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Highlander Season Five
Next week: Duende
Revelation 6:8
Air Date: Feb. 1997
One by one, Kronos is putting the Four Horsemen back together. Once they struck fear in the hearts of men with sword and axe. Today, their weapons of destruction are different, but their goal is the same: to bring mankind what it fears most, the Apocalypse. Only Duncan MacLeod stands between them and the end of the world. ~ recap via TV.com
Next week: Duende
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 05:57 pm (UTC)From:I think Methos wants to get rid of both Kronos and Caspian (or have MacLeod do it) from the start, but that he decides Silas will also have to die in the scene with the monkey.
Cassandra is still pushing Mac's buttons. Glad to see Mac's trying to figure out what's happening and whose side Methos is on.
When trying to figure out why Cassandra doesn't whack Methos with the axe, I'm thinking (because Duncan is too far away to stop her, and isn't the kind who would take her head while she's down from the Quickening, even if he wanted to kill her) she doesn't want to piss Mac off as she may need to hide behind his sword again in the future.
What else whould it be? A request from a friend not to kill the man she hates? I don't buy it. He's a good friend to her, but the woman has been manipulating him since before they even met (OK, so maybe she did save him when he was a kid, but she was also looking to save her own bacon and atone for the mistake she made training Kantos). So I can't say she's his friend. He's hers, but not the other way aroound.
I hurt for Methos in this ep.
We get treated to more of the awesome blue make-up. :D
Caspian may be insane, but he shows a better grasp on the modern world than Silas. Well, he has been hiding in the woods for a 1000 years after all.
I guess Methos is quite right about Cassandra having Stockholm Syndrome. She seems more pissed at him letting her down when she counted on him than for all the rest.
I can't think of anything more for the moment.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 07:26 pm (UTC)From:Plus, stick boy!!!
XC
no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 07:40 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 08:25 pm (UTC)From:That's always been my impression as well.
As for why she didn't kill Methos, I'd never thought of it that way before. Interesting.
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Date: 2008-05-29 08:36 pm (UTC)From:Glad I'm not the only one who sees it this way. ;)
As for why she didn't kill Methos, I'd never thought of it that way before. Interesting.
What do you think then?
I'm not sure those are my definitive thoughts, but I'm trying to find something that would make sense (to me at least :P). I really don't think that she did it because she was afraid Mac would take her head if she did.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 10:34 pm (UTC)From:I've never really come up with a definitive answer for Cassandra, other than they couldn't let her kill Methos, so she didn't because Duncan asked her to. Partly maybe because Methos had challenged Silas to save her, and partly because in the end, she wanted to keep Duncan's good opinion of her [shrugs]
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Date: 2008-05-29 10:39 pm (UTC)From:Duncan: "Cassandra, don't kill Methos, we need him for the episode next week". ROFL
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Date: 2008-05-29 08:13 pm (UTC)From:The big question in this episode is who is Methos, and what the hell is he doing, and why? I can only give my opinion, which I know isn’t shared universally, but I will try to set it out as best I can.
Methos is, both by word and deed, a consummate survivor. We are never told why he became a Horseman, but I have come to believe he did so for two reasons. First, with these four other Immortals, doing what they were doing, he could be exactly who he was without fear of discovery or persecution. He was already a couple of thousand years old by that time. How many times had he left, either voluntarily or out of necessity, a family, tribe or clan because of what he was? How many times had he been persecuted, killed, enslaved or imprisoned out of fear of his very nature? What a wonderful freedom it must finally have been to just “be”.
The other reason was precisely as Kronos described it: The freedom to do whatever they wanted, take whatever they wanted, kill whomever they wanted, to exercise power on a scale unknown in the world at that time except by gods – to virtually be a god.
But who is Methos today? He is still that consummate survivor, but he has outgrown his need to exercise that power, and come to abhor that part of his nature. However, to him Kronos is still near god-like in the power he exerts over his life. Clearly Methos believed that Kronos had both the will and the strength to do exactly what he proposed – to bring about world anarchy and chaos – and that to oppose him would guarantee his own death. That was a price he would not pay, no matter what other costs were involved. MacLeod was his only leverage to escape a return to what he had been, an icon for the kind of person he had wished he was but knew he could never be – not just because of his own nature, but because of what he had seen and done. He would never have MacLeod’s sense that the world “ought” to be a decent place where good was rewarded and evil was punished. Duncan was Methos’ wild card, as it were, which he kept in play by whatever means he could: dropping the matches; drawing him away from Cassandra; telling him about the virus in the fountain. I think Duncan was right, that Methos *did* orchestrate those events, but not out of any grand plan. He was just waiting for a critical moment when events might turn, when he hoped that MacLeod could be put in a position to do what Methos had never been able to bring himself to do.
If Duncan hadn’t been in the picture, would Methos have become Kronos’ second-in-command, overseeing the apocalypse? In my opinion, the answer is unquestionably yes, oh yes. Even Peter W. has said much the same thing – that Methos’ priority was, first and foremost, to survive. Niceties like avoiding doing bad things were a distant second to that Maslovian pyramid point. He couldn’t kill Kronos, even in the face of what Kronos was prepared to do, but despite Kronos’ need of Methos as a foil for his own evil genius, he knew Kronos would kill him without hesitation if he truly worked against him or tried to leave him.
And this brings me to a comparison to the end of “The Valkyrie”, where Methos refuses to answer Duncan’s question about who judges him. Methos had refused to judge Kronos or himself because to do so would require him deal with the consequences of his history. Duncan, to the contrary, *does* judge others and acts on that judgment especially when it comes to behavior that threatens the life of mortals. He also, however, judges himself, and can be very harsh on himself for doing the wrong thing, or even doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. So Methos feels he has no right to judge anyone, but chooses to become best buds with someone he knows to make such judgments. Does he have an inner need to be, if not forgiven, at least accepted by someone like Duncan MacLeod because if MacLeod can learn to accept him, then Methos is somehow more comfortable in his own skin and can truly put the past behind him? Just a thought.
And does refusing to make judgments make Methos the better man, or just someone who takes the easy way out of morally ambiguous situations?
.. cont.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 08:24 pm (UTC)From:How many times had he been persecuted, killed, enslaved or imprisoned out of fear of his very nature? What a wonderful freedom it must finally have been to just “be”.
I've often thought that. It really must have been an intoxicating sort of freedom for an Immortal to have.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 08:32 pm (UTC)From:I agree.
Does he have an inner need to be, if not forgiven, at least accepted by someone like Duncan MacLeod because if MacLeod can learn to accept him, then Methos is somehow more comfortable in his own skin and can truly put the past behind him?
Maybe.
And does refusing to make judgments make Methos the better man, or just someone who takes the easy way out of morally ambiguous situations?
Usually, I'd say yes, that makes him the better man. I think he does pass judgements on occasions, but will mostly not act upon them because it would be risking his own skin. And as you said, he's the consummate survivor. He does risk his own hide to save MacLeod several times though, which raises many questions as to why he does so.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 09:00 pm (UTC)From:Whatever judgments are made and whomever makes them, Methos has, in some deep part of his soul, recognized that Kronos could not be allowed to live, not just for his past acts, but for the very essence of who he was. Methos’ dilemma was that, at one time, he was no different from Kronos, and no less worthy to die. The fact that Methos wanted desperately to live at virtually any cost also cast him more into Kronos’ moral cesspool. And that brings us to the fight with Silas. Boy, is it ever clear he didn’t want to do that, so why did he? He couldn’t possibly know the outcome of the fight between Duncan and Kronos. It could go either way, so he didn’t do it to help MacLeod.
