HLS5: 'Comes a Horseman'

[ithildin]

I haven't posted one of these in a while since interest seemed to have been waning. But I thought there had been enough of a break that we could pick up the discussions again.

Highlander Season Five

Comes a Horseman
Air Date: Feb. 1997

MacLeod knew him as Melvin Koren, a desperado who left a trail of death and fire across the Old West, but Cassandra remembers him as an evil far older. He is Kronos, leader of the Four Horsemen, mounted Bronze Age raiders who murdered, raped, and pillaged their way across two continents. Never was a band of Immortals more cruel or more feared. He destroyed Cassandra's people and she's been hunting him across the millenia. But Kronos has a different target now -- Methos.
~ recap via TV.com

Next week: Revelation 6:8

Comments

[macgeorge1.livejournal.com]

....sorry to be so long-winded.

#5: Cassandra was a vengeful bitch who was utterly unreasonable and irrational in her single-minded pursuit of Methos.

My view: Cassandra was a character with many possible interpretations, but I had no trouble believing that her first-death and post-death experiences were horrifying and would have left life-long scars, regardless of how long that life was. It was made clear that Methos used whatever methods were most painful to ensure her cooperation, and that he treated her as property to be used for his own benefit and pleasure.

I thought her character as revealed in Prophecy was ambiguous as to whether she was a cold, manipulative predator or a fearful woman getting by as best she could. There is also ambiguity here since she pursues both Kronos and Methos even in the face of her own probable death. She can’t have hoped to win against either of them physically, so she had only her demonstrably unreliable Voice. Both Kronos and Methos were significantly older than she, had survived for thousands of years and were likely to be extraordinarily powerful. To rely totally on her Voice as her defense against them was tenuous, at best. She had to have known she was putting her life on the line – although she sure didn’t hesitate a moment to rely once again on Duncan as her defender.

That she sees Methos as evil incarnate is in part a result of his own evil deeds, and in part a result of her guilt and disgust at her ultimate acquiescence and servitude to him under duress. She is blinded by both her history and her guilt. Was she irrational? Yes. Was it understandable? Completely.

#6: Methos was never *really* bad, not in context of the times. Ten thousand wasn’t that many, after all, if you extrapolate out over a thousand or so years, and that’s just the way people lived way back then.

My view: Hogwash. Kronos describes them as being the ultimate in evil, even for the times. Methos describes them as being living nightmares, and his use of the killing of “ten thousand” was merely metaphor for “a whole, whole, whole lot of people.” To minimize and trivialize what they were is to take away the sting of the whole episode and to paint Methos as simply a minor bad guy who eventually saw the error of his ways. Phooey on that. I want a *real* bad guy. I want a monumentally, seriously bad, bad guy who now lives with the reality of what he once was. That’s Drama!



....only a little more, about Joe.