The Watcher Chronicle

Highlander was a 1986 cult movie that spawned two film sequels, six seasons of television, and two more films that served as direct sequels to the television series. Actually, the series also had one season of a spinoff series about the Amanda character, and there was at least one animated film somewhere in the mix. All in all, that’s six movies and seven seasons of television that, in all fairness, should never have existed in the first place (I'll come back to that in a minute).

Back in the 1990s, I got into Highlander. I caught glimpses of the series in syndication when I was at my late uncle’s house a few times, and thought it looked interesting. Mainly, I was catching the flashbacks and quickening sequences out of context, and was under the impression that a lightning storm heralded a time travel sequence. This turned out to be very, very, very incorrect. But it piqued my curiosity: swordplay, time travel, and lightning effects were some of my favorite elements of action movies.

Later, I learned that the local CBS network was getting episodes of Highlander: The Series in syndication. I was excited. I didn’t need cable to watch a show that really interested me. So it began, I jumped in at the fourth season, but the episodes aired at 12:30 AM on a Sunday, which was insultingly inconvenient. However, that only lent more mystique to the show, as if even the network didn’t want to admit they were airing it. So every Saturday night, I’d try to stay up long enough to watch it, and I’d pop a tape into the VCR for posterity.

In the middle of the fourth season two-part cliffhanger finale, they lost syndication (or decided nobody was watching it and pulled the show). I was able to convince someone to record a few episodes of the fifth season for me, but my experience ended there.

I must have been about fifteen at the time. As they say, “There’s no accounting for taste.”

It was around this time that they started releasing episodes on VHS. Just before the advent of DVDs, they would release seasons of television with two episodes per tape. You can imagine how much space an entire season’s set would occupy on the shelves at Suncoast. Yeah. Never mind the ripoff. But I started buying the first season, piecemeal. I didn’t get very far before giving up, because I was just a kid and this was turning into a very expensive hobby, and it turned out that even to a kid the first season was unbearably cheesy.

So, I knew the entire fourth season, bits of the fifth, and bits of the first. It turns out that season three is a “fan favorite,” but depending on whom you ask, seasons three through five are the best.

Much, much later, the series was released on DVD. Much more economical, both in budget and in shelf space.

After finishing grad school and moving to Kansas City with a lot of time on my hands, I started watching all six seasons. I was glad to finally have them all on DVD, glad to finally be able to know the full context. Even at the time, however, I wondered if it was worth owning all these DVDs if I’d almost never watch them. I concluded that I might as well keep them for the archives, since I’d probably want to bust out an episode at unexpected times.

Recently, with the current 80s franchise remake craze in full swing, the inevitable happened: they announced plans for a Highlander reboot. Of all people, they announced Justin Lin as director. Any hope of making it a good movie was slain with a single stroke of a sword.

As a writer, you should know whether your “cool idea” has any serviceable direction to go. If its main redeeming feature is its novelty, you might want to think things through a bit more thoroughly. As I’ve said with experimental music, just because it’s an interesting idea doesn’t mean it will have a good execution. Considering the “rules” of the franchise, Highlander was doomed from the start. And getting Justin Lin to direct the remake only destroyed my hope of it being at least stylistically redeemable. Now, it’s safe to assume that neither the style nor the substance will be any good.

Yet, with this new reboot on its way, I was inspired to watch the series again. And so I did. Just now, I finished. Again I wonder if it’s worth owning the whole series—especially now that Netflix has changed the game for spontaneously wanting to watch an episode of an old TV show—and again I decide I might as well keep them “for the archives.”

Besides, Netflix doesn’t work on my laptop.

So I recently finished watching Highlander: The Series again, and the best way I can describe my experience is to you is to compare it to flipping through your high school yearbook. You are at some times amused, at some times fascinated, and at all times surprised at how things were and how they’ve changed since. You can’t help but laugh hysterically with embarrassment (sort of the I-can’t-believe-that-was-my-hair-back-then reaction) as you revisit this period.

