1:6 Bad Day in Building ‘A’ – Tessa goes to court to pay a bunch of parking tickets, with Duncan and Richie tagging along. Unfortunately, Seacouver apparently only has ONE court complex, so they’re taken as hostages when a career criminal being sentenced to life without parole engineers a breakout with his posse. Duncan maneuvers his way into being the hostage that they “kill” to show they mean business, so that he can slip away and play low-budget Die Hard.
I’m sure the writers room was hip-deep in dealing with the twin dangers of the series premise: Either you have an unlikely number of Immortals showing up weekly, or you have Duncan et al wandering into danger situations unrelated to Immortals just because it’s an action-adventure series. This is one of the latter.
It also heaps up both unlikelihoods (like the afore-mentioned Amalgamated Courts ‘R’ Us), and story setups without payoffs:
- Richie meets an old con-man that he’s worked with before, who becomes one of the hostages… and then nothing. I thought there might be some attempt to pull a con on the criminals, but nope.
- The janitor, also a hostage, has a young daughter who hangs out in his custodial office/closet while he’s working. Is she going to be okay? Well, M<acLeod finds her, and… nothing. She tags along and does what she’d told. Never in danger.
Guest Immortals: 0
Quickenings: 0
…and not even a flashback.
1:7 Mountain Men – Tessa goes into the mountains to sketch some Indian petroglyphs. Unfortunately, she catches the idea of mountain-man survivalist Caleb (Marc Singer!) and his two hangers-on; they kidnap her, intending for her to be Caleb’s bride. So Duncan’s got to use his own mountain-man tracking skills to find her.
Someone in the writers room must have been traumatized by a flannel-wearing redneck in his formative years — how else do you explain a second “deadly country hicks” episode in the first season? Complete with non-Pacific-Northwest pseudo-Southern accents, to boot.
Remember above where I listed the two basic Highlander story types as “unlikely Immortal” vs. “random danger situations”? This is both of them at once, because Caleb turns out to be an Immortal. Huh. Imagine that. We don’t get any inkling as to how old he is; he’s never crossed paths with Duncan before, but he knows all about taking “quickenin’s.”
Mostly, it’s disappointing to waste Marc Singer in a one-note, one-shot appearance. He could have been so much more in the series if he had become a recurring guest star (imagine Singer as Methos!).
Guest Immortals: 2*
Quickenings: 1
*the other one was “Carl the Hermit,” the Immortal that Duncan learned his woodcraft from a century ago, played by John Dennis Johnston — one of those “that guy” actors that you’ve totally seen in something before