vintage as Highlander) despite its sky-high levels of cheese, but it was always the vampire protagonist and his interactions with his human friends that I liked, not the vampire side of the show. And despite my love of fantasy and sci-fi, typical vampire fare does nothing for me. It's just a kink I don't have, I guess.

[scrollgirl]

Competent characters are SUCH a kink of mine. It's why I adore Criminal Minds so much, even though the character backstories occasionally test my suspension of disbelief. (If you've never seen, I highly recommend. Unless you hate dead bodies/serial killers.) But I've always loved HL for these smart, cunning Immortals who adapt to different cultures, different time periods. Women as property to women as equals. Demon possession to mental illnesses. Slavery/servitude as fact of life to emancipation and the rise of the middle class.

I'm trying(!) to write a Criminal Minds/HL crossover in which Duncan is a recent college grad. With everything going digital/online, he realises he needs to know how to hack. And so he goes out to learn, and I think it's entirely in-character. I mean, Duncan is such a physical person, always moving, always fighting, always interacting with people--it's kind of hard to imagine him coding non-stop for hours or days. But once he got into it, I could see him appreciating the power and beauty of code, the aesthetics, as well as its usefulness. For Duncan, this embracing of new ideas and new skills isn't just a matter of survival: it's what makes forever worth living. It's embracing life, people, change, constantly saying, "Oh brave new world." It's this complicated twining of surviving to live, and living to survive.

he's been rich and he's lost his shirt, he got involved with the slave trade and then a century or two later came to regret it, stuff like that.

Ooh, I really like that. Yeah, I have difficulty enjoying vampire/immortal characters who don't have this kind of malleability, this capacity for change and growth. With the Buffyverse vamps, at least there's acknowledgment that the vamps are out of touch. They have their own subculture and are so removed from humanity that they don't bother/need to change with the times. ("First of all, what's with the outfit? Live in the now, okay? You look like DeBarge!") The Buffyverse vamps are dead in more than one way.

I still haven't watched Sanctuary, despite recs from the flist. (But I did watch the first ep of Murdoch Mysteries, which also has Tesla guest-starring. Very slashy with Murdoch, but he wasn't a vampire.) I've only seen the TV version of Dresden Files and only know FK by reputation/fannish osmosis. (Yes, it's filmed and set in my city, but oh God, the cheese!)

[dossier]

I am way ahead of you! I work from home, and have lots of time to have the episodes running as I work.

I think the remarkable thing about Richie is how easily he slides into Tessa & Duncan's life. There's obvious true affection between Tessa and Richie, and I found it almost shocking how much they showed that affection physically, with lots of platonic hugs and casual touching. It's not something I see very much of in a lot of genre tv (Buffy is the other exception, I think) in the last decade.

I think Duncan's facility with modern life (OMG, the luggable laptops! with command promts!) is meant to show how well he's integrated, as opposed to other immortals who tend to remain static. Also, that integration is an adjunct to the effect where he takes in the knowledge via the quickenings,he's always gaining knowledge as a way of life. Or vice versa, you know. I think there's a correlation there, that the successfully integrated immortals also seem to have that same attitude, and are not so much into the hunting, but tend to be the defenders in a challenge.

[sholio]

Heh, in some ways I have the opposite problem, because I also work from home and I have to fight the temptation to watch episodes while I do it; I can't get anything else done! Not that it's stopping me, really. :D (The week without Internet stopped me a whole lot more, darn it.)

The open affection between the characters - Duncan and Tessa, Duncan and Richie, and like you said, Richie and Tessa - is, I think, the thing that's really sold me on this show and made it nest deep in my fannish hindbrain. If you want to grab me by the heartstrings, give me characters who love each other. And, yeah, you're right that Richie and Tessa's relationship is kind of a rare one. It's 100% platonic and yet it's become so openly loving and close over the past season.

I think Duncan's facility with modern life (OMG, the luggable laptops! with command promts!) is meant to show how well he's integrated, as opposed to other immortals who tend to remain static. Also, that integration is an adjunct to the effect where he takes in the knowledge via the quickenings,he's always gaining knowledge as a way of life.

Oh, that's a good point about the quickenings - I keep forgetting that he takes in knowledge that way (and undoubtedly an increasingly broad range of knowledge as he's moved into the present day). But I think one of the things I love most about Duncan is that mental flexibility - that he genuinely likes people, and cares about them, and learns from them. He's part of the world, not apart from it. (And he's such a sweetheart. Awww, Duncan.)

hahaha, the laptops, yes! But I do love that they actually HAVE them. I was just reading a suspense novel published in ... 1997, I think? And no one has computers, and no one has cell phones; yeah, they wouldn't be as ubiquitous as in the present day, but it's like the author is still stuck in the 1980s. There's way more tech in Highlander, years earlier!

I think there's a correlation there, that the successfully integrated immortals also seem to have that same attitude, and are not so much into the hunting, but tend to be the defenders in a challenge.

I think you're right, and that's an excellent point! After all, if you spend all your waking hours preparing to fight, and trying to hunt other people down ... what kind of life is that? The more psychologically well-adjusted immortals are just getting on with their lives, as people do -- they're not really interested in playing the beheading game.