HIGHLA-L Digest - 10 Apr 2004 to 12 Apr 2004 (#2004-67)
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Mon, 12 Apr 2004 22:00:03 -0400
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Topics of the day:
1. Season Three dvds: Blind Faith
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Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 12:06:59 -0400
From: kageorge <kageorge@erols.com>
Subject: Season Three dvds: Blind Faith
COMMENTARY: Gillian tells us that the original common story line of the
Highlander series was that Duncan would run into an old enemy, there would
be some kind of conflict, and by the end of the episode Duncan would have
whacked him. By the end of season two, they had modified the concept by
having Duncan run into an old friend who had turned evil and - reluctantly -
Duncan would have to kill him. In "Blind Faith", they did a reverse twist on
that and had Duncan run into an old enemy, only to realize the enemy is no
longer evil, and he has to *not* kill him.
Bill Panzer says that the concept of a bad person who does bad things - not
one crazy weekend in college, but for centuries - and then after a long
absence the person appears again and they are a spiritual healer and a force
for good, your first reaction is going to be "this is a load of crap." To
overcome those original views of the person is probably easier in a normal
life span, but it would be particularly difficult for MacLeod, who saw these
major atrocities committed for so long, to decide whether the character's
redemption is really true. And even supposing it might be true, does MacLeod
kill for what he's done in the past, or does he deserve to be given a chance
to atone for the next few hundred years? He says they filmed two different
endings, but they decided that the idea that redemption was possible was the
one MacLeod would chose.
David A. says that the idea of "Blind Faith" - about whether redemption was
possible - was one of his favorites, that the episode was pretty good and
was acted well, but he feels he could have written the story a little better
to make it a little more exciting. At its best, he says, Highlander answers
such questions in the context of action/adventure. He jokingly says that
sometimes he believes redemption is possible and sometimes not, depending on
who it is and the circumstances. For instance, if it is some studio
executive giving him notes he doesn't want to hear, he would say redemption
is not possible and that "they should burn in hell." But if it is someone
who likes the script and they only pissed on his work yesterday and they
liked it today, then he figures maybe they don't have to burn in hell, that
they can be redeemed.
Then he turned serious and said that whether redemption is possible in all
instances is one of the great questions of the age, and talks about his
Talmudic studies. The passage "where God hardened Pharaoh's heart" about
letting the Hebrews go was one that always bothered him. Why is God stacking
the deck, he asks. But someone "very wise" once said to him that some sins
are irredeemable, which is why at the end of the episode, Duncan lets Kirin
live, but doesn't forgive him, expressing his view by saying, in Duncan's
view: "Look, I'm still pissed at you. I don't want to be your friend, but I'
m not going to judge you." Because, Abramowitz says, "I don't think Duncan
knows how." He says Duncan truly believed that Kirin was redeemed in some
way, but being redeemed doesn't mean you're not guilty, or that you don't
have to pay for what you did.
Gillian: "Why doesn't he kill him?" She opines that Duncan feels that living
a good life doesn't matter, if what you are doing now is hurting other
people; and if that is so, the flip side must also be true.
OUTTAKES: None, which was disappointing. They should have shown us that
alternate ending.
EPISODE: We first meet John Kirin giving money and sandwiches to the
homeless. He ends up saving the life of one of his helpers (Matthew) by
pushing him out of the path of a speeding car, getting hit himself. He dies
in the Emergency Room while under Dr. Anne's care, but revives, with his
followers proclaiming it a miracle.
Anne tells MacLeod about the remarkable event, and MacLeod investigates. He
and Richie find Kirin at some kind of multi-denominational ashram, as
Matthew is throwing a reporter out of the building. When Duncan sees who it
is, he gets very grim, and we get a flashback to the Spanish Civil War, in
1937, where Duncan is a reporter, with the troops fighting against Franco.
Kirin (then known as Cage) is there, supposedly as a photographer. But Kirin
ends up betraying them to the enemy in return for money, and the young
idealistic fighters Duncan has come to know and like are all shot rather
than taken to a POW camp because, as Kirin says, "it's cheaper than feeding
them." MacLeod tries to help them escape, carrying a wounded man on his back
for miles, but the boy dies anyway.
