Big Finish Audio: Highlander Season 2
May. 9th, 2011 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethSo far today I have listened to 3 episodes. They're about Kronos, Silas, and Caspian. Except I'm pretty sure it isn't properly them. The stories are based on a twist on the Highlander concept. Instead of 'take their head and with it their power' the whole thing is based on the idea you can take parts and pieces away, eat bits of an Immortal's Quickening and with it some aspect of their emotions, capacity and personality. It combines this with the Dark Quickening concept. And it keeps playing with the mechanics of Immortality, with what you could do to really permanently mess up an Immortal.
Highlander is 'romantic talmudic discussion with swords'. This... isn't. It's a three episode horror story about grotesque ways to die and things worse than death. I'm at once grossed out and bored.
And it's repetitive. It comes up with a new bad guy and a new bad thing he does and then it just repeats it. Why bother?
So now there's just the Methos story left to listen to, but I don't think I want to, because right now I only need to erase these mucked up fanfic versions of the other three Horsemen, and I know plenty versions of them already. A mucked up Methos would be... well, rather worse.
Details: The Kronos story didn't do anything too distorting to his character. I guess I was okay with that one, I just found it a bit pointless. The stories are set up like Companion Chronicles, limited voices, one of them acting as a narrator, not fully acted plays. So Kronos or Silas or Caspian is telling a story to someone in each section. Kronos is telling a Watcher the real truth behind Melvin Koren. He starts with how he used to protect a tribe with a band of brothers, but some bastard turned up and strangled him to death. Apparently being killed was an almost sexual thrill, but he could see the guy killing him was getting even more out of it, so his last thought was regret that he'd never killed anyone so intimately he could feel that way. It's all very lovingly described. And I know there's a strand of fanfic that's big on the sex-and-death, but it's not what I'm there for. It's creepy, and it's not very interesting.
After Kronos wakes up Immortal the story gets interesting for a bit. It's about how the four horsemen break up. Somebody splits them up by making Kronos all paranoid. And then he tells Kronos he'll do that to any set of friends Kronos ever has. And Kronos, telling the Watcher millennia later, believes that's what happened. And it's pretty weak, really, the way they're split up, but if you believe Kronos is a paranoid crazy bastard who has been blaming invisible enemies for his inability to keep friends then it works.
The trouble is the next two discs make it clear that actually it's not imaginary invisible enemies, it's one all powerful Big Bad who controls a whole network of Immortals. With mind control. With this new magic tweak where he can steal and put back pieces of Quickening, and take stuff out he doesn't want there and put stuff back in to suit. So it's not Highlander, it's not about Immortals facing each other with a sword, it's some kind of mind control magic.
Also in the next two discs we learn that Silas and Caspian:
(a) Used to be good guys
(b) Got operated on by this magic mind control guy
(c) Got left permanently altered and full of hate and murder and so on and so forth
(d) Killed magic guy's friends so
(e) Every once in a while he picks them up, cures them, tells them all about it, makes sure they understand what they're about to lose, and puts them back to their usual damaged personalities, the murderous bastards.
That's two discs of the same story with different clothes on. And in neither case is it a Highlander story. It's just a horror story.
Also that's two discs about people who are not the Silas and Caspian we knew. It is in fact the point that they're not the people we knew. So it's two discs about two original characters that happen to have the same voice.
At this point, what is the point?
On to specifics: it medicalises and diagnoses Silas and Caspian, makes Silas an 'imbecile' because he has a rock stuck in his head (no, really), and Caspian have multiple personality disorder because of a combination of a Dark Quickening and this new magic guy eating bits of his mind. In both cases it's not a result of choices they made, they didn't just set out to kill a bunch of people, it just kind of happened to them because of this Big Bad.
... WTF???
Highlander is a story about how upbringing shapes us, how people we're not related to by blood can still be the making of us, the complex reshaping of self through experience, through eras of history. At its finest it examines the way one eras good is another eras evil, the way someone can be a hero of might-makes-right and a villain of egalitarian democracy. And, yeah, it does this by making people try and kill each other with swords, but seriously, it's about how we become who we are.
The thesis of these two big finish audios is that Silas and Caspian became who they were because someone drilled a hole in their head.
Seriously. That's 100% it. Someone drilled a hole in their head.
Silas got the drill bit left in his brain, so he was stupid. Caspian had his goodness fall out the hole. No, I'm not making it up. All the good in him fell out of the hole in his head.
I need now a list of any time any Immortal suffers a head injury. Bullet to the brain pan, sword in the head, arrows, I don't know. If there is evidence I need to have the knowing of it. Because this can't be right.
It's also really boring. We learn something about Silas and Caspian that doesn't apply to anyone else, that can't be a question in our own lives. Do we need to worry about someone leaving a drill bit in our brains? No!
Silas is interesting because he's a big cuddly guy who is nice to animals... and likes chopping people up with an axe. Explore that! How is he like that? Why is it not a contradiction to him? In these audios the answer is brain damage. I hate that answer. It's boring, it leaves no questions, it explores no morality. Why bother? Plus it demonises people with brain damage, and yuck to that.
And Caspian... the idea that he's a good man who suffers a Dark Quickening is interesting, the idea that the more good people he kills the more he tilts back to the good is interesting, but it draws on explanations that applied in all of two Highlander episodes. Still, say that's what Immortals believe about themselves. In killing monsters they become the monster, solid story. In killing good men they realise what they're wrecking and learn to regret it, again a solid story. You know what's not a solid story? The Big Bad Stole His Brains every time he started to realise. That's nothing! There's no equivalent to that in the real world. It's not a moral issue. Some magic reached in to his brain and sucked the goodness out. He didn't make a choice.
Okay, actually, he made a choice to seek out a pain eater to take his pain away. Lets try and be fair to the story and see if that works as a theme. Hoping someone else can make you stop suffering, when you suffer because of things you've done... and then it goes horribly wrong because they... eat your Quickening in edited slices. Nope, I'm not feeling it.
It's the new Quