HIGHLA-L Digest - 18 Mar 2005 to 24 Mar 2005 (#2005-29)
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Thu, 24 Mar 2005 22:00:11 -0500
There is one message totalling 296 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. Season Six DVDs: Sins of the Fathers
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Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 09:52:50 -0500
From: kageorge <kageorge@erols.com>
Subject: Season Six DVDs: Sins of the Fathers
Complete commentary w/screen captures at:
http://www.wordsmiths.net/MacGeorge/episodes/Season6/Sins.htm
INSIDER COMMENTARY: AP says he wasn’t in the episode very much, but he
remembers watching the dailies, including the Quickening with Dara
Tomanovich. There was a big discussion because she had no bra on and “it
looked like a wet t-shirt competition.” Then he adds with a grin, “Not
to say that I was disappointed in watching the dailies on that, but I
think the higher ups thought they weren’t going to be able to show that
on regular television.”
He says he thinks MacLeod as a character was less aggressive than he had
been in previous seasons, but that the storyline didn’t carry through
very well through the season because each episode was shot separately
and as a result were a little disjointed. This episode was really about
targeting the female Immortal for a proposed spin-off show.
James Thorpe discusses the same issue – that these episodes were
showcasing a female immortal and were really a screen test of sorts.
They were trying to find the character who would become Raven. He says
it didn’t alter the way he wrote, but it did alter the way the producers
read the scripts. They were all feeling their way towards the Raven
character.
OUTTAKES: We see “Dara Tomanovich, Spin-Off Audition” where Donna L.
tells us that a large number of Canadian actresses auditioned for the
role, using scenes from “Sins of the Father” as well as a sequence of
sword choreography. From those auditions, four women were selected to be
in Highlander episodes and considered for the spin-off series. We see
Dara’s audition tape where she talks about her first death, as well as
when she threatens the bad guy in the car.
We see a black and white version, then the color version of the initial
scene in the first flashback in the episode.
EPISODE: The prologue is a flashback to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. We
see a woman stealthily avoiding Nazi soldiers to bring disguises to a
boy and his father, who is carefully recording names on a page. He
insists that keeping the list of names safe is more important than
escaping from the Nazis, and importunes his young son, Max, to use the
list to “restore our people.” The Nazis arrive and Max hides. The woman
fights them but there are too many and they kill both her and the man.
Max comes out of his hiding place only to find their dead bodies.
Duncan is playing a friendly game of bocce with an elderly gentleman,
George, who jokes about his discontent with retirement and having to
turn over his bank to his grandson. Then the man asks about whether
“it’s only good deeds that define a man’s soul?” When Duncan asks if
something his bothering him, he says he’s only catching up on his
reading of great books. Duncan walks George to his car as they discuss
his family, and Duncan feels the presence of another Immortal. As he
walks away towards his own car, George’s car explodes into flames.
We see the woman from the flashback get into a car with an older man,
announcing that, “He’s dead, Max.” And Max responds that now they will
talk to the boy, who has to know about the money.
“That money is ours!” he says intently. “We must have it back, whatever
it takes. We never forget.”
Grant, who is George’s grandson, comes to the site of the explosion with
no explanation of who might have wanted to kill his grandfather. Grant
goes to his car and the woman pops up behind him brandishing a gun. She
says she wants to finish what she started with his grandfather, that she
wants $60 million. When Grant asks what they can work out, she instructs
him to look for the name David Liener in his bank records, and gives him
a number to call.
She gets out and he drives away, then she feels another Immortal. Duncan
approaches and the two recognize each other.
There is a flashback to the French countryside in 1796. The woman is
smooching with a man at a private picnic and when he asks her to marry
him, she says ends up telling him the story of her true origins, that
she was born almost at the time of the birth of Christ and was killed by
Roman invaders, and that she is Immortal. Then another Immortal appears
and kills her lover. She is enraged, knocks the Immortal down and takes
his sword.
Duncan happens to be riding by when he hears her wail of grief and turns
toward the sound. She jumps on a horse and runs down the other Immortal,
and Duncan comes up just in time to see the weaponless man beg for his
life, watch her taunt him then take his head. Duncan is clearly troubled
by her actions, and after the Quickening is over questions her about her
‘style’ of chasing an unarmed opponent on horseback and taking his head.
However, he decides he isn’t prepared to fight her over it, and he rides
away.
Back in the present, Duncan asks if she is responsible for the explosion
and angrily says that this time the victim was a friend of his. “Then we
have a problem, don’t we?” she says calmly. Duncan officially introduces
himself and she introduces herself as Alex Raven, then drives away on
her motorcycle.