Back in the present, Kirin is all calm beneficence. Duncan asks him where
the profit is in his current enterprise, but Kirin insists he's "not the man
I was." Duncan invites him to "step off holy ground and find out" but Kirin
says he doesn't fight anymore. Duncan and Richie leave, and Matthew is
worried, saying Kirin is "too good. You can't see it. He wants to hurt you,"
and it is obvious that Matthew is a little unbalanced in his fanatic
devotion to his hero, John Kirin.
At Joe's bar, with some nice live blues playing in the background, Richie
and Joe talk about Kirin, and Joe tells Richie that whatever Kirin is doing
now, he has hundreds of pages of history on the man, that he is a "liar and
a murdering son of a bitch." Duncan insists it is because of the money, that
the day after Kirin "rose from the dead" his church collected a quarter of a
million in donations, that Kirin's actions are always about money.
But in a conversation with Anne (while Duncan beats her at chess), she tells
him she heard that Kirin gave most of the money back to charity. We get
another flashback, this time to Cambodia in 1975, where Duncan is trying to
help a dozen or so children and the nun who cares for them. They are caught
in the middle of a battle, and the plane that was to take them to safety has
been bombed. A helicopter arrives, and Duncan tries to commandeer it, but it
belongs to Kirin who is running drugs in the midst of the war. After
threatening to kill the children himself if Duncan interferes, they take
off. Duncan is running at the helicopter, screaming at him to stop when he
is hit by a mortar round and is killed.
Duncan goes to see Kirin, inviting him to "take a walk", and over Matthew's
strong protest, Kirin agrees. They end up in a small garden enclave, with
Kirin saying he now has so much to teach people about redemption and
forgiveness. "And you're the expert," Duncan replies in anger. Kirin tells
Duncan that he studied with the Buddhist monks in the near east, that he had
many teachers in many religions, that John Cage died when he became Kirin.
"And you became God!" Duncan yells. "We don't play God!" He tells him, "We
don't have the answers!" and that they don't do miracles. Kirin insists he
didn't plan on coming back to life in front of anyone, that he is using his
immortality to try to do good in the world, but Duncan insists that
everything Kirin says is a lie. "Maybe God has forgiven you," Duncan ends
the conversation abruptly, "but I sure haven't."
The reporter who Matthew had earlier thrown out of the ashram follows
Duncan, wanting to know what he knows about Kirin. In the meantime, Anne is
meeting with Kirin to thank him for a contribution to the children's wing of
the hospital, but she also wants to investigate why he is even alive, but
Kirin says "some things are best left alone."
The reporter sneaks into the dojo, looking for a connection between MacLeod
and Kirin, but Matthew is there (we are to assume, I think, that he is there
because he thinks Duncan is a threat to Kirin). Matthew kills the reporter.
After the police leave, Duncan is grim, believing that Kirin had killed the
reporter "and dropped him on my doorstep," that the reporter had died
because Duncan hadn't killed Kirin right off the bat and that Kirin was
toying with him.
Back at the ashram, as Kirin gets ready to leave to meet MacLeod, he tells
Matthew that "whatever it is you wish to become, you already are." Matthew
insists that he has no life with out Kirin, but Kirin tells him he must find
one.
In their meeting, Kirin insists he didn't kill the reporter. Duncan doesn't
believe him, asking him if the charade hasn't gone on long enough. Duncan is
ready to kill him, full of fury, saying that he'll kill Kirin even if Kirin
refuses to fight. "If you've judged me," Kirin says, "then that's what I
deserve."
"I don't judge you, Cage. The children you left to die and the men you
betrayed and murdered do that," Duncan answers.
Kirin tells Duncan that, in Cambodia, he came back looking for Duncan, to
kill him. "In my life, I've seen much horror," he says, "much destruction.
With every war I grew harder and harder inside, but with this one, this
time..." And we see a flashback to the helicopter landing, and Kirin walking
among the graves of the children, each marked with a small homemade cross
(we assume made by Duncan), and decorated with the bloodied remains of their
clothes. Kirin falls to his knees with a cry.
Back in the present, Kirin is weeping, "But the children, what they did to
the children!"
"I was there!" Duncan is barely able to say, and tries to force Kirin to
fight him, even hitting him across the face.
But Kirin just goes to his knees. "Do as you must," Kirin says, his arms
spread.
