WATCH FOR FALLING SHOW-BABBLE
BFLG="Blue-Faced Love God," aka Methos of the Horsemen, whom I use as a shortcut to talk about Methos's inner Evil Methos.
ROG="Really Old Guy," the modern Methos we all know and love. (I wonder how far back you'd have to go before he became Kinda Old Guy. After all, I'm under the impression that he's just the oldest *surviving* immortal, like there *were* immortals born before him, but I don't remember if canon ever tells us for sure.)
I wanted to say something with this vid. And I'm not really sure now what it is, but I know that I wanted to explore Methos's psyche, his character, his relation to Kronos, and how those things are all intertwined. The figure of Kronos in particular is a thorny issue. He can serve as a shortcut to Methos's Dark Side, but he's also a character separate from Methos. And I think I'm conflating a bit the Kronos in the real world and the Kronos that looms in Methos's mind and memory. Which is okay, since Methos conflates them too, and this vid is from Methos's POV. (Err, except during the last two quickenings, where it's sometimes from the POV of the Kronos Quickening (or psychotic split personality - oh wait, we already have one of those, hi BFLG) within Methos. But still, that's a part of Methos, so I guess it's still Methos POV? Man, this is weird.)
I think Methos actually has a much more fascinating "dark quickening" than Duncan's. Except his is more internal - the weight of his own life taking its toll, not the external evil of other immortals' quickenings influencing him. His is a much more subtle and interesting temptation. When you've lived 5000 years, done everything, been everyone, why *shouldn't* you do whatever the fuck you want? What's to stop you, really, when you've learned by now exactly how the world works, how people and societies work? After you've learned by hard experience that nothing you do to change the world makes any lasting difference and any people whose lives you may change for the better just die and die and die, there's a large temptation to just stop trying to do anything but please yourself, and screw the rest of the world.
That's not to say that Methos gives into the temptation all the time, but it's always there, lurking and caged in the basement of his psyche.
I guess the shortcut to say what this vid is about is, to use cheeky fannish terminology, that it's about how Methos maintains the balance between his inner ROG and BFLG.
I'm kinda ambivalent about the way that I've treated Methos's obsession with survival here. I have Methos asking Duncan "Can you save me from myself?" while pulling Duncan's sword to his throat, essentially asking Duncan to kill him. It's true that Methos when we first met him offered Duncan his head as a Grand Sacrifice for the rest of Immortals and Watchers (and for the happiness of normal mortals if ignorance is bliss). And he certainly takes chances with his life when dealing with stubbly!Duncan. But his overarching motivation in the Kronos storyline and elsewhere was to "live, grow stronger, fight another day." Survival. He appeared to be sacrificing his prinicples and friendships for survival when the Horsemen came back: "I go with the winner." How do we reconcile these two apparently conflicting acts?
I'm not much with the Highlander meta, so I've never read a really good character analysis, but just my humble take on it is here. (Because hi, work is so boring, what else do I have to do but write Highlander meta and make random lists about archetypes personified by Daniel Jackson and Rand al'Thor?)
When we first meet Methos, he's tired. He wants to die, and Duncan is a good way to do it without admitting to himself that he's giving up just because he wants to - he maintains still the illusion that he will make a difference in this world, even if only through his death. Interacting with MacLeod and his menagerie, along with Alexa, brings back some of his fire and reconnects him with life. It has been two centuries since he'd taken a challenge the first time we meet him, and maybe he has protectively walled himself off from really experiencing life, from feeling (since Byron?).
Then when the Horsemen come back, Methos's newly reawakened feelings are seduced by the memory of pleasure and power, but he uses the excuse of survival to justify his actions. His true motivations are a strange mix, IMO. I think he does consciously believe that he wants to survive. He doesn't want Kronos to hurt MacLeod or Joe, so he has to separate himself from them completely, and survival is a reason they would accept for his defection to the Horsemen. But although Methos gently informs Cassandra about her Stockholm Syndrome, I believe the great sufferer of Stockholm Syndrome here (whether he knows it or not) is Methos. Kronos has kidnapped him, held him prisoner, threatened his life, threatened his friends, and given him no hope of future freedom. So he also feels some Stokholmy affection for Silas and Kronos, and part of him doesn't want MacLeod to hurt *them*.
Then why doesn't he just get himself killed, make a grand sacrifice like he was prepared to do to save the world from Kalas? Why does he actively reunite the Horsemen, not just going along with a madman's wishes out of fear for his life, but actively giving the madman more ammunition and power? Why does he defy the madman and risk his life to talk to Mac in secret? I think it goes back to his stubborn hope that his life (or at least death) will have meaning. He surely knows that this hope is an illusion, a self-aware self-delusion, but that doesn't stop it from having power. What else is there to tie together 5000 years of memories but a lingering instinct that there must be more than this endless endurance, must be some kind of payoff?
