HIGHLA-L Digest - 11 Mar 2004 to 14 Mar 2004 (#2004-49)
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Sun, 14 Mar 2004 22:00:02 -0500
There is one message totalling 233 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. Season Three dvds: Line of Fire
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Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 09:03:24 -0500
From: kageorge <kageorge@erols.com>
Subject: Season Three dvds: Line of Fire
COMMENTARY: Stan Kirsch is seen watching the opening scene of the episode as
a young woman announces Richie has fathered her baby, and comments that, "I
wanted to take on responsibility for the child. Adrian was trying to
convince me that this wasn't my child." Then he chuckles and says, "I had no
clue what I was getting into."
David Tynan then talks about how Joe Dawson tells Richie that Immortals can'
t have children, but Richie didn't want to believe it. He says they really
achieved what they wanted, that Stan did a great job of showing how
vulnerable Richie was and how much he wanted to become a responsible adult
and take care of the child.
Stan says he understood Richie's desire, but that it was an incredibly naive
point of view. He saw it as another, "stammering with MacLeod, 'Oh, come on,
come on', only to find out that what he thought was real, wasn't necessarily
so, and that it wouldn't have been good for him anyway.
Stephen Geaghan, the show's Production Designer discusses the design of Joe'
s Bar, which makes its first appearance in this episode. They wanted
something subterranean, fitting into Panzer's notion that the world of
Immortals should be full of corners and darkness, and ". you go around a
corner and reveal something that is totally unexpected." It was narrow and
high with several different tiers, to look as if it were in the bowels of
the city, entering from all different areas of the space, including the
stairs to provide interesting camera angles. "It was underneath and part of
the city, like the denizens that occupied it."
David Tynan says that the casting of Randall "Tex" Cobb as Kern was
brilliant, and that he had actually thought of Cobb as he wrote the part
(Cobb played the biker from hell in Raising Arizona - a great flick, IMO).
He made a great, crude, nasty villain. He was also a world champion
kick-boxer, so he was thought of as a very dangerous man, but in person he
was very sweet.
The first day of shooting, Cobb got hit by a beer truck and was taken away
in an ambulance. Geaghan says the bar where they were shooting was off a
major truck route, and Cobb was just walking around after having done the
scene, and there was a big "thump." They all turned around and Cobb just
gets up out of the road, having just gotten hit by a truck. Cobb claimed he
was okay, that he had just "lost his balance", but Cobb had actually dented
the truck. Although they took him to the hospital to be checked out, he was
back on the set the next day.
Stan describes doing the scene where Kern comes after Richie in Richie's
apartment, and Richie jumps out the window. Stan was supposed to hurl a
chair at him, and was throwing it a little to the side to avoid actually
hitting him, but Cobb objected, saying something like, "Just throw the
f***ing chair at me. You think you're gonna hurt me with a goddamn chair?"
So he threw the heavy chair at him, and it hit him on his sword hand. They
finished the take (with Stan ending up with some cuts on his arm from going
through the window with breakaway glass), and Cobb ended up with a bruise
the size of a softball on his arm, and they ended up taking him to the
emergency room.
With regard to the set design for the Sioux village, Geaghan said they had
to place the village in a way that it wouldn't get washed away by the moving
waters of the river delta, and make sure the tribal clothing, the teepee
design, the implements and weapons design, and even the horses they were
riding were all appropriate. One of the things the script required was that
MacLeod and Kahani come up on a canoe, except that that was not appropriate
to that culture, and they had run out of time to find a "real" canoe. They
ended up taking an aluminum canoe, welding on bits to provide a more
authentic shape, then applying birch bark to the exterior. The canoe ended
up weighing over 200 lbs, and Geaghan hoped that only those really
knowledgeable about Sioux culture would realize it was out of place.
OUTTAKES: The initial scene with Richie's introduction to his "son" is
shown, but the child wouldn't stop crying. Gillian Horvath says that,
surprisingly, Cobb was very good with the child, and in an outtake from the
scene where he has taken the child and is supposed to be terrorizing him,
Cobb is making silly faces and the child is actually smiling at him.