Duncan is distraught, turning away with a cry of frustration, but he turns
back and nods. "Then I will. I will!" he yells, and swings but the katana
ends up hitting the ground, with Duncan going to his knees, too.
Kirin slowly stands. "You are the better man, MacLeod. You always were." He
gently touches Duncan on the shoulder and leaves.
Duncan goes to Joe's, and Joe isn't convinced that Kirin didn't deserve to
die. "He was willing to die rather than fight me," Duncan tells Joe.
"All that means is that he's a good judge of character," Joe replies, but
Duncan says it wasn't up to him to judge Kirin.
Joe acknowledges that even if Cage/Kirin had changed, "I don't see how 20
years of good deeds even begins to cover his tab," Joe insists.
"Well, maybe it doesn't," Duncan sighs. "But I'm not going to be the one to
decide."
"Well, if you're not, then who is? You know what he was. Who better than you
to judge him?"
"One Immortal playing God is enough."
The last part of the episode is about Matthew, who had followed Kirin to his
meeting with MacLeod, and who sneaks into the loft. Duncan senses that
Matthew is there before he sees him ("The money is on the table," he sighs
tiredly. "Take it and get out.") But Matthew's hero-worship of Kirin was the
only thing that he had had to cling to, and after admitting he had killed
the reporter, he insists on knowing about the murdered children that Kirin
and Duncan had talked about.
Kirin arrives and tries to diffuse the situation. Matthew is confused and
unbalanced. Kirin says he has called the police because he knew Matthew had
killed the reporter (and, by implication, that he figured Matthew was on his
way to kill MacLeod, as well). Kirin tries to get Matthew to give himself
up, but Matthew feels betrayed, and when Kirin tries to take the gun,
Matthew ends up killing Kirin. The police arrive, and despite Duncan's
effort to intervene ("Didn't he [Kirin] teach you that nobody was beyond
redemption?"), Matthew clearly wants to die ("I loved him and I killed
him!").
Matthew throws himself out the front door in front of the police,
deliberately drawing their fire, and he is killed.
In a final scene, Kirin is standing with Duncan by Duncan's car, carrying a
suitcase. He tells Duncan that Matthew's death was his fault. "My redemption
caused two people to die." He extends his hand, expressing the thought that
they might meet again someday, and that they might even be friends.
Duncan looks at Kirin's extended hand for a moment before he finally takes
it. "You better get going," he says, and Kirin walks away down the road.
MY COMMENTS: This is an important episode because of its theme, a thread
that runs throughout the entire series, getting deeper and more complex
through the seasons as we deal with it again in the Horsemen episodes, and
again in Forgive Us Our Trespasses, and as a sub-theme in a number of other
episodes. While the scenes are a little uneven (the ones with Anne tended to
look like they were inserted as place markers to keep Anne in the story, or
as convenient exposition), several of them have real emotional impact. The
confrontation between Duncan and Kirin when Duncan can't bring himself to
kill a man who refused to defend himself was intense.
Duncan's strong need for closure, for vengeance for the deaths he personally
knew Kirin had caused, was well played and understandable, but that need was
irreconcilable with his concurrent belief that he couldn't kill someone who
didn't fight back, especially someone whose actions in the present day were
demonstrably attempts to do good. All that is also colored by Duncan's own
sense that he has done some pretty awful things in his own life, and has
hoped that, in some way, trying to live a good life has redeemed those sins.
We also see an interesting view of Joe, who expresses the view that Kirin's
20-year stint at doing good cannot balance the scales against hundreds of
years of deliberate, conscious atrocities, yet when it came to Methos'
thousands of years of similar acts, Joe argued the opposite. But Joe had
only known the present-day Methos, considered Methos a personal friend, and
put Methos' actions in the same category as the kinds of war-time atrocities
Joe saw in Vietnam - which was (frankly) a specious and irrelevant analogy,
IMO.
Certainly it increases the complexity of these characters and demonstrates
Duncan's reluctance to judge others - a situation he found himself in all
too often and which, over the next three years of episodes, played an
important role in eroding his own belief systems to the point where, by the
end of Season Six he hardly knew who he was anymore.
It was this kind of thematic underpinning of the series that, IMO, make it
interesting and still worthy of conversations, even so long after the show
was off the air.
MacGeorge
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End of HIGHLA-L Digest - 10 Apr 2004 to 12 Apr 2004 (#2004-67)
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