"From the dawn of time we came, moving silently down through the centuries. Living many secret lives, struggling to reach the time of the gathering, when the few who remain will battle to the last. No one has ever known we were among you...until now."
With these words, spoken by none other than Sean Connery and followed by a friggin' awesome Queen song, the Highlander saga began...and continued a lot longer than it probably should have, as one awful movie sequel after another followed in the wake of the original film. However, unlike the movies, I loved the spinoff Highlander television - so much so that it's my favorite TV show of all time. (Or at least since I started college, watching reruns of it on the Sci-Fi Channel, back when it was called that.) And as you can tell from the title of this blog, it's also the subject of my 100th INCspotlight review!
It all began with Russell Mulcahey's 1986 cult classic film Highlander, starring Christopher Lambert, Clancy Brown, Roxanne Hart, and Sean Connery. The story had been conceived by Gregory Widen during a trip to Scotland, inspired by the idea of a medieval knight still being alive today. Widen wrote - and sold - a screenplay based on this premise while he was still an undergraduate film student at UCLA. (In fact, he wrote it as a class assignment.) The end result was a visually striking, endearing fantasy about a mysterious race of Immortals of unknown origin. They're seemingly ordinary humans until their immortality is triggered by a premature death - in battle, an accident, that sort of thing. They don't age once they become Immortal, they heal from any injuries (except for stuff like missing limbs and injured vocal cords), and they can't have children. While this means they get a lifetime to accumulate knowledge, experiences, and wealth, it also means living in secret to conceal their gift, and watching their mortal loved ones grow old and die.
When I originally posted this on Channel Awesome, it was only in two parts. Now that I'm hosting it on my own site, I've decided to split it into three instead. So now that we've done with the preliminaries, it's time for the main event, which now commences in Part 2 of this review!