Methos gets the Horsemen back together for the purpose of eliminating them all in one fell swoop, making a difference in the world by removing an evil for which he feels partly responsible. He manipulates Mac to help with the eliminating, but he wants Mac to survive as part of Methos's good deed, the one good man he's saving who will protect all the innocents (like Cassandra) from evils like the Horsemen. The whole thing is of course a desperate kamikaze mission for Methos, and one that he probably thought he wouldn't survive. That was the point. This death would expiate any guilt from the Stockholm Syndrome, guilt from his own evil acts as part of the Horsemen and elsewhere, guilt from his own temptation to be like Kronos himself and live for nothing but his own desires. And finally, this death would end Methos's bleak habitual insistence on existence for existence's sake, and end the potential for him to do any more
harm to himself or others.
He says to MacLeod, "If I judged him [Kronos] worthy to die then I judged myself the same way. And I wanted to live. I still do." Here we see again his Stockholm-induced affection for Kronos and, more tellingly, how he equates Kronos with himself. This is why in the vid I felt it was appropriate to elide the real Kronos and the Kronos as Inner Evil within Methos's mind (while in Methos POV). Methos himself in canon believes that he's no better than Kronos, that he has a darkness like Kronos's that he's always hiding from the world, and for which he deserves to be punished.
(This is the reason Methos is so adamant about MacLeod's self-crucifixion in the Steven Keane episode. Mac's darkness is nowhere near as deep as Methos's. Mac doesn't deserve to die; Methos does. And if Mac dies for his paltry sins and Methos lives, then Methos would have to live with more guilt and the reaffirmation that there is no meaning or justice in the universe. Also, Mac was Methos's one good man that he saved from the Horsemen, at the time thinking it would cost Methos his life. Mac doesn't get to just throw that gift away. I think Methos believes that he accesses the good in himself through Mac, just like he accesses the evil in himself through Kronos. (See what happens to NTB!Methos.) This is where the first "Can you save me from myself?" comes from, wherein Methos is asking Mac to help save Methos from Kronos by killing Kronos IRL, but he's also asking Mac to be the little angel on Methos's shoulder to combat the Kronos devil on the other side. [Timeout to say that picturing Mac as any kind of Angel of Goodness makes me feel slightly ill.])
If Methos killed Kronos, he would have to kill himself too. Which is just what he was trying to do, even if he didn't fully admit it to himself.
In the second part of this statement, "I wanted to live," he's rearticulating to Mac his previous position that the desire for survival was his only motivation throughout. It's a motivation that has the benefit of being believable by Mac, lets Methos punish himself a little (since he didn't get to die) by being seen by his friend as a mercenary traitor, and lets Methos get away with never explaining his true motivations (which he may not fully understand himself).
I do think that Methos's desire to live is genuine, as far as he knows. I think this kamikaze impulse is based on subconscious desires that sporadically surface.
And I think that it's telling just how often Methos articulates his strong will to live, ("I still do.") as if he's trying to convince himself that it's genuine. Why does his will to survive have to be so strong - and so strongly articulated? What is he overcoming with it?
Actions always speak louder than words, and Methos at least thrice in the series seems perfectly willing to be killed. The first time is when he offers his head to Duncan, discussed above. The second time is is when the crystal-hunting watchers capture him and are about to chop his head off. They tie his hands with *rope* and push on his shoulder to make him go to his knees and are generally unconvincing adversaries. Methos has already been exposed as an immortal, so these two who know his secret *have* to die. And don't tell me that a little rope will stop him. Yet when the killing stroke is about to come down, we see Methos squeeze his eyes shut.
This is not the resolve of a man about to strike and make his escape (and the only reason besides stupidity or a willingness to die that Methos wouldn't make them at least have to gather the resolve to shoot him first to stop his struggles before they behead him is that he has an escape plan). It's true the squeezed eyes could be a sign of Methos screwing up the resolve to execute a plan that involves killing, but they really do look like a man preparing for death. So that rules out escape plan; we already know that Methos isn't stupid, leaving only willingness to die. The third time is later on, after the Horsemen, when Cassandra moves to behead Methos, and he doesn't try at all to stop her. As discussed above, at that point, he would welcome death.
But Fenlings! you say. Methos always runs away from immortals! He's all "I don't like to fight." Well, yes, that's true. But I think he runs away from confrontation not because he's afraid he'll be beaten, but because he's afraid he'll *let himself* be beaten. I mean, the idea to offer Duncan his head just didn't come out of nowhere. At least unconsciously Methos knows that his will to survive isn't nearly as strong as he likes to pretend.
It seems strange that I'm realizing as I type this that the poster boy for survival (so much so that it's almost a caricature in fandom) actually has a death wish. But, at the risk of evoking maudlin Queen lyrics, you try living 5000 years and then see how healthy your psyche is.
Elastic immortal brains notwithstanding, heh.