Highlander
Transcripts:

DVD Extras

 

SEASON ONE

 

1x01: The Gathering

Location: Base of Burrard St Bridge (where DM pulls CM from the water)

Bill Panzer:

Hi, I'm Bill Panzer, Executive Producer of Highlander... and the first season of Highlander, what a grand adventure it was for all of us. The first episode... we tried to connect the Highlander legend from the films, in the person of Christopher Lambert, with the new Highlander, in the person of Adrian Paul, and we wanted to expand the notion that Highlander was a broader spectrum than we had in the films. To that end we shot here at the Burrard Street Bridge in Vancouver for the final fight of that first episode. It was our first Quickening. It was, you know, kind of the shake-down cruise of a television series. We discovered that, if you were paying REALLY close attention, that Richie Ryan -- Stan Kirsch -- was the potential of being an Immortal, had the potential of being an Immortal. But you had to watch real close, because we weren't sure ourselves that he was going to become an Immortal. It was the kick off to, you know, six years of exciting television for us behind the camera, and hopefully for you guys out there.

In doing the first episode, we had a lot of firsts, a lot of things we had to explore. We had to get across the idea that there would be flashbacks in Highlander, that these Immortals had known each other in the past. If you were a fan of the movie, you already knew this, but if you were just coming to us kind of cold, we had to make that clear -- that these guys lived for hundreds, thousands of years, and they've been in contact in the past. We had to set up the fact that Connor MacLeod knew Duncan MacLeod and in fact had been his mentor when he was a newborn Immortal. We needed to set up the fact that Slan Quince had known Connor in the past and bore him some enmity. And we needed to establish what kind of a Quickening we were going to have. In the movies, you know, we had a lot more license, but this being television in the early nineties, we couldn't have a lot of body parts flying around. So we tried to choose something that created the idea that somebody got their head cut off, but that it was more like a jolt of light came out of the head and the lightning flew around and, you know, it was -- it was less violent than the, uh, than the movie version. And then we had to deal with the concept of Immortals being able to sense each other's presence from a reasonable distance. We call it "the buzz". That word is never used, but that's how it's referred to in the scripts. And we had to start with something. We started with a buzz, and it gradually evolved from this first episode, over the course of the next hundred and eighteen episodes, as the directors and the post-production staff, the, uh, the music people, the sound effects people, all gradually honed the buzz to where it became kind of a defining Highlander moment.

1x02: Family Tree

Bill Panzer:

Sometimes when you're writing an episode, and the actor has to go from point A to point B on kind of an excursion to find something out, it becomes impractical, impossible, too expensive to have the full unit go along with the actor to take him from point A to point B. In this case, Richie is trying to find the guy he thinks is his father. So he has to go out on the street and ask people if they know Joe Scanlon. In order to do that, Don Paonessa, a cameraman, and a couple of people, four people, and Richie -- Stan Kirsch -- went out and wandered around the seedy side of Vancouver, and they would stop the car, jump out, Richie would do a shot, and then they would jump back in the car and go away. Kind of gorilla film-making. So they needed somebody to react to all of this, but we couldn't afford to pay anybody or script anything or get them involved. So they stop the car, Don and the cameraman get out, and they start rolling. Richie gets out of the car and walks up to some complete stranger on the street and says, "Hey, have you, uh... do you know where the nearest McDonalds is?" And the guy turns to him and starts pointing down the street, like, "Yeah, there's the McDonalds down there." And when -- in the script, what he's doing, of course, is saying, "Have you seen Joe Scanlon? I think he's my father." So you get the shot of the guy pointing down the street, perfectly naturally, Richie's saying thank you, exiting shot, and we get a little closer to point B than we started at point A.

1x03: Road Not Taken

Location: Outside Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Park

Bill Panzer:

This is Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Park. It is a monument, a tribute to the great Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, leader of the Chinese people, and it's in the middle of downtown Vancouver, hustle and bustle all around, but yet, when you walk through these doors, it's an island of peace and tranquility. But for Duncan MacLeod, it's a place where he discovers that one of his old friends has been making kind of, uh, super-human speedballs, and what we see in this episode that we haven't seen before is truly how great Adrian Paul's martial arts skills are, as he fights bad guy after bad guy, him doing all of his own stuff -- there's no stuntmen involved -- and the guys he's fighting are also skilled martial artists.