Yes, there are many things about Highlander that don’t hold up well at all. The dialogue, the music, the choreography, the special effects. Oh my, it is a blast from the past. This paragraph alone could be an epic blog post in itself, but I have other points to make.

As I opened this post with, Highlander as a franchise should never have existed in the first place. My meaning is two-fold: one, I was being tongue-in-cheek about the overall bad writing; two, because the original Highlander film was by far the most self-contained, no-possible-room-for-a-sequel-EVER movie I have ever seen. Connor gets the “Prize” and the story’s over. Everyone else is dead and the final battle of good versus evil is concluded, and the world is in good hands. The only movie I can think of offhand that leaves as much room for a sequel would be Knowing. Yeah, basically. “THE END.”

So how can this be?

The peer-reviewed Wikipedia fanboy goon squad does a pretty good job of making sense of all the minutiae, including the obvious no-room-for-a-sequel aspect, but the use of the word “multiverse” to explain it comes off as a bit of a cop-out. If it’s really a multiverse, then it’s badly explained. You just assume that the series is “based on” the films, despite the frequent references, crossovers, and Easter eggs to the films. Again, Wikipedia does a satisfactory job of analyzing this, so I am not going to bother.

Instead, I am going to assume you know the basics of the franchise, the “Rules” as the show’s characters call them, and not bother setting up my list any more than I already have.

So, without further ado, I share with you…


21 Things I Learned From Highlander: The Series

1) Apparently the world is full of abandoned warehouses, train yards, and various other places with no witnesses. When choosing a site for your duel to the death, the world is your oyster.

2) When you behead someone with a sword, don’t bother hiding the body. Just walk away. They’ll never catch you.

3) If the police do take you in for questioning, they never, ever, ever notice the freaking sword you’re hiding under your coat.

4) Consistent character motivation is overrated when your story is largely episodic.

5) Every type of sword is capable of beheading with such ease as to not even require a proper stroke. Sometimes just slitting the throat with a Spanish rapier is enough to decapitate someone, just barely off-camera.

6) Revenge won’t solve anything. Wait, yes it will. Uh, no, revenge is a selfish quest for murder. Wait, revenge is about justice and honor. Wait, no. Uh, it’s whatever’s convenient that week.

7) We’ll always have Paris. About six months out of every year, in fact.

8) The 90s may not always hold up well, but a good sweater is timeless.

9) Paris is never lovely this time of year.

10) Immortals’ healing properties move at the speed of plot. If it suits the scene, they pop right back up. Other times, they wait until they’re in the morgue to awake. If you need to stage your death, plan accordingly.

11) Crime scene investigators only work an average of two days a year, and no one has a permanent record of all the crap they were involved in the year before.

12) By virtue of never aging, you also never need to earn income. Your credit balance is immortal, too.

13) If you belong to a super-secret society that even national intelligence agencies don’t know exist, as a rite of passage you have to have your order’s symbol tattooed on your wrist, where surely nobody will see it.

14) When you are tasked with monitoring an individual to such an intimate degree that you daily know their every movement, you still have enough time to put into your cover life. You can even own and operate a blues bar and lose track of your subject for weeks on end. But you can still make the claim, “Hell, I even know what you had for breakfast.”

15) Everybody listens to Queen.

16) Reusing supporting actors in other roles a mere season later is kosher. No one will notice.

17) In ancient Egypt, everybody spoke English.

18) People of antiquity had amazing dental plans.

19) As it turns out, Scotsmen always wore underwear beneath their kilts.

20) James Cameron was right. Night is blue.

21) As a writer, if your series runs long enough that you have to phase out the lead actors and hope that new characters pick up the slack, it means you missed the writing on the wall: you should have just wrapped things up with the previous season. (I’m looking at you, J.A.G. and The X-Files.)



In closing…

A “cult” movie is a film, often of low quality and/or obscurity, that is dismissed by mainstream audiences but embraced by a small following, a minority that regards it with favor proportionate to the mass audience’s disfavor. Highlander is a cult show, and while I’m not really still a member of the cult, I do still like it enough not to sell all my DVDs. I shall keep it for the archives.