EPISODE: Richie is playing basketball with a friend when a pretty girl comes
along. It is an old girlfriend by the name of Donna, who has a little
surprise for him. She has a son, and she tells Richie he is the father.
Charlie thinks it's a great thing, but Duncan's reaction to the joyous news
is grim, to say the least. Upstairs, Duncan insists the child can't be
Richie's, but Richie isn't listening, saying the child was conceived before
he became Immortal. Richie gets caught up in the notion of having a family,
and is feeling all warm and fuzzy, not listening to Mac at all.
In the meantime, we are introduced to Kern, a big, mean, nasty biker who
trashes a biker bar, beats up the bouncer (who looks suspiciously like one
Horton's Watcher minions who were across the street from the bookstore in
The Watchers), then drinks a beer by breaking the neck and pouring the
liquid down his throat.
Duncan goes to Richie's apartment and meets Jeremy, the child, and there is
a segue to a.
FLASHBACK to an idyllic Sioux encampment, where Duncan is living with Little
Deer and her son Kahani. Her husband died, and Duncan now cares for them,
saying he will never leave them. Little Deer wants to have children with
him, but Duncan says that he is happy the way things are, that he is "at
peace for the first time since I can remember. You and Kahani are all I'll
ever need."
Back in the present, Richie and Duncan are talking on the street, while
Duncan tries to tell Richie that the complications of being an Immortal are
too great to have a relationship. Surprise, surprise, they run into the Bad
Biker Dude Kern, and from Duncan's rage, you know these guys have a history.
They fight, crashing (literally) a wedding going on in a nearby church,
where the priest obviously knows MacLeod (giving rise to much discussion as
to whether MacLeod is still a practicing Catholic). Kern escapes.
Charlie berates an exercising Duncan (working out rather violently with a
staff, still obviously angry about Kern) for not supporting Richie's desire
to "take on his responsibilities." Richie enters, asking about Kern, but
Duncan is unforthcoming, saying Richie was dealing with enough. Richie tells
DM that he can't turn Jeremy away, that this is his chance to have a normal
life.
"Good luck," Duncan answers sadly.
FLASHBACK: Duncan, dressed in Indian garb, is sitting by a fire and he feels
another Immortal. He looks up with a smile and calls out, "Connor?" But it's
Kern, who asks to join him at the fire and share his food and coffee, saying
he's "not hunting today." It quickly becomes clear that Kern is a scout for
the "redcoats" that were hunting down and killing the Sioux. Kern ends up
taunting Duncan as looking like a Squaw Man, holding up scalps he had taken
and asking him if one of them was Duncan's woman. Duncan is enraged and
attacks, fighting him with a spear and a hatchet. While he defeats Kern, he
doesn't stay and finish it, instead riding away to the village, where he
finds everyone brutally slaughtered, including Kahani and Little Deer. He
weeps over their bodies, burns them ritually, changes to non-Indian dress
and leaves the encampment, but swearing in Lakota as he goes, obviously
vowing revenge.
In the present day, Duncan goes to "Joe's" a new bar that Dawson is setting
up. Joe is chatting away about his plans for the bar, but finally realizes
DM is not in a chatty mood. Joe doesn't want to tell Duncan where Kern is,
but Duncan insists and Joe relents (rather quickly, actually). We see Duncan
tracking Kern down to a flophouse, intimidating some big, sleazy-looking
hotel manager, finally grabbing his beard and pulling him forward and
saying, "You're beginning to PISS ME OFF!" [NOTE: We don't often see
Nasty!Duncan bullying mortals. He does it very well, when motivated.]
Duncan searches Kern's room, then trashes it in a rage, leaving behind a
feather to let Kern know he had been there.
In the meantime, Richie is feeling good about caring for Donna and Jeremy
when Donna finds Richie's sword, which Richie refuses to explain or get rid
of, which upsets Donna.