1x04: Innocent Man

Bill Panzer:

"Innocent Man," the story of a man almost convicted of a crime he didn't commit. Two incredibly great performances: John Novak as the sheriff, one of our really good bad guys, and Vincent Schiavelli, who we were fortunate enough to have come to us directly from his fantastic performance in, uh, "Amadeus" and, I mean, brought such pathos and such humanity to the poor, brain-damaged character that was, uh, we thought, wonderful to watch. A story of injustice, and who better to tell that story than the director, Jorge Montesi, who himself had spent many years as a political prisoner in jail in Chile. And he gave us some wonderful moments in the fight scene, using wide-angle lenses so we could look up the blade of the sword and at the actor, something we hadn't done before, and his decapitation was one of the very best we ever did. I mean, he, it was -- even though you saw nothing, it was so brutal that when we all were watching it in the dailies, everybody simultaneously went, "Ugh!"

1x05: Free Fall

Bill Panzer:

In the first Highlander movie, we kind of started, uh, we kind of had an idea that rock-and-roll was a good thing for Highlander, which is why Queen was so closely involved in the scoring of the picture, and some of those songs, of course, we used in the series, and they've become kind of like Highlander anthems -- "Who Wants to Live Forever," "Princes of the Universe." So in the series, we thought it might be fun if we had, every once in a while, a rock star to play a friend of MacLeod's, a baddie, whatever. And the first one was Joan Jett. Now Joan is like hard-core rock-and-roll. Great, great lady. And all of the actors and people who come up and work on Highlander in Vancouver would generally get a choice of staying at the Sutton Place Hotel, a great hotel; the Pan-Pacific, another great hotel; the Viva Towers, an apartment complex that was also quite lovely. Joan didn't want to stay in any of these places, and she said she'd let us know when she got here, where she was going to stay. So we get a phone call and go over to see her at this hotel. Now, this is not a hotel that we would have ever thought a rock-and-roll star would stay in. And Joan said, "No, no." Uh, we're sitting in a bar that you probably would never want to go into in your life. And she said, "No, no. I talked to the band, and they said this place was cool." We said, "You know, Joan, you could stay at one of these other places." And she said, "No, No. This is cool. This is -- I'm happy here." And, I mean, it was like no pretention, it was just, it was fun.

And we got to shooting the final fight scene between her and Duncan MacLeod on the beach at night. And when you -- when you're shooting during the day, we have an expression that you're 'losing the light', which means that it's a day scene and the sun goes down and it's over. Well, with night shooting, obviously, it's the reverse. You, uh, you're shooting at night, and 'losing the light' means when the sun is coming up. So with the sun coming up, uh, the director just managed to get what he needed to tell the story of the scene, and when Don Paonessa and I looked at the stuff, we said, "Maybe this would be fun to turn this into kind of a rock video, since we had -- you know, it was Joan, and we had music and, uh, so we really stylized it and did a different kind of fight scene than we had done up until that date. So, thank you, Joan.

(I'm in awe at the *spin* he puts on this. Reading between the lines, the fight scene was crap and they realized the only way they could make it work was to turn it into a music video.)

1x06: Bad Day in Building 'A'

Location: Pacific Central Station, Vancouver (not episode-related)

Bill Panzer:

Every once in a while, when shooting episodic television, for some reason the bean-counters decide you need to do a show in six days instead of seven days. What we look for then is something called a 'bottle show,' which means the whole thing can be done in one place, minimum number of actors, and you can shoot it in six days... or most of it. So "Bad Day at Building A" was, uh, that was how it came about, and it actually happened. We shot the whole thing in and around a courthouse -- a structure that looked like a courthouse -- and we managed to get the stuff done 'cause it was so contained.

The other... the thing that, though, that we always try to find in a Highlander episode is something that could not happen if the hero was not Immortal. So the Immortal element in this is, of course, is MacLeod making sure that he becomes the sacrifice. That he becomes the one who's killed on television. That he becomes the one, because he's -- he's of course, not going to die; he is going to come back and save the day. And that's what... you know, you try to find that element in each episode that separates it just from a traditional action-adventure, romantic series. This could not happen if we were not dealing with a man who is Immortal.

1x07: Mountain Men

Bill Panzer:

"Highlander" is first and foremost a romantic action-adventure show, and this episode, we thought, captured the idea of the romance, because the guy who kidnaps Tessa falls in love with her. We thought there was action and adventure in the Canadian Rockies, because one of the great things about this part of Canada is that the terrain is so beautiful, so incredibly varied, and we tried to take advantage of it wherever we could. And finally, we have the Immortal component, which is really, uh, in two ways. One is that because MacLeod has been alive for so long and lived in much rougher times, he was able to survive in the wilderness in a way most people never could. And then, because of course he's Immortal, it was possible for him to take that header off the cliff and fool the guys, the kidnappers, into thinking that he was dead and he gets to come back like Rambo.

