Moar Highlander (now up to 3x12, "They Also Serve")

[sholio]

Still mainlining the series at an alarming rate, but I figured that 3x12 was a good point to stop and post again, due to the EPIC SQUEE. (Actually I watched it first thing this morning, but it's taken me this long to finish writing this post.)

♥ ♥ ♥ DAWSON ♥ ♥ ♥

This season (and the end of last season) has been wonderful. Dawson and Duncan! Dawson and Duncan and Richie, oh my heart. Dawson and Amanda - the squee-o-meter is off the charts! Duncan still owns my heart, the big softie, but Dawson is giving him a serious run for his money. (There's nobody I don't like, though. I would like to know where the heck Charlie got off to; is there some kind of rule that they can only have so many characters at once or something?)

And canon has been very obligingly answering a lot of my questions about Immortals. I'd wondered if they can recognize specific other Immortals from the "tingle" they get, or if it's just a general sense of "someone's there", and that's been pretty definitively answered, as well as the question of whether they can recognize nascent Immortals before their immortality kicks in (which makes me want to go back and re-watch Duncan's first meeting with Richie all over again). And the episode with the kid Immortal! That was something I'd wondered about, too -- not to mention "adult in a child's body" is a scifi/fantasy idea that I find completely fascinating ... and have explored in some of my own (original) fiction, but I really loved seeing it done here, doubly so because the show was willing to actually go there and have him be evil.

But oh, oh, the characters. *flails* Part of my frustration with last season, I think, was that my big source of love for this show (er, besides the obvious: there can never been too many scenes of hawt guys swordfighting!) is watching the characters interact with each other, and Duncan was so isolated last season. This season, as well as last season's finale, has been giving me plenty of neat character bits, and those are ALWAYS going to be my favorite thing!

It does crack me up that Joe's bar seems to be the only place to eat or get a drink in town. It cracks me up still further that it's basically a cover for Watcher activities. Did I mention that I really adored 3x12 a LOT?

All the character relationships on the show are really neat, though. I love Duncan's mentorship with Richie, and his wary friendship with Dawson. The fact that Richie is now going to Dawson for advice will never stop making me giggle and squee. I even get a major kick out of Duncan and Amanda, though bickering lovers are normally a bulletproof squick of mine. But I think it doesn't strike me that way because it's not really a will-they-or-won't-they kind of bickering; they have a pretty well-established off-and-on "friends with benefits" thing, and they hit my bickering-friends squee buttons a great deal more than my bickering-courtship squick. I also like how their relationship has grown and developed over the last couple of seasons. Amanda is really a good person, deep down -- she was sympathetic to Joe losing Lauren, and she really does care about Duncan. (And she's trying to go straight! Badly!)

Man, the police in their universe suck, though. You'd think that they'd occasionally look into all of these decapitated bodies that are turning up all over the city. To the non-clued-in members of the public, it must look like there's some kind of serial killer running around. But it's not just the masses of headless dead people ... nearly every episode has some kind of crime that the police completely ignore. (Maybe the Watchers occasionally use their connections to help protect the anonymity of the Immortals? Maybe Duncan just spends most of his time hiding bodies.)

I am increasingly starting to wonder if all of Duncan's flashbacks can actually be pieced together into anything resembling a coherent chronology. He gets around a lot. *tries not to think too hard about it* But they do try, with flashbacks referencing other flashbacks, and at least some sense of internal consistency to where he is and what he's doing in any given time period. And somewhat surprisingly for a show of this sort, they've generally avoided having him meet famous people or get involved in pivotal historical events, aside from those that would be sort of inescapable for someone who was in that country at that time. I like!

I'm also becoming more and more impressed with young!Duncan versus modern!Duncan, because there is really a difference between them. Young!Duncan is so much more innocent and less jaded. All those generations of loss and betrayal have taken their toll. Also, his accent -- I'm not sure if he's supposed to have lost it over time or if he taught himself not to speak that way as an intentional choice somewhere along the way, but there's this point somewhere in the middle 1800s when he seems to lose it, and the show is pretty consistent about that.

Another thing I really love is the way the various Immortals' swords suit their personality and fighting style. It's something I've been noticing since the first season, and it's a neat little value-added thing each time he meets a new Immortal: what kind of sword do they have?

In conclusion: I LOVE THIS SHOW A LOT. ♥

Comments

[scrollgirl]

The more you talk about HL, the more I appreciate how well constructed the mythology is, exploring the different facets and limits of immortality, the role of the Watchers, and of course Duncan's flashbacks. Also, yes, there are a couple of (older) websites dedicated to tracking every last HL flashback. I can't tell you whether or not they constitute a coherent chronology--as you say, he gets around a lot--but I have to admire the dedication and hard work of these old skool fans!

Kenny was pretty evil, wasn't he! I find de-aged characters kind of cute, if it's a temporary change, but someone like clone!Jack from SG-1 would be kind of depressing unless he managed to completely disassociate himself from those prior 50+ years of life! And to be 10-years-old forever? I'd go insane.

And since you've now seen "They Also Serve", I can use this icon!