At the barge, which is still pretty bare with only a few personal items
to be seen, Duncan sits drinking tea, contemplating the katana that Joe
had importuned him to take back. We get a montage of scenes where he
receives the sword from Hideo Koto, then uses it in various significant
battles and moments. It is really a music video done to “Rising” (I
assume that is the name since I could find no information about the song
or the artist who performed it) with the refrain “you are looking like a
broken child” repeating again and again. The montage ends with the image
of Duncan killing Richie. Duncan puts the wrapped katana away in a
storage chest and the music ends with the heavy crash of the lid closing.
Duncan goes to George’s estate ask Grant some questions. Grant is packed
to leave, and Duncan asks if “she was going with you?” asking him about
Alex Raven, who he had seen getting out of Grant’s car. Grant gets
hostile, but just then Duncan feels the presence of an Immortal. He
shoves Grant out of the house and goes looking for Alex. He finds her
hovering over a bomb timer. He demands that she move away from the bomb,
but she is unperturbed and continues what she is doing which, she says,
is trying to disarm the bomb. Duncan doesn’t believe her and tries to
disarm the bomb himself, but only (barely) manages it when he ends up
following her instructions.
Duncan demands that she tell him what’s going on, she tells him to get
lost. He pulls out a kenji stick and she pulls out a sword, asking,
“That’s the best that you can do?” They spar and he effectively deflects
her blows, finally cornering her, but she shoves him away and hits an
electric line with her sword, taking out the lights, then escapes.
Duncan goes back to Grant, demanding to know what Alex Raven wants with
him. Grant tells him Alex killed his grandfather and threatened to kill
him as well because his grandfather had gotten the bank into trouble and
had turned to the Russian mafia. His grandfather finally had had enough
and “pulled the plug”, but didn’t go to the police because the scandal
would cause a run on the bank. Grant says it’s his problem, but Duncan
says he can’t handle it alone and tells him to set up a meeting with the
woman.
They meet at a beautiful promontory under some tall white free-standing
columns. She insists that she had nothing to do with the bombings, then
she draws a sword, only to get shot in the back. Grant steps out from
behind a column, claiming that he shot her to protect Duncan’s life.
Duncan quickly ushers Grant away just before Alex revives. Duncan
insists that Grant say in a hotel, claiming that he fears that the
Russian mafia might send someone else after him.
Duncan goes back to the barge, finding Alex there. He tells her he
didn’t have anything to do with her getting shot, and she claims that,
far from trying to kill Grant, she’s trying to keep him alive. Then she
introduces Max, now an elegant elderly man. Finally, Duncan hears the
whole tale (that we see through a flashback) of how Max was there when
Alex revived, how she subsequently raised him as her son and they had
spent the last 60 years trying to track down and return the savings of
Jewish families that Max’s father had transferred out of the country.
George’s bank has millions of those dollars, but had denied it. Alex was
looking for a safe in Grant’s house, where she thought records were kept
of where the money was, when she found the bomb.
When Duncan questions whether George and Grant would do such a thing,
Max says, “I have looked into the face of darkness. Do you know what
that face looks like? It looks like you. It looks like Alex. It looks
like me.” That statement moves Duncan, and he heads out with Alex close
on his heels.
He goes to the hotel where he had taken Grant but someone shoots Duncan
three times through the door and he goes down, urging Alex to chase
after whoever shot him as he dies. She does, climbing out a window and
dropping several stories to track down the shooter, tackling him, but
then someone in a car fires at her and she has to dive over a bridge to
avoid the shots and the shooter gets away.
Duncan and Alex find the safe in Grant’s house, and while Alex wants to
blow the safe up with plastique, Duncan uses certain skills a “friend”
taught him to crack open the safe, but it is empty. Grant enters,
confronting them with a gun. As Duncan and Alex snipe at each other
Grant asks, “What the hell does it take to kill you guys?”
Duncan wants to know why Grant killed his grandfather, and he tells them
it was because George had developed a conscience, that he had planned to
return the money. Two goons arrive and Grant admits that they were the
ones who also planted the bomb in the house to throw suspicion off.
The two goons escort Duncan and Alex off to kill them, but they continue
arguing about who was right, using the argument to make a move on the
henchmen and take them out. Duncan is concerned that now that Grant
thinks the two of them are dead, Max is only person who remains a threat
to him.
We find Grant holding Max at gunpoint in some old factory (I think we’ve
seen it at least once before, in “Til Death”). Max is calm, saying that
even if Grant kills him, there will be others who will come to right the
injustice. “Do you have enough bullets for all of them?”
