Birdwings

This show has been on my watch list for a while, and I finally sat down with it. It's a bit odd, coming to a show I only know via fandom (given several Highlander fans have written for this and recommended it to me) and an infamous final episode.

I tend to prespoil final episodes when I hear they are widely despised. It's usually for stuff I'd never consider watching anyway, like How I Met Your Mother and St. Elsewhere. But I also watched several takedown videos about the final season of Game of Thrones before going on to watch the first seven seasons, so me and spoilers are frequently on speaking terms.

I can't help it, I'm curious what decision could enrage that many people. It's like a cautionary tale for writers. So I did that for this show ages ago, which is just to say, I know what I'm in for. What happens on the way is the mystery.

So, things I did not know about the show: LaCroix is pronounced La Craw, not La Croy. Schanke has a Ska sound instead of Shh.

Also, since the only thing I know about Natalie is that final episode, I pictured her as being way more like Alys in this episode - nominally professional, but actually swooning over Mr Vampire, wandering into peril and being in need of rescue all the time. I did not like Alys at all.

Natalie is awesome, however. No nonsense. Already knowing the big secret. Flinty, but warm enough to try to help Nick even when he's deep in his cups.

Nick is played by Geraint Wyn Davies, who is a better actor than I realized. I completely forgot about Michael Moore very quickly. Nice speaking voice, too.

This show does a great job with the vampire alcoholism metaphor. I'll be very interested to compare this to Angel as I go along. Nick is being shown as a constant sufferer, with excellent sound design driving home how heroic he is to constantly work around oblivious food sources and abstain. He's self-loathing in a more physical manner than Angel, crippling himself with starvation and seeming to reject the whole Dark Avenger concept Angel couldn't help buy into (to his frequent downfall). Nick is doing a job and trying to stay sober.

LaCroix was mostly there to be evil and die. Two things I liked: Nigel Bennett's impeccable delivery of every line. He's understated, which is a great choice. And how every time I thought the score was providing creepy violin notes, it turned out to be LaCroix doing his own scene setting. Also, he works as a late night talk radio man! He has colleagues who fill in when he's indisposed. This is hilarious to me. Was the station struggling and he's their major donor with an ad-free slot all to himself? Or does he have to deal with commercial breaks and the like? I doubt the show will ever provide a single detail, so I'll just imagine some WKRP-style nonsense in his backstory.

Moving on, Janette has a much more standard vampire job. Running a cool 90s club. Not much to say about her yet. Another nice speaking voice.

Schanke and the whole cop aspect is very much a cop show. He's bumbling and ridiculous, but did have the right idea about the mystery here, so I'm hoping he isn't just used as the comic relief and gets to be a competent cop.

I'm enjoying the vampire lore, comparing and contrasting with later shows and seeing how much of a trendsetter this was. However, all sympathy for its ambition, but I can see why flying has pretty much been abandoned as a vampire trait. I enjoy some good wire work, but you need to be able to see it.

I did enjoy the copious quantities of 90s TV atmosphere, both procedural and gothic. My biggest complaint is the title cards, because the typeface they chose reminds me of those "prove you're not a robot by typing these grotesquely distorted letters" captchas and I can't actually tell who worked on this show. Major design fail.

Most of season one is on YouTube. I look forward to continuing!

Here's the promised other half of my listmaking. Again, there's no order and I didn't select based on any criteria other than my heart sinking as I eyeballed the list or a frequent skip reflex. However, I will say one nice thing about each unfavorite, because I love this show. There is no episode of Highlander wholly lacking in redeeming features. I never engage in those thought exercises about "if you could make a perfect 12 episode season, which ones do you keep?" I keep them all, for cumulative effect. ( Read more... )

To cheer myself up this evening, I looked at a list of Highlander episodes and have decided to rank the season openers and finales from my favorite to least for no reason except whim.

I threw The Raven on here, although it's at a disadvantage for only being seen once so far. I also treated all two parters as one.

Onward to my opinions, subject to change on my next rewatch. ( Read more... )

I was gonna hide this post entirely. Then I decided I'll just hide it with a cut tag, since it's about my emotional state, as regards tv, and that way it can be skipped as needed. ( Read more... )

Shortcuts has concluded and it was an amazing feast. The perfect end to one year and start to another. I even managed to comment on all but four stories before reveals, despite a rocky real world week.

I wrote Guests for the Weekend for Coralysendria. I was apparently not hard to guess, which is fair. Like last year, it ended up being a somewhat comic adventure heavily featuring Amanda, and this time it became my first Highlander story to go beyond the timeline of the show.

( Creative process stuff. )

I received my HLH Shortcuts gift much more quickly than I had anticipated, and I am still stunned by it. ( Read more... )

I successfully convinced my favorite coworker to watch Highlander. Since he rocketed through four and a half episodes in two days, it seems he's enjoying it. He's nineteen, and unfamiliar with older models of television storytelling, so a lot of his observations are based on a level of structured storytelling that... Well...

"Kiem Sun was cool. He's gonna show up again later, right?"

"Okay, Lucas didn't show up at all,* but there's gonna be flashbacks developing his friendship with Duncan, because he was obviously super important to him. He will be referenced going forward. No?"

"Connor is definitely going to reappear, though, because he's his cousin!"

I did assure him that Connor will be mentioned, and that other characters will be recurring, but yes, there are a lot of one shot Immortals.

"I finally understand why you write fanfiction."

He likes Richie a lot, so yeah, if he perseveres, he's gonna learn why fanfic is a thing. And now I feel bad.

*For the first time it occurs to me that Lucas is killed so completely off screen that we really have no proof he's the actual Immortal killed in that sequence, or was even the guy living in that town (had Duncan visited him in that location before? I'll have to check). It's nothing but hearsay. That episode is structured so weird.

A post was still needed to cover the bulk of the season, so here are my thought. A lot to love, and a small but significant portion to hate, but most of that I covered in previous mini-rants (Carson, Kolya and the "Irritable" two-parter).

Plenty of stuff I liked, though! ( Cut for length and overuse of parentheticals) )

Season three continues to be pretty great.... except it has this weird hangup with Lucius, the creepy sitcom roofie guy, who reappears, getting a whole second episode dedicated to his "hijinks." Being less revolting, I did watch this outing all the way through and was "rewarded" by this being the episode which wraps up the ferocious feud between Sheppard and this show's most effective recurring human villain.

Concluding a multi-episode high stakes arc with an episode in which he felt like an afterthought.

It was a lot like if Xavier St. Cloud showed up and was beheaded during 'The Ransom of Richard Redstone.'

Or if Buffy staked Drusilla during the last three minutes of 'Go Fish.'

It's just fundamentally unsatisfying to me.

After a long hard battle, my phone spellcheck has finally given up autocorrecting Methos to method.

Instead, it autocorrects method to Methos.