1x08: Deadly Medicine

Location: north end of Pacific Central Station, Vancouver (not episode-related)

Bill Panzer:

Again, you know, when you talk about the difference between movies and television -- movies, you just have a lot more time, and when you get to something like stunts, which no matter how simple or how many times you've seen them or done them, always have an element of real danger involved, time is something that can make everybody a little nervous. And when MacLeod gets run over by the car, we only had the time to do that one time, and the stunt guy threw a little extra something in it, and I don't think anybody has ever been hit by a car better than that guy. And we all thought that -- we all thought he was hurt, and... to the best of my knowledge, he seems to be fine.

The character of Amanda -- the character of RANDI, played by Amanda Wyss, who was an ongoing character in the first season -- was something that we tried to do as a continuity from the first movie. The idea of taking a reporter who -- or, in the movie's case, a policeman, an investigator, who kind of gets into 'what's going on here; things don't seem to add up,' and in the case of the series, being thrown into events in which MacLeod participated in kind of an odd way, was a terrific idea for us, and it kind of helped give a sense that we were continuing with the Highlander universe as it existed in the movie, because really that's all the universe there was at that time, and then gradually, as we got into the other seasons, the character became a little bit limiting, had said pretty much, we thought, about all that she had to say, and we gradually phased her out.

(...'as we got into the other seasons' & 'gradually phased her out'? She was in six of the first 13 episodes of season one, then MacLeod & Co. head for Paris and she's never seen again. That's not exactly what I would call 'phasing out'.)

1x09: The Sea Witch

Location: seawalk NW of Granville Bridge

Bill Panzer:

One of the great challenges of making "Highlander" in Vancouver is that it is very different -- difficult -- to do a flashback without just shooting it in close-up and trying to, you know, create something out of wardrobe and a few props. Our production designer, Steve Geaghan, was continually amazing, because every time we'd ask him, "Steve, can we do this?" he would say, "Yes." Well, we said, "Steve, we need to do kind of a World War II period, Eastern Europe / Russia, something like that, with a hundred refugees going onto a... being exiled, uh, supposedly rescued by MacLeod and being kind of betrayed. Uh, can we do that?" And he said, "Yeah. Plus we'll have cars driving up and we'll have a whole thing. You can even have a wide shot." And sure enough, four days later, when we arrived at the location, everything had been dressed, everything had been organized, I mean, and it looked like, as you've seen, it looked like Eastern Europe in that time period.

The other interesting thing, I think, about this episode is that we had to deal with what happens when an Immortal is decapitated by something other than the sword of the Immortal he was fighting. And, you know, because in this case Voshin gets chopped up by the propellers. So what we thought was, as long as an Immortal is present, he gets the Quickening, and if there is no Immortal present, then the Quickening just goes to 'the source'.

And finally, the issue of -- one of the issues of Immortality that is intriguing is why does somebody choose to spend their mortal life with someone who won't grow old and with whom they can't have children. And it's one thing to have this as an intellectual conversation. It's another thing when you're put in close proximity to a child, and for Tessa, when she comes in contact with the little girl and starts to kind of fall in love with the little girl, it brings home in a very powerful way what exactly she's giving up to be with MacLeod. This is a story that could only be told in the context of "Highlander".

1x10: Revenge Is Sweet

Bill Panzer:

So it was time for another person from the rock-and-roll world, and we were really lucky that we got Vanity, you know, fresh with her triumphs of Prince, and she came up to Vancouver and learned to use a sword. That was something else, you know, most of these people -- most of them... NONE of them -- really had ever used a sword before, and the swordmaster had -- Bob Anderson, in this first season -- had... you know, he may have taught Errol Flynn, and he may have taught Connor MacLeod, but having a day, maybe, to work with these people and have them produce a creditable swordfight was not so easy. But Vanity was game, and, uh, she gave Adrian a pretty good tussle. But then we came to the Quickening -- running out of time, same story, only this time we're outside. Outside is not great for Quickenings. Outside during the day is not great for Quickenings. Quickenings like night. Quickenings like the special effects they can do. Quickenings do not like blowing up flower pots. This is something we learned from experience here and we never did it again.

1x11: See No Evil

Bill Panzer:

Brian Clemens had an interesting idea -- that a present day mortal, uh, psycopath would be killing women in the same way that, seventy years ago, an Immortal psycopath had killed them. He was copycatting them, not knowing anything about the Immortality, but MacLeod, of course, did know about it. So in order to kind of get a sense of what -- of the time difference and to set this thing back into the Twenties, we decided we'd try and make it look a little bit like a silent movie. And we had -- we shot at the Orpheum Theatre, which is a wonderul, great old theatre here that's, that has been used -- we've used any number of times for any number of things. And in order to make it seem a little more authentically of that period, we changed the color timing so that even though we shot it in color, we made it, uh, on the screen in black and white. Now, this was something that we like to do, is to give the flashbacks a slightly different visual look, although black-and-white is a little more than 'slight'. We try to get a little different visual look so you can get a sense of both the period and to separate it from the story in the present.

And because this was a real theatre, and a real OLD theatre, doing the Quickening in there was a little hairy, because any kind of pyrotechnics were -- the kind that we used outside are dangerous, they're... they're flammable, they're fireworks. And we had to use a whole new system of pyro to accomplish this safely inside, and believe me, everybody was kind of happy when we walked out of the theatre without burning it down.

And because MacLeod was not -- because this guy in the present was not an Immortal, uh, you know, MacLeod's sense of justice was certainly, uh, outraged, but somehow it took Tessa to step out of her characteristic role and be the one who dropped the ax on the guy. And this was, as you can imagine, in television, this was kind of an unusual idea, and the -- there was a subject of a lot of meetings with David Abramowitz and myself and occasionally people from the various networks, domestic and foreign who were involved, but at the end, we did it, and we're glad we did.

1x12: Eyewitness

Location: near science dome

Bill Panzer:

Well, this script was from one of our favorite writers, David Tynan, who gave us a great deal of ideas, quality scripts, and also was around on the set for a lot of these things to polish the dialogue when occasionally the actors would have a dispute. The science center, which is a Vancouver landmark, served as the backdrop for the Quickening in this episode. The director had time only to shoot part of the scene, only to shoot the close-ups of the actors fighting and, uh, exchanging dialogue and, you know, just the stuff with the principles. Some weeks later, we realized that the close shots did not a Quickening make, and we sent ever-trusty Don Paonessa out in the field to shoot wider shots of the science center. Also, to shoot the lamps getting allegedly chopped off, blown off, by the actors when they were fighting and by the lightning from the Quickening. And the lamps were pretty real and were a little bit dangerous and everybody's wearing masks, and somebody -- people were getting a little exuberant in the way these things were rigged to fly off the poles, and there was a line of parked cars and, I don't know -- seven or eight cars had their windshields pitted, had to be replaced.

It's another example of how, without people coming behind later, after the scene has been roughly put together, to kind of mop up and add shots that are required, uh, you just don't have a chance to get these things done on a television schedule.

1x13: Band of Brothers

Bill Panzer:

When you arrive in a new city to film a tv series, and you know you're going to be making twenty-two one-hour shows that year, you go on a general scouting tour of the town to kind of just get a sense of what's available. And sort of in the middle of the second day, we're driving around by the harbour, and we see these two piles, uh, yellow piles, maybe eighty, ninety, a hundred feet high. And it's like, 'what's that? These are great!' And they said, well, it's piles of sulfur that they... I guess they manufacture it and then they ship it out from the harbour on boats. And it's sort of almost always there, in some size, and we said one day we're going to have to use this because it's really a terrific location.

And the... the, uh -- so the pyrotechnics that were rigged for the -- for that final, that Quickening, were the most elaborate that we had ever done. And it was all one take, and after, uh, the two guys were fighting, 'cause they did all their own stuff, but by the time they were finished, it was raining. Sulfur doesn't smell so great in the rain, and when they finished, they looked tired, they WERE tired, and then when the pyrotechnics went off, uh, it was shot in slow motion, and so the actual take, the wide shot, was two and a half minutes long, and it was, still, it was probably one of the most amazing Quickenings that we'd ever had.

And "Band of Brothers" also, for all of us on "Highlander", introduced Darius. Great character, an Immortal that, you know, had given up being a great warrior to live a life of peace on holy ground, and was somebody that Adrian had met during the Battle of Waterloo, which was also kind of fun, in that it's easier to do certain period flashbacks in Europe than it is in Canada. And the Canadian producer, Brent Clackson, said, "We can do the Battle of Waterloo," and he was determined, he was going to show the French what the Battle of Waterloo looked like. So the day before, it all got set up. We must have had every old cannon and, you know, artificial horse and wagons and costumes that they possibly had for that period. And we left that night about seven or eight o'clock after having set it all up. That night, it snowed. So the look was, you know, it was unbelievable, it was absolutely unbelievable, and sometimes, you know, you need a little luck to pull these things off, and we certainly got it.

