'Unholy Alliance'

[ithildin]

Highlander Season Two

Unholy Alliance, Air Date: February 1994

Xavier St. Cloud returns, killing Immortals with the help of mortal mercenaries who shoot his prey, making his kill easy. His next target is MacLeod but, warned by Dawson, Mac and Charlie just manage to escape death -- though the dojo is all but destroyed in the gunfight. Renee Delaney, a CID agent investigating the mercenary angle, gets on the case. MacLeod goes after Xavier himself, and Charlie insists on coming along. During his battle with St. Cloud, MacLeod spots James Horton, the Hunter who killed Darius. Distracted, Mac is 'killed' and falls down an elevator shaft out of beheading range, and Charlie is badly wounded and lies near death. Blaming Dawson for helping Horton escape alive, MacLeod warns him not to cross his path again.

As Charlie regains strength, MacLeod accepts help from Dawson one last time, and barely misses catching Xavier and Horton. He then follows their trail to Paris -- accompanied by the persistent Renee Delaney. They track down Horton, and when he almost escapes, he is shot by Joe Dawson. MacLeod, with the help of his humorous new neighbor Maurice, then tracks down Xavier and finally takes his head. In a coda, however, we learn that Horton still lives.
~ recap via tv.com

Next week will be Pharaoh's Daughter

Comments

[macgeorge1.livejournal.com]

This encompasses two episodes, so I'll do two different comments. For these, I ended up with a lot of miscellaneous comments, in addition to my general commentary at the end:

Unholy Alliance I: episode description and commentary at:
http://www.wordsmiths.net/MacGeorge/episodes/Season2/Unholy1.htm

Joe continuously denies knowing Horton was alive, but once that lie becomes apparent, he denies knowing that Horton was involved in these killings. But if that was true, why did Joe specifically warn MacLeod about these killings which had taken place in Paris and New York, far away from Seacouver and not involving anyone Mac was close to? Methinks Joe *always* knew it might be Horton, but either wasn't certain enough, or didn't have the courage to confront Horton about it.

Also, in the flashback Duncan is carrying a standard broadsword instead of his basket-hilt claymore that he carried after Culloden. There's also a canon implication here - that after Duncan left Connor, he returned to the Highlands, at least for a time. The Watcher Chronicle with the dvd says the incident occurred in 1670.

General Comments: This is an important episode, both canonically and especially in the relationship between Joe and Mac. At the end of it, Mac is convinced that Joe can't be trusted. The disappointment and sense of betrayal is palpable. Duncan is intensely loyal to his friends and he had begun to think of Joe as a real friend. As for Dawson, he really has screwed up, IMO. He had to have known something was going on, at *least* subconsciously. We do know that, like Mac, Joe is loyal to a fault, sometimes blindly and in this instance, fatally blindly.

I think Horton is a great villain, full of that fire of righteous, insane arrogance at the right moments, and smoothly suave the next. And Xavier is pretty good as a bad guy, too, easy on the eye in a creepy kind of way. I wish they'd done a better job with the severed hand, but I supposed the length is always a problem.

What to say about Renee? Well, I liked her better than I remembered, and she and Duncan had some nice moments contrasting sexual tension and very real anger and irritation. You got a solid sense that he liked her gumption and her playacting and her humor and her intelligence, but they were *so* never going to have a relationship because of who and what she was, and who and what he was.