HIGHLA-L Digest - 20 Jun 2005 to 21 Jun 2005 (#2005-75)
HIGHLA-L automatic digest system (LISTSERV@lists.psu.edu)
Tue, 21 Jun 2005 22:00:05 -0400
There are 3 messages totalling 328 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. Highlander animated movie trailer up
2. Season Six DVD Commentary: Black Tower (2)
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Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 00:33:17 -0400
From: Melinda Morgan <sgt_buck_Frobisher@YAHOO.COM>
Subject: Re: Highlander animated movie trailer up
What's the URL for the Magic Spring board? I'd like to pay a visit.
Mel
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Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 14:23:18 -0400
From: kageorge <kageorge1@verizon.net>
Subject: Season Six DVD Commentary: Black Tower
The htlm version of the commentary, with screen captures, can be found at:
http://www.wordsmiths.net/MacGeorge/episodes/Season6/BlackTower.htm
TPTB COMMENTARY: Director Richard Martin tells us that the fantasy was
that since the episode mostly took place on one set, it would simplify
things. But of course it took place in the parking garage, the lobby,
the hallways, the offices on multiple floors, the stairwells, etc., so
while they never had to actually move the cameras across town, it was
still pretty tricky. Because they knew were nearing the end of the whole
Highlander series, while the show had some light moments, it felt
“monumental.” (He didn’t really explain what he meant by that.) This was
an entirely “Action Jackson” show, which didn’t have the moral dilemmas
that a lot of the shows had, but it was “a good lark.” Martin says he
felt very much a part of the Highlander family and thinks he brought
some freshness and spark to the later seasons, and that he got some good
scripts with solid stories, and a great cast, and doing it and living in
Paris was, “a marvelous life experience for me.”
Adrian, he says, had a different attitude in Season Six, that he was
ready to move on, and every episode was leading up to that. (The comment
is interspersed with AP doing some very physical action scenes, which
seems a little odd since it appears that there is no sense of anything
but 100% commitment to the scene.) Martin says that the plethora of
action scenes made for long days, and it was the only time he ever had
“a twelve-page day” (evidently a normal day is shooting six to eight
pages), and that things had to be planned with military precision.
OUTTAKES: None
EPISODE: It is 3 am of a Saturday morning, and Duncan is serving sushi
in his candlelit barge to a lovely young woman whom he has escorted to
the opera. Turns out she was the one who got the tickets, and as she
puts on his tuxedo jacket for warmth, she admits she did it just to
impress him. He is gracious and attentive, admitting he hadn’t been
“getting out much lately.” He is lighting more candles while she answers
an unexpected knock on the door, and pokes her head outside when she
doesn’t see anyone there. She screams, and Duncan runs out to find a
kidnapping in process. The kidnappers fire automatic rifles, he ducks,
they drive away, leaving behind a small wind-up toy as a deliberate clue.
The next morning, Duncan visits the headquarter of Keram Enterprises,
the maker of the toy, but the building lobby is deserted – except for
the Immortal holding the bound and gagged girl at gunpoint. Duncan
recognizes the man as Devon Marek (“Keram” spelled backwards, how
subtle), his very first Immortal student.
FLASHBACK: Scotland, 1634. Riding through the woods, Duncan encounters a
relatively well-dressed Marek in a fight with a peasant. The peasant
manages to stab Marek and run away. As Marek lies bleeding to death, he
imperiously and rudely commands that the obviously low-born Duncan not
touch him, and then that he aid him. Duncan refuses to be ordered around
and starts to walk away. It is only when Marek pleads for aid that
Duncan actually turns to help him. After inspecting the wound, Duncan
declares that Marek is beyond help, and he should “make peace with your
Maker.” Sure enough, Marek dies, Duncan buries him, and starts to ride
away, only to have Marek push his way up out of the grave, coughing and
spitting. Duncan roles his eyes, clearly not liking the man, and not at
all pleased at this turn of events. Marek is pissed at Duncan for
burying him alive, while Duncan ruminates that he hadn’t recognized the
sense of someone who would become an Immortal when he felt it.
Marek looks very pleased with himself. “What you sensed,” he says
proudly, “was greatness!”
“What I sensed, you pompous ass, was immortality,” Duncan grumbles.
In the present, Marek tells MacLeod that, “I told you I’d accomplish
great things.”
“You make toys, Marek,” Duncan replies derisively. “Get over it.”
But it turns out that the kidnapping of the girl was merely bait to get
Duncan to come to him so that he could set up a scenario where Duncan
was hunted by assassins, two independents and one set of brothers, while
Duncan searched the building for the girl. A computer geek named Dice
has set up the building controls so that the building is rigged like an
adventure computer game, with various levels.
Duncan tries to insist that he and Marek just fight by the normal rules,
but Marek isn’t interested, and tells Duncan he has sixty seconds before
the game starts. As time runs out, Duncan ducks through a door, followed
by the assassins, their guns blazing away.
Dice, a slightly hyperactive computer geek, evidently believes this is
all a live-simulation of some computer game under development, but
doesn’t believe it will be all that useful since, “It’s not like he’s
*really* running for his life or anything.”
In the meantime, there’s a lot of shooting and running and chasing, and
Dice is impressed that Duncan first escapes the assassins, insisting
that it merits “bonus points” or a “level change.” Duncan takes out one
of the assassins, but gets shot in the process. Over the building’s
intercom, Marek congratulates Duncan, and tells him that if he can find
the girl before the guard outside her door “blows her brains out,” he’ll
get 10,000 bonus points, or he can turn tail and “go home.” Marek
unlocks the front lobby door to show him he can get out.
Of course, our Duncan never chooses the easy way (like leaving and
calling the police on this nutjob). While Dice is getting a little wary
of Marek’s obvious malice towards the “hero” of their simulated game,
Duncan starts breaking the various cameras he finds. Rather than let the
assassins stand and shoot him as he gets off the elevator, Duncan climbs
out and shimmies up the elevator shaft, climbing out onto the floor
where the girl is held, and making a weapon out of a push broom handle.
Dice and Marek both gloat that the hero is taking the bait, and the
ambush is set.
FLASHBACK: We see the beginning of the previous fight between Marek and
the peasant. Turns out the peasant had tried to kill a deer on Marek’s
father’s land that Marek had deliberately set out as bait and Marek
thought it would be amusing for him to then hunt the hunter. He sends
his minions away, and sets off on the chase, and when he gets stabbed
it’s really more of an accident of him falling on his own blade.
Back at the Black Tower – Marek’s tall office building – Duncan has
found a storeroom, and while the three remaining assassins are searching
door to door for him, he does a MacGuyver, mixing various cleaning
fluids, and setting up a tripwire and hiding under a raised floor. One
of the bad guys takes the bait when Duncan deliberately makes noise. The
bad guy trips the wire and there is an explosion. Bye, bye bad guy #2.
Only the brothers are left.
Dice is positively orgasmic with excitement about the success of the
“beta test.” But Marek isn’t worried, figuring the brothers are still
capable of getting MacLeod, who is now climbing through the air vents.
MacLeod falls through an office ceiling and ultimately encounters the
guard on the girl’s door, distracts him with a flying toy stabs him in
the face with his broken broomstick and rescues the girl.
In the meantime, a policeman has discovered that the front door has been
left open (from when Marek offered Duncan an opportunity to leave), and
Dice jokes that it is a little late in the game to introduce new
characters. Marek snarls at him and leaves to deal with the cop, who is
checking the otherwise deserted lobby area. It is only when Dice watches
Marek shoot down the cop in cold blood that he realizes that this is not
your standard computer game simulation. Marek comes back up to the
simulation control room, and Dice grabs his backpack, saying he didn’t
sign up for this, and, “You are a nutbar, and I am so out of here!”
But Marek puts a gun to his head, and tells him to sit back down and “be
a good little geek.”
Duncan is trying to get himself and the girl out of the building, as she
tries to get him to tell her what Marek has against him. Duncan tells
her he helped Marek once, and that “it’s a long story.”
FLASHBACK: Marek is arrogantly demonstrating that he has been trained by
the best European teachers, and tells Duncan that no matter what the
skill level of any Immortal he faces, he’ll have help in defending
himself anyway. Duncan informs him that there are rules he is
honor-bound to follow, but Marek dismisses them, saying that rules were
not made for men such as he, and that when he comes into his inheritance
he will build a fortress that no Immortal could penetrate, unless by
invitation. Then they would only be sport for him to hunt, especially
since he could kill them again and again.
Duncan tells him there will be no inheritance since he is now dead as
far as his current life is concerned, but Marek pushes Duncan off a
ledge, steals his horse, finds the peasant who stabbed him and kills him
to prevent him from telling anyone what had happened. Duncan finds him
standing over the peasant’s body and challenges him. In short order he
has run Marek through, but as he is about to take his head, Marek’s
minions arrive and Duncan has to flee (he does get his horse back).
Unfortunately for Marek, he is dead, and now the guards have witnessed it.
Duncan is moving through the building with the girl “faster than Yahoo
on a website”, observes Dice admiringly, and that “he is almost here.”
As the assassin brothers search the floor, Duncan takes the girl into an
office, removing electric cords from lamps and gathering them up. He
manages to electrify the doorknob and spill a puddle of water around the
door so that when one of the brothers grabs it, he is zapped, leaving
only one assassin to deal with. The guy shoots the hell out of the room,
then walks in, where Duncan jumps him from above, rabbit punches him,
then in a nifty fast move, snaps his neck.
Now that all the professional bad guys are dealt with, he insists that
the girl stay there while he deals with Marek. She tenderly kisses him
and tells him to be careful because he is, “very valuable to me.”
Duncan goes back to the lobby where he left his coat, and retrieves his
katana as Dice nervously mumbles that, “This isn’t good.”
Duncan arrives at the simulation room, and punches Dice when he tries to
leave, knocking him out. Marek complains that Duncan took everything
from him, but Duncan says he went to a lot of trouble to draw him out,
when “All you had to do was ask.” Then a shot rings out and Duncan
falls, looking stunned, and the girl steps through the door, gun in hand.
“Sorry, Duncan,” she purrs. “But a girl’s got to pay the bills.”
Duncan manages to throw himself out of a (conveniently open) window,
falling dramatically about twenty stories to the lobby below.
The girl casually demands her payment since, “nobody could survive a
fall like that.” Marek pulls out his gun and puts his arm around her,
agreeing with her.
Dice struggles to rise, seeing on the monitors that both Duncan and the
girl are splatted messily onto the lobby floor. Dice nervously heads to
the elevator to escape, only to encounter a furious, limping, injured
Duncan (who has been shot twice, been in several fights and fallen about
twenty stories), who grabs him around the neck as Dice insists that he
thought it was a simulation. Duncan grimly tells him that “people are
dead. Real people,” but ultimately decides that the geek is harmless and
tells him to leave. Dice insists that Marek will find him and then it
will be, “Game over.” Duncan says he’ll help Dice if Dice will help him.
Marek has cautiously entered the lobby, to find Duncan’s body gone, so
he hurriedly heads back to the elevators to get back to the simulation
room. However, Duncan and Dice have turned the tables on him, and now it
is Duncan in control of the game. Duncan tells Dice to leave, and Marek
arrives. Duncan says that now they will have to play by his rules and in
very short order he has disarmed Marek. Marek taunts him about the hero
killing an unarmed man, and Duncan lets him pick up his blade, but then,
once again, in relatively short order, Duncan has gutted him and taken
his head.
We observe the quickening on monitors that multiply until there are a
whole wall of them.
We see officials carrying away bodies as MacLeod and Dice confer on the
street outside the building, with Duncan telling Dice that, as far as
the officials are concerned, MacLeod was never there, “not even in your
wildest imagination.”
“Man,” says Dice, “I never go there.”
FOOTNOTE: The Watcher Chronicle notes that Lawrence “Dice” Dicente was
Valedictorian of the 1999 Watcher Academy class, and was giving “one of
the most passionate graduation speeches in the 108 year history of the
Watcher Training Academy Tuesday night when he hit a snag he didn’t
anticipate. The portable generator providing power for the graduation
ceremony on the South Lawn hiccupped, and Valedictorian Dice disappeared
mid-sentence. The power surge shorted out a circuit in an elaborate
holographic laser setup Dice had installed to cover his absence at the
graduation ceremony. Academy administration was less than happy with
Dice’s stunt and later recommended Tribunal disciplinary action when
they learned Dice had staged the elaborate hoax in order not to miss his
weekly “X-Files” chat on the internet.”
MY COMMENTARY: Well, it wasn’t awful. It didn’t feel much like a
Highlander episode, though. It was all show, no substance, lots of
watching Marek watch Duncan creeping around the building or engaging in
short, intense action scenes. We never even learn the girl’s name, but
you have to speculate that Duncan must be getting more and more wary of
*any* relationships, since they all seem to go south so quickly.
Unfortunately Marek was not a particularly malevolent bad guy, just a
jerk with a serious case of delusional self-importance. Dice could have
been interesting, but the actor was too old for the part and exaggerated
all the geeky stereotypes, so he was never much more than a cardboard
character.
Duncan looked good in the flashbacks and rode his horse well. <g>
As for the believability factor – there was almost none. There were too
many “gimme a break” moments for me, like the conveniently open window,
and the stereotype bad guy assassins. I know, I know – it was intended
to be more amusing than threatening, since we all knew from the
beginning that Duncan would prevail.
Maybe that was the problem. I never felt like Duncan was in any real
jeopardy at all. It occurs to me that by this time in the development of
the series, in order to be a plausible threat to Duncan, the bad guys
have to be Big Time Major League Bad Guys, and Marek sure as heck
doesn’t fill that bill. At this point, the only way to really set up
genuine life-threatening tension is to combine a physical threat with an
emotional one (which they do in TB/NTB), so this particular episode was
doomed to mediocrity from the start.
In essence, they had set the bar too high in seasons four and five. The
Highlander audience expected moral dilemmas, tough questions asked, with
no simple, easy answers offered. Showing such a simplistic episode with
such cartoonish characters to an audience expecting a Talmudic
discussion is bound to generate a negative response.
MacGeorge
Episode Commentary Index at:
http://www.wordsmiths.net/MacGeorge/episodes/indexframeset.htm
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Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 14:57:09 EDT
From: Degruy@aol.com
Subject: Re: Season Six DVD Commentary: Black Tower
<<Dice could have been interesting, but the actor was too old for the part
and exaggerated
all the geeky stereotypes, so he was never much more than a cardboard
character.>>
Geekiness has age limits? Who knew?
As to being a stereotype I am sure if they wanted to continue with his
character that would have been dealt with. More than one recurring character
started off as a stereotype and went on to be written better later.
Edward deGruy
Student of Humanity
@}----------
"Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in
a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside,
thoroughly used up, totally worn out, & loudly proclaiming- "WOW!! What a Ride!" -
Bill Hicks
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End of HIGHLA-L Digest - 20 Jun 2005 to 21 Jun 2005 (#2005-75)
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