When precisely it happened I can’t really say. Perhaps it was back when we Australians first got cable, at which point I was exposed to a plethora of shows that were not deemed ratings-worthy and so were hard to find on the main channels, and certainly not in any kind of encore performance. These weren’t bad television shows, but they were rarely good ones, either. But they were strangely watchable on an afternoon or at 2AM, long after I should have just given up for the night. And so it was that I became a fan of Highlander: The Series.

No Connor MacLeod in sight (bar the occasional guest appearance), just his ‘cousin’, who sounded even less Scottish (if that was possible). However, you could still guarantee a head getting knocked off once a week. As for the rest of the storyline: the weird old guy who likes to watch (now that doesn’t sound creepy), a chick with a fetish for sharp edges, and a four-thousand year old Immortal who was at some point one of the Biblical Four Horsemen… well, it was somehow passable.

I had seen the movies when I was much younger and I had a passing remembrance of them. The original Highlander movie would occasionally get a re-run, which I’d watch. The others wouldn’t. They would never get mentioned in the TV series either. Where was the continuity? They couldn’t have been that bad, otherwise the show would never have been made, right? I endeavored to investigate this.

A short trip to the store and approximately an hour and a half later, I remembered why I should never question anything and should stay inside my small room with four walls, curled up in the fetal position, slowly rocking myself saying “everything will be okay, everything will be okay, everything will be okay...” I believe Captain Willard said it best: “Never get off the boat.”

So, with our moral out of the way, I can now ‘review’ Highlander II. Two minutes in and it has already thrown away the playbook. Despite the first movie spending half of its time on Connor learning he’s an Immortal, and a Spanish Sean Connery (?) turning up to teach him how to be an Immortal, we learn via flashback that ACTUALLY they knew each other all along and are from ANOTHER PLANET, the desert world Zeist, where they were leading a rebel group against the despot, General Katana, (Michael Ironside). Anyone still with me? When they got captured, their PUNISHMENT for high treason was to be sent to Earth, to live a free life. Oh, and to become immortal. You can imagine what the General’s reponse should be (“WTF, High Priests?! Come on, at least let me go Gitmo on their asses!”), but for whatever reason he goes along with it, they get beamed off-planet, and he keeps ruling with an iron fist. So everyone’s happy.

The catch: the only way they can get back to Zeist is to be the last ‘Immortal’ on Earth, which involves playing The Game of chopping everybody else’s head off, at which point they will become mortal again and can choose to return to the homeworld or grow old on Earth (hence the first movie).

If you got through those last two paragraphs without considering seppuku, you’re doing good so far.

Back to the present, which is now 2024, where Earth’s inhabitants live in squalor under an artificial ozone layer, built in part by the now old and mortal Connor (as his ‘prize‘ from the first movie, he decided to stay on Earth), but controlled by an evil Dr Cox, no wait, I mean businessman David Blake (John C. McGinley). Then cue brief scene where General Katana decides AFTER ALL THIS TIME that he now wants to kill Connor, to stop him returning to Zeist. This ‘triggers‘ The Game again, Connor is back to being young and immortal once more, and so we’re back where we started: There Can Be Only One.

I could go on about how absolutely ridiculous this all is (and I will shortly), how it goes against almost everything from the last movie, except some bits that it bizarrely decides are canon, but I could never quite say it as well as the characters in the movie say it. How about this witty repartee:-

Louise: Okay, now let me just see if I can get this straight. You come from another planet, and you're mortal there, but you're immortal here until you kill all the guys from there who have come here... and then you're mortal here... unless you go back there, or some more guys from there came here, in which case you become immortal here... again.
Connor: Something like that.

Or even this gem, between Connor and General Katana (and us) about the General’s motives:-

Katana: You’re not coming back to Zeist, Connor.
Connor: I never planned to.
Katana: What do you mean?
Connor: After of all this time I was ready to kick back, grow old and die. Then you send those Thugs down here. You changed things! And I’m now I’m back to square one, immortal again!

I’m all for some Fourth Wall banter, but I suspect this was unintended. There is so much more wrong with this movie, but I’ll try to stick to the main issues:-

1. You’ve just seen an old man you’ve never met get hit by thunderbolts and turned into a young man after brutally killing two others. He then turns to you, says “I'm Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. I was banished from the Planet Zeist 500 years ago... and I cannot die”. What do you do? Have sex with him of course.

2. Sean Connery. What, now you’re some sort of magician? All Connor has to do is call your name and you come back to life? Did you find a loop hole in the whole immortal ‘game’?

3. Our two Immortals drive their car through a little checkpoint and get riddled with hundreds of bullets, leaving the car looking like metallic Swiss cheese. The woman hiding in the trunk? Not a scratch.

4. The WHOLE ozone layer subplot. I have no idea where that was going, and don’t care to. (I do wonder, not that I'm a climate skeptic, if we'll look back in 30 years and wonder what The Day After Tomorrow was thinking as well).

I’m getting even more worked up, so I’ll stop (and so should you if you think about watching this). It does make you wonder though how the TV series then was able to get made only a year later. I can only assume that it was with an ironclad promise to never mention Zeist or Sean Connery’s Ramirez ever, ever again. And thankfully, they didn’t.

  -- William Cashin