Then did he do it just to save Cassandra? In my opinion, that was truly at the heart of his actions. The self-disgust he manifests when he talks about Cassandra dying a dozen times in the desert being worth it just to get away from them makes it clear to me that Cassandra is a living representative of all those he had wronged so horribly so long ago. I don’t think Methos knew until he was faced with the idea of Cassandra’s death at the Horsemen’s hands, he finally did that which, up to that point, I don’t think he had been ready to do – to lay his life on the line for a concept, a notion of honor, a belief that it was the *right* thing to do.
Duncan, it should be noted, never suggested that Methos deserved to die, only that he was appalled at the history that Cassandra had related, and that he felt betrayed that Methos had lied to him. He has certainly killed and/or hunted for personal vengeance (Kern. Culbraith. Kiernan.), so he understands Cassandra’s feelings, but he also knows today’s Methos and has learned to trust him with his life. Every step of the way, Methos’ actions can be interpreted as either self serving and manipulative, or altruistic, and Duncan never really knows which, but he chooses to cling to the possibility that Methos is still the man he originally believed (or wanted him) to be. Very, very complicated, and not easy to get past the sense that Duncan had been played for a fool, and dangerously so.
It is hardly surprising that in the end Duncan is still angry and suspicious that he still doesn’t know what Methos’ agenda really was, whether he *and* Cassandra had merely been pawns manipulated to extricate a dangerous thorn from Methos’ side. Methos’ only true moment of complete vulnerability had been when he wept at the loss of his friend Silas – a simple man, but also a beast who had smiled as he watched Caspian murder the doctor, and as he watched Kronos prepare to kill Cassandra with the knife she had stabbed him with so long ago.
Did Cassandra decide not to kill Methos because of Duncan? At least partially. He was the voice of reason, of sanity. He had been telling her all along that vengeance would never bring her peace – a lesson he had learned the hard way. It was something she knew intellectually but until that moment she hadn’t come face to face with the power of letting go. Not killing Methos must have been incredibly freeing for her, once she was past the immediate emotional crisis. She finally let go of thousands of years of hate and fear and took back her life. I’d like to think she might have done that on her own, but Duncan’s voice demanding that Methos live was the small push she needed to make that break with her past.
... cont.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 09:33 pm (UTC)From:I kinda think they're both, although more self-serving and manipulative than altruistic.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 09:00 pm (UTC)From:As for an overall assessment of the quality of the episode, I think it was brilliant. Somehow, the writers and AP managed to pack in an incredible amount of nuance among the four Horsemen, show the core of the relationship between Methos and Kronos, and layer subtlety upon subtlety so that even as we are peeling back the layers of time and relationship, we remain uncertain who is the manipulator and who is the manipulated. The space was brilliantly decorated and used and managed to convey a mix of ancient world and modern world in a dark, shadowed space full of hard edges that were, in a bizarre way, kind of beautiful.
The special effects of the quickening didn’t really work, and was the one moment of cheesiness that bothered me. I think I heard a comment by AP somewhere (the “best of” video, maybe?) that he really hated that post-production effect, but they ran out of time to change it.
The battles (I think “swordfight” is too tame a term for those confrontations) were stunningly done, with the intercuts between the two combatants paced for maximum tension and visual interest. The personalities of all the fighters emerged in the way they moved and defended, so it was truly a violent ballet of grotesque beauty.
The meaning of the joint Quickening business has been explored ad nauseum, to no definitive conclusion, so I’ll leave that to each viewer to interpret however they choose.
I could probably keep rambling on because there is so much meat in this episode that involves interpretation and comparisons with what we have seen in the past of these characters, and what we will learn of them in the future, but that is fodder for discussion, not lecture.
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Date: 2008-05-29 09:24 pm (UTC)From:*nods* I agree.
The special effects of the quickening didn’t really work, and was the one moment of cheesiness that bothered me.
Me too. It was really weird. Didn't work for me.
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Date: 2008-05-29 10:27 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 10:36 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 10:37 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-05-30 04:24 pm (UTC)From: