Snowflake Challenge: Promote A Canon: HIGHLANDER
Snowflake Challenge #9: Promote A Canon.
This post is brought to you by cold medicine. Fair warning.
Highlander is one of those 90's televsion shows that filmed in Vancouver (it also filmed in Paris). It's about people who are immortal until you cut their heads off. There is a lot of heads being cut off. When that happens, there's a lot of explosions and light effects.
It has a main pairing which, tbh, is not my OTP, but many others like it, it has the trope of the Broody One and the Snarky One. My preferred OTP is the Snarky One and The Spy. My other preferred OTP is The Snarky One And His Evil Mass Murdering Boyfriend From A Thousand Years Ago. Due to the whole immortality thing and also the whole murdering-other-immortals thing, having multiple OTPs works very nicely.
What Highlander has going for it:
- a closed canon. No surprises!
- sword fights. Sword fights are great.
- Due to the immortality thing, endless crossover bait with any canon that takes place in the past, present, or future, without having to do any work at all to make it overlap. Only the tiniest bit of work is needed with canons that don't have planet earth existing in them.
- Recurring character who snarks a lot, drinks beer, and likes to research things. You will know him from multi-fandom vids as the guy who gets housepaint painted on his nose by the other guy.
- A lot of episodes dealing with heavy themes. Plus comedy episodes. There's something for everyone.
- "There can be only one," except there's actually two Highlanders, so. The point is extensively undermined.
- The theme song is by Queen.
- If you like women who are thieves, Amanda is your friend.
- One main character is a guy who is part of a secret society devoted to spying on immortals, and is in charge of spying on the title character. There is friction.
- "Will my favorite character die?" Uh, it's possible? But due to the nature of the show, that is not necessarily a bar to them showing up again; there's a guy who is killed in the 3rd season and still shows up in the 6th.
- "Can I watch the episodes out of order?" It's a 90s television show. There's a two-parter of essential importance to the storyline and I watched the second part before I saw the first part. You can watch this show in any damn order you want.
That said, there IS long-term character and plot development. It's not heavy on the reset switch. But it's got recaps of important points before the episode starts. You might wanna watch each season's finale episodes in order. But, like, again. 90s television show. They do not assume you have seen every single preceding episode before you see the current one. (So what this really means is, if you don't like an episode, you can just skip it; if it has anything later to do with the plot, they'll let you know. Just pretend the episode you skipped was pre-empted that week by a local breaking news or a sporting event.)
How to watch? There's a youtube playlist but it says it doesn't have the pilot in it, here's the pilot. I think it used to be authentically on youtube? IDK, things get moved so much. It also used to be on hulu and it seems like it still might be, but I can't find it with a cursory googling. Cursory googling does inform me it's on Amazon Prime.
Watch the first episode and see if it's something you like! It's a good pilot. It links it back to the Highlander The Movie, with Connor MacLeod. You do not need to have seen that movie (or any of the movies, but the first one is the one with relevance).
This entry was originally posted at https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1096108.html.