[sholio]

Yeah, there really is a surprising amount of both plot and continuity in this show. I was expecting something much more episodic and, well, incoherent; I've been very pleased.

ha, I'm not surprised that there are websites that track Duncan's flashbacks - and actually, fandom being fandom, I'd be a whole lot more surprised if there weren't any! After I've seen more of the show and am less rabidly spoiler-avoidant, I'd like to look up a Duncan chronology, because I'm really curious if it seems to fit together better or worse when you're looking at a list of flashback events rather than seeing them scattered throughout various episodes and across 400 years.

And that's a pretty icon! :) What does the text say?

[sholio]

I find de-aged characters kind of cute, if it's a temporary change, but someone like clone!Jack from SG-1 would be kind of depressing unless he managed to completely disassociate himself from those prior 50+ years of life! And to be 10-years-old forever? I'd go insane.

I think that's precisely why the whole idea appeals to me -- appeals in a narrative way, I mean; obviously it's not something that I would ever want to happen to me or anyone else! It'd be a horrible fate, but given certain kinds of technology or certain fantasy setups, it's narratively logical that there would be a few people who did get stuck with that fate, and the appalling creepiness is interesting to explore. I had a couple of characters like that in a webcomic that I did a few years ago; there's one character, actually, who I thought of instantly when Kenny's homicidal tendencies came to light (and, though not immortal, he's even rather hard to kill). It was kind of fun to see that I wasn't the only person who was fascinated by the idea of an adult killer in a 10-year-old body.

(No particular significance to the icon, except it's the only one I currently have from that comic ...)

[scrollgirl]

I kind of wonder if the HL writers, because they knew they'd have to deal with flashbacks all over the place, really worked hard to keep a chronology or character bible. Plenty of other really well-written shows can't keep track of whether the main character's parents are alive or dead, let alone 400 years of history!

The text says "friend". Or at least I hope it does! Alas, I never learned to read or write. Or speak, really. Here's another Mei-Ling icon. Because I thought it was pathetic I didn't have more Asian girls in my icon slots. :)

[scrollgirl]

Ooh, you wrote a webcomic? Very cool. I knew you did art, but I didn't know you worked on such a complicated project. I'm looking forward to reading it!

Yeah, I love clone!Jack for the potential comedy as well as the angst factor, but what I find most interesting is the dissonance of this innocent-looking teenager actually being a trained soldier and killer, set loose in high school.

[sholio]

I hope you like it if you do read it! The art is pretty rough in the beginning, but it improves as it goes on. There are things I'd do differently now, and things that make me eyeroll at myself (just for starters, my idea of what constitutes a racially and sexually diverse future in 1995 -- when I wrote the original novella that became the comic -- was a bit different than it is now) but I'm still kind of proud of it, and I'm working (...slowly) on a sequel.

I was actually a writer of original stuff before I ever tried fanfic. I mean, not published or anything, but it was what I did in my spare time. Fanfic was something I tried on a lark in about 2000 or so; I'd been reading a lot of it, and I wondered if it was possible to get my brain to do that. I still remember how hard it was to make myself insert myself into the heads of other peoples' characters in that way! It, er, was an experiment that worked rather better than I'd hoped. *g* And I've actually learned a ton from writing fanfic, not just from the thought experiment of writing characters different from the ones I tend to come up with on my own, but also because of the sheer creativity in fandom. Even after ten years I'm still in awe of it, actually, the challenges and impromptu commentfic and AUs and crossovers and "anything goes" pairings, not to mention the freedom of not worrying about salability or word count or genre -- the things that published fictions lives and dies by.

[dossier]

Yes, there is/was a Watcher Database that had reasonably coherent canon for the where and when of a lot of the immortals--whether that is still up or in a new incarnation is something that I had also wondered about. I do recall though, that Duncan's backstory is a little dodgy, some episodes ended up having him in 2 places at the same time, but that is rumor and years old hearsay.

Uhm, the police are horrible. On both sides of the pond! Even in 95, they should be cognizant of finger prints, random witnesses, freak lightning storms, etc. I think I read something in a story that the Watchers were like the little behind the scenes cleaners, picking up bodies, heads, swords, etc. I have no idea if that is true or not.

Kenny! I noticed that they also do have some older Immortals, too, and some that are not all fit and sleek and lithe. The number of child immortals would be very small I think, since they would be very easy to take down. Though, the cute and helpless act gets Kenny through the years!

[mackiedockie]

Thank you for allowing us to look over your shoulder as you discover the series--it brings back the warm fuzzies from when I first cottoned to the show.

When you are ready, down the line, there is a website put together by Parda that includes a comprehensive timeline that tracks the series flashbacks in a very organized and logical way.

[sholio]

Thank you! :) I'm having a wonderful time, and even though I want to make the experience last, I also can't wait to be done and ask for recs to all the wonderful fic and vids and fannish resources that I KNOW are out there! But, yeah, not to that point yet. :D

[sholio]

Oops, never answered this comment? Um, yeah. What you said. *g*

I love how the Immortals in this universe represent such a wide range of people -- different ages, body types, lifestyles, personalities. They're a cross-section of humanity rather than being all, say, ultra-fit 25-year-olds. (Admittedly, the fit 25-year-olds do seem to do better at "The Game" for obvious reasons ...)