And, on the other side of luck is bad luck, and Darius, a wonderful character had, unknownst to all of us, had a brain tumor, and he died. And we miss his character, but most of all we miss Werner Stocker, the man.

(While a snowy battlefield might have looked lovely from a cinematic point of view, it sucked lemons for historical accuracy -- Belgium apparently suffered a freak mid-June snowstorm in this interpretation of events!)

(ALSO, the brain tumor explanation of Werner Stocker's death, I've since learned, is a COMPLETE fabrication. The truth is that he died of HIV/AIDS complications. The brain tumor story was given due to the anti-AIDS prejudices of the times, to deflect the stigma associated with the AIDS epidemic (and homosexuals) in the 90's. But we are now, relatively speaking, much more open-minded about both AIDS and homosexuality, so here's to setting the record straight.)

1x14: For Evil's Sake

Bill Panzer:

What would you do if you were Immortal, if you were going to live for hundreds or even thousands of years? Most people, believe it or not -- or so we say in "Highlander" -- will pretty much do the same thing. Some make a lot of money. Some become bullies and like to fight. Some become great lovers. Some, like Duncan MacLeod, become righters of wrongs. And some, like Kuyler, the bad guy in this show, become like the best killer in the world. And from the time MacLeod meets him, he is... he's a killer. And he uses the same trick of distraction to kill people, and he continues to use it today, where he's the highest paid, most successful assassin there's ever been. But with an Immortal like Duncan MacLeod, you... once you hurt him, he doesn't forget. And Immortals have a long time to remember, and sooner or later, you WILL cross his path.

1x15: For Tomorrow We Die

Bill Panzer:

Roland Gift, star of the Fine Young Cannibals, and now star, rock-and-roller, in a "Highlander" episode. One of our great bad guys: hedonistic, nasty, cruel, greedy, vindictive. We liked him so much that we brought him back for another show, and answered once and for all, we hope, the question of what happens when an Immortal loses a body part other than his head. It does not grow back, does not regenerate. All it did in Roland's case was really tick him off. On a more technical side, one of his themes throughout all of his various crimes was using gas. So in the World War I flashback, we desaturated and kind of 'blued up' the actual battle scene so that when he released the mustard gas, the yellow became kind of the dominant color.

1x16: The Beast Below

Bill Panzer:

One of the tough things about shooting in Paris as opposed to Vancouver is that Vancouver, for the most part, is happy to have you film there, and in Paris they make it INCREDIBLY difficult for anybody to film anything anyplace. There's a little woman who sits at the mairie, the, you know, where you get your permits, who -- you have to have a permit ten days in advance to shoot anything in Paris. Now, unfortunately, the scripts are generally not finished until seven or eight days before we start filming. So, it's -- and when it comes twelve o'clock, she closes for lunch and it doesn't matter who's standing there.

However, one of the great things about shooting in Paris as opposed to Vancouver is that Paris is a flashback, and a lot of things were easier to do there. And one of the rare moments of French cooperation was when we got permission to film inside the Paris Opera, on the roof of the Paris Opera, and in the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera. Nobody had ever filmed on the roof of the Paris Opera, let alone a fight scene on the roof of the Paris Opera. And as most actors won't usually get involved in doing swordfights and martial arts on the top of a mansard roof, uh, but Adrian was a very game guy, and although we were nervous, we said, "Hey, he's Immortal, so it'll be fine."

The catacombs underneath the Paris Opera connect to the catacombs that run under almost all of Paris and was incredibly difficult -- hot, sweaty, smoky, dusty -- place to shoot, but I think in the end you get a look out of those things that makes the series kind of leap off the screen. At least, we hope so.

Translation: mairie - city hall

1x17: Saving Grace

Bill Panzer:

For Duncan MacLeod to be present for the birth of a child probably happened many times in his four hundred years of life. However, this time when we saw it with Grace in the past, it was particularly moving, I thought, and raised for him that issue of, 'this is something that I will never have.' And part of the effectiveness of that scene was that we got to use the music, the song 'Amazing Grace'. Now, in television, buying songs for, and getting performances by good people is very expensive, very difficult and doesn't happen in syndicated television that often. However, our accountant at the time, Nicole Forest, had a friend who was a first class opera singer, and she volunteered -- for what I suspect was a very modest amount of money -- to sing 'Amazing Grace' for us. And so we got, you know, through a -- it made a wonderful, resonance in that scene, and it was one of those wonderful coincidences that happen when a bunch of like-minded people get together.

1x18: The Lady and the Tiger

Location: Vanier Park, Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival tents (not episode-related)

Bill Panzer:

For the most part, Immortals are very much like ordinary people. They have peo-- they have Immortal friends that they like; they have Immortals that they don't like, except from time to time, they fight, but aside from that, it's pretty much life in a shadowy world, making sure that after twenty years or twenty-five years, you leave the place you are, change your identity because you're not getting older and people are going to start to notice. And from time to time, Immortals run into each other -- after twenty years, fifty years, a hundred years -- and we thought it'd be fun if MacLeod had a kind of, every fifty, sixty years, affair with Amanda, a zany, beautiful, funny, con-artist, international jewel thief kind of character who's crazy mad about MacLeod but also crazy mad about her own freedom. And when Amanda comes into his life, if he's free, they have a moment, and... she generally picks his pocket and slips off into the night.

1x19: Eye of the Beholder

Bill Panzer:

One of the things that separates television from movies is a complete lack of flexibility in scheduling. I mean, you don't get it today, you don't get it. No second chances. So in this episode, the young lady who plays Richie's love interest on the show was a quite well-known Paris model who was contracted to shoot for two days of the eight-day Paris schedule. I think -- I mean, these schedules are carved in stone. So after the first day, she comes up to the producer, Gary, and she says, "Would it be okay if I didn't shoot tomorrow?" and he says, "What's the matter? Are you sick? Is there a -- what's the problem?" And she says, "Well, no, not exactly. It's just that I have a fashion shoot, and I can go tomorrow and make more money tomorrow than I'm making on this show. So--" and he's, like, dumbstruck, and she says, "So maybe, if, uh, if you could just postpone the shooting for a day, then I'll be back and we can finish up." Sometimes they just don't get it.

1x20: Avenging Angel

Location: St. Paul's Anglican Church, 1130 Jervis St (used in 3x02: Line of Fire)

Bill Panzer:

Immortals... where do they come from? We don't know where they come from. Maybe they come from 'the source'. But one thing we do know is that they carry within them the seed of their immortality, which is triggered by a violent death. So what happens if you're a slightly deranged guy -- or extremely deranged guy in the case of Cahill -- and you're murdered? And when you wake up, you come back to life believing that the good Lord has saved you and sent you on a mission of murder. Who can argue with this guy? Certainly not Duncan MacLeod.

1x21: Nowhere To Run

Bill Panzer:

A girl walks down a foggy, lonely country road, a guy in a nice car picks her up, and she's raped. She tells her father, he believes her, and he comes and he says he wants the boy for punishment. The father's an Immortal who knows MacLeod. The -- MacLeod has a problem with innocence and guilt because he remembers a time when he tried to save somebody, carrying the news that the guy was innocent, couldn't get to the firing squad in time. So he is... he is prepared to defend the boy, and in kind of an homage to Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs", Dennis Berry, one of our favorite directors, creates a wonderful mood of, uh, of seige as the good guys try and keep the bad guys from coming in. but in reality, the bad guys are not the bad guys, either, and the thing resolves itself with a wonderful twist after a great fog-shrouded swordfight in the middle of the forest. One of our best.

1x22: The Hunters

Bill Panzer:

This was a very emotional episode for all of us, because Werner Stocker, who played the character of Darius, died before we started shooting -- JUST before -- which involved a tremendous amount of rewriting over twenty-four hours straight shot by David Abramowitz, because as we've discussed, in television, the schedule doesn't change. So the part of Hugh Fitzcairn, which was played by another one of our rock stars, Roger Daltrey of The Who, became enlarged, and where he was -- he was supposed to die at the end of the episode, and we decided to -- we liked it so much, we let him live.

The Watchers Organization, which has been observing Immortals, recording their history but not interfering, for thousands of years, has remained very, very secret, and it was only recently that MacLeod discovered their existence, uh, through the character played by Jim Byrnes. And they have within them a group of Watchers that we call 'Hunters', and the Hunters have decided that Immortals are a bad thing, they are a scourge, they are a blight on the Earth, and they are unnatural and immoral and must be removed. And they have been killing Immortals, and in fact, they killed Darius.

So this episode saw the birth of a wonderful character, Hugh Fitzcairn, and the death of another wonderful character, Werner Stocker.

 

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