Joe is still fixing up the bar when Richie arrives, feeling confused and
blue, and questions Joe about whether or not Immortals can have kids.
Mistakenly assuming Richie doesn't want to be held responsible for a child
that isn't his, Dawson tells him that in all their centuries of watching
Immortals, none has ever had a child. Finally, Richie is convinced he can't
be the father, and is crestfallen.
Richie goes to Duncan, who says he has two choices, tell her and let her in
and let her make a choice, or let her go, send her away and never look back.
He tells Richie that he can't protect them. "It doesn't matter what you do,
how much you love them or how hard you try. You just can't." In the
meantime, he is sharpening a long Indian spear.
Richie goes to Donna and tells her he knows Jeremy is not his son, but that
he doesn't care that he isn't the father, and starts to tell her about his
immortality. They are interrupted by Kern who has followed Donna to their
apartment. Richie sends Donna to Mac, and staves off Kern long enough to
have his sword knocked away, and has to jump out the window and into a truck
full of tomatoes to get away.
Richie runs to Mac, telling him that he couldn't protect Donna and Jeremy
from Kern, and Mac goes after Kern without ever telling Richie what Kern had
done to his Indian family.
Mac meets Kern on the top of a building somewhere (we don't know how they
got there). Kern fights with a knife and a sword and Mac fights with his
spear. When Kern cuts him across the chest, Mac uses the blood to mark his
face, saying something probably not very nice in Lakota, ultimately stabbing
him, then, with an Indian cry, swinging the spear in a circle to behead him.
We have one of the dumber Quickenings in the whole series (IMO, the only one
more embarrassing was the levitating house). Duncan is levitated off the
ground as he holds out the beaded necklace he had given Kahani to the
ghostly, smiling figures of Little Deer and Kahani until they fade away into
the sky. Hookey, hookey, hookey.
Richie then breaks up with Donna who is (justifiably) totally confused and
very pissed off, but Richie doesn't try to explain things to her, just tells
her it can't work out. She ends up slapping him and telling him to go to
hell, and obviously Richie feels like crap.
Duncan watched the whole scene and tells Richie he did the right thing, that
"They're alive," as though that was the best outcome he could have hoped
for. They walk away and an Indian woman passes them, and Duncan turns and
looks.
COMMENTARY: The flashbacks in this episode are classic HL and what we see
happen explains a major element of Duncan's difficulty in letting himself
fully love and commit his life to a mortal, but there is something I find
very confusing. We saw a portion of them in the very first episode, didn't
we, with Connor consoling Duncan as he burned the bodies, then afterwards at
the cabin where Connor told Duncan he couldn't hide from the Game forever?
Yet the production designer talks about setting up the whole flashback
sequence as part of *this* episode, and we don't see Connor at all.
So when was this flashback actually filmed? Has anyone heard an explanation
from Gillian H. or Donna L.?
Kern was a way-over-the-top bad guy, and I prefer my bad guys to have a
little more, umm, substance to them, but the scenes with Joe (with both
Duncan and Richie) were great, short character sketches. However, I didn't
find a whole lot about the episode that was particularly compelling,
emotionally or dramatically, perhaps *because* Kern was such an unrelenting,
unrepentant bad guy. We do get some idea of just how badly Duncan was
damaged by what had happened since not only is he instantly enraged when he
sees Kern, but he seems utterly unable to talk about it to anyone.
Of course, we only find out later about the long and hate-filled search for
Kern that Duncan went on after the slaughter of his tribe's village, but the
evidence of just how badly Duncan was hurt is all there, even before we
learn about that.
That is, however, twice that Duncan's whole world had been destroyed by
marauders, and the people he loved most in the world slaughtered without
mercy. That's something that puts Duncan's reaction to learning that Methos
was a marauder for a thousand years into a larger context.
MacGeorge
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End of HIGHLA-L Digest - 11 Mar 2004 to 14 Mar 2004 (#2004-49)
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