Duncan and Alex arrive and Grant runs, shooting at each of them as they
dodge around obstacles until he runs out of bullets. The immortals step
out and Grant backs away, falling over the edge of a long drop, dying
before he can give them a clue where the records are that will allow
them to track down the hidden accounts.
Max, Alex and Duncan search the house from top to bottom for the records
of account numbers, but finally Duncan remembers George’s comment about
whether it is only good deeds who define a man’s soul, and that he was
finally catching up on his reading of “great tragedies of men and
temptation.” Duncan looks in the library shelves and finds a copy of
“Faust.” Inside, there is a yellowed paper with a list of names and
secret account numbers. There is also a written confession by George,
with an explanation of the money trail.
Max breaks down in tears, saying that for years he had been wracked with
guilt about surviving when so many had died, but now he knew why he had
lived.
Duncan and Alex are alone, lounging against Duncan’s Range Rover. Duncan
says George was a good man, kind and generous, but history was going to
remember him a different way. Alex asks how “can one survive with all
that guilt?”
“The same way we do,” Duncan answers a little grimly, asking Alex if she
can justify every person she had ever fought and every one she had ever
killed.
“If I’ve killed unnecessarily, I didn’t know so at the time.”
“We rewrite our history all the time because we have to,” Duncan
responds. “We rationalize our cruelty so we can look in the mirror and
face ourselves. Perhaps that’s what George did. Maybe that’s how he
became the man I knew.”
We next see them playing bocce, and the two of them talk a little about
their history. Alex beats Duncan, calling it “beginner’s luck.” When
Duncan asks if she’s hungry she says she’s made other plans.
“Some other time,” Duncan says with a smile.
“Some other time,” she says with a smile and a little kiss, and she
walks away.
MY COMMENTS: I actually liked this episode for a number of reasons. I
thought the Alex Raven character was a good basis for a smart, sassy,
kick-ass kind of woman who wasn’t too cutsy or a Wonder Woman type. She
was flawed, she had a temper, she didn’t know everything, but at the
same time she had enough going for her to be justifiably self-confident.
While AP seemed reluctant to endorse what was done with Duncan MacLeod’s
character in Season Six, I thought this episode was quite consistent
with what we saw at the end of Armageddon. Duncan is not quite so
ascetically lean, he has added blue to the beige monochromatic color
palette that he had been wearing, his hair has grown out a little and he
is allowing himself to relax a little.
He is, however, still living a very Spartan lifestyle. The barge has a
few pillows on the floor now, but no real furniture that invites others
to stay or that provides a place for anything other than meditation, so
we know he is still very much in a monkish, somewhat emotionally
isolated mindset. It is as though he is marking time, still healing,
unwilling to truly rejoin life.
When he considers the katana, what he sees is the trust bestowed on him
by Hideo Koto, and how he had used that blade since in a life of
unremitting violence culminating in murdering his own student. He sees
no honor in his actions so he puts the blade away out of sight.
One of the best moments in the episode is when the wonderful, elegant
actor who portrayed the older Max made his speech about seeing the face
of evil in Duncan, in Alex and in himself, and watching Duncan’s
reaction. However hard and successfully had Duncan had worked to accept
the evil within himself, it was still a bitter, bitter lesson and an
open, still-painful wound. His discussion at the end of how they rewrite
their history and rationalize their cruelty just so they can look in the
mirror is the most telling remark that he makes about his own mindset,
and what he is spending his time dwelling on.
Most of the story was about introducing Alex Raven, and the actual plot
was a straightforward mystery that had some silly plotholes, but nothing
really bothered me enough to get excited about. The wig they had on
Duncan in the flashback was icky, and the “bad” Immortal in the
flashback was poorly done, but those problems were fairly
inconsequential. On a shallow note, I am surprised they didn’t blur out
the nipples that were showing during the Quickening, but I’m glad they
didn’t.
All in all, not a great episode, but not a bad one, either. It gave us
an interesting glimpse into what Duncan’s life was like after the
upheaval of Richie’s death, Duncan’s retreat to a monastery, then his
return to confront whatever evil had bedeviled him into murdering his
beloved student. It showed him changed and still struggling with those
events, but trying to find some equilibrium and all that worked for me.
One a scale of 1 to 5, I’d give this one about a 3½.
MacGeorge
All episode commentaries available at:
http://www.wordsmiths.net/MacGeorge/episodes/indexframeset.htm
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End of HIGHLA-L Digest - 18 Mar 2005 to 24 Mar 2005 (#2005-29)
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