Lower Decks

This is a column I had on the schedule for a while, but only recently got really excited about. It seems overnight I became a huge fan of Highlander. I can’t explain it. I was aware of the TV show only really when it was coming to an end, knew the original film best by its Queen soundtrack, and for some reason found ‘Highlander: Endgame’ important enough to add to my collection early on, even though I had no real reason to. It just seemed important, the movie that united Christopher Lambert and Adrian Paul, two generations of MacLeods. One of my early columns (#6; next week hits, numerically, a year of HYGOTS, but I started it back at the Lower Decks relaunch in September 2008, so it comes a month late for technical reasons) touched on film franchises, of which Highlander is perhaps one of the more improbable entries, and the fact that it’s also a genre franchise in general only complicates matters further, but I’m now beginning to appreciate the history and breadth of it, to the equally unlikely point where, in 2009, I may actually be one of its biggest fans.

One of the things that has always complicated the continuity of Highlander is that the most consistent creators have been a couple of producers, and not Gregory Widen, whom lore has it first thought of the idea when he was taking a tour of Scottish castles and wondered what a man would be like who was still wearing today the armor Widen saw lined against the walls: in effect, a very basic idea of Immortals. That the only concerted effort to explain that origin, for story’s sake, met with such controversial results, ‘Highlander 2,’ is perhaps the most telling detail of all. Even the fans who were on the ground floor of this franchise weren’t all that interested in details beyond the action fare critics continually scoffed at. They were always going to be hard to please.

But from a fan’s perspective, there’s only one real origin, and that’s 1986’s ’Highlander.’ There, we meet Connor MacLeod (Lambert) for the first time, from his origins in the Clan MacLeod of the sixteenth century to modern New York, very different places for a man with a sword and a destiny charged with using it in ways the outside world will never understand. Helping him learn the ropes of this exclusive and ever-diminishing alternate world he finds himself in, at least early on, is Ramirez (Sean Connery), whose own origins stretch far earlier, but whose fate is no different from any other Immortal, bound by the creed of “There Can Be Only One.” By the end of it, we’re led to believe that defeating Clancy Brown awards Connor victory in this little game, and as sole survivor, unimaginable power and the chance, if he so chooses, to steer the course of humanity itself.

He seems to do something about that in ‘Highlander 2: The Quickening,’ released in 1990, which sees Connor consulting in a shield to protect the planet against a tapped-out ozone layer and the sun, spanning 1999-2024, when that shield eventually proves unnecessary. If that were all there was to the film, maybe the budding franchise might simply have had its funny little “save the whales” episode and that would’ve been it, but as I’ve mentioned, there’s an effort to explain his origins, not so much how he learned he was immortal, but why. Turns out, he was an alien. Well, until they redacted that.

Then someone realized, hey, if the movie franchise doesn’t work out so well, maybe there’s a TV show in there. Between 1992-1998, Adrian Paul starred as Duncan MacLeod, and the expansiveness of the new format allowed the mythology to grow beyond simply that creed and inevitable showdowns with villains. Duncan was a far more reluctant Immortal, and perhaps in that way, it explained why his existence never seemed to factor into Connor’s previous adventures (complicated only by that future timeline since placed on the story, another reason why it would become easy to ignore, regardless of changes). ‘Highlander: The Series’ probably caught the franchise at its peak (while its spin-off, ‘Highlander: The Raven,’ caught the bug infecting Star Trek, during a brief 1998-1999 run).

‘Highlander: The Final Dimension’ continued Connor’s adventures in 1994, and might have been the first time I heard about the franchise. Described as ignoring the second film, it found Connor battling a new foe (suspiciously just as time-diverted as the villain in the middle movie), but basically extending the life of a series that didn’t seem to really need it, or fans who wanted it. ‘Highlander: Endgame’ in 2000 saw pretty much the same reception, and ‘Highlander: The Source’ was played on TV, was the first one to star Paul alone since his show, and pretty much the nail in the coffin. By that point, the whole franchise might be said to no longer have a functioning fan base.

They’re tell you, those who are still around, that there simply wasn’t any coherence anymore, but with a foundation based on an origin that did its best to offer only the thinnest form of source material, that there was ever more than one incarnation of Highlander was only ever going to produce something that would end up contradicting everything else in some way. ‘Highlander’ told a more or less complete story about Connor MacLeod, drew its own conclusions, and then someone decided to make another one, and that one was laughed out of the building, and then they kept making them, in two mediums, until the building was empty of product and fan alike. How to explain? Greedy studios milking a story dry? Hey, why not?

My background is comic books. I like to recall how I read about Robin dying in a newspaper, and only later realizing that it was Jason Todd and not Dick Grayson, the original Boy Wonder. It was my first experience in the expansiveness and possibility of a rich tradition and storied history behind an iconic character. Later, I would come to appreciate this in other forms, the way Batman’s (at least one of many) forbearer Zorro could continually be revived. I knew him best as Antonio Banderas in 1998’s ‘Mask of Zorro,’ which itself saw the hero as a generational figure, but grew to appreciate the heritage further the more I became aware of it. Reading comic books, I would find revolving creative teams to be a perfectly natural extension of a character’s adventures, and even when decisions were made that changed details or emphasized different features, there was no real use in denying that the character and their circumstances essentially remained the same.

Had the Highlander concept originated from anything but that first film, even for a brief moment, anything but a momentary vision cooked up by Gregory Widen and goosed by a few other men, we might be talking about it in very different terms today. Instead, it’s silly nonsense for some, unredeemed garbage for others, and fond memories for a few more. ‘Highlander 2: Renegade Version’ was released in 1997, and attempted to correct a number of problems, rectifying popular understanding of franchise lore with what had been done previously in the film, before it was taken out of its creators’ hands. The resulting product represents quite a curiosity. It’s unquestionably a better film, shaped better, more intriguingly, more memorably. It also retains the essence of what the story had tried to do, shape an understanding of the mythology that fleshed out the meaning of the Immortals (much as ‘The Source’ would try and do ten years later) as an ancient race casting its unwanted into our world, where they would have to have that famous sequence of duals. The winner would have the option of staying there and eventually dying or returning home as an Immortal once more.

I know, you might be saying, wouldn’t that lead to the same result regardless? The problem with Highlander is that no one has ever really sat down and tried to plot a single through-line. The fear that built up around ‘Lost’ as a show promising a grand saga but seeming like it didn’t know where it was going originated from a long line of genre experiences where this was exactly the case, where everything was made up on the fly, and Highlander unquestionably one of the most famous cases. You could have one creator working on a single vision (J. Michael Straczynski and ‘Babylon 5’ being the thing every fan believed in at the height of Highlander’s popularity), but the minute the creative pool became diluted, there was never a chance. ‘Highlander 2’ was that one chance to set things right, and on the first try, it was deemed an outrageous failure. The second chance was only for the diehards. Ironically, even those who were never into Highlander would have appreciated ‘Renegade Version.’

The writers behind the popular ‘Iron Man’ movie are said to be working on a Highlander reboot (with perfect casting Kevin McKidd attached as the new MacLeod). Handled correctly, this movie could easily capitalize on the recent origin trend and redeem the franchise (if it doesn’t, I would in all gracious modesty agree to work on the project myself), rectify inconsistencies, explain what has never been properly explained before, and create an iconic story that apparently has yet to be found for a story that essentially tells about a whole framework hung on a single representative who by sheer convenience gets the whole thing called a strictly regional matter. No, Highlander in its present form isn’t perfect. But it has always had the potential. In the end, all it really needs is one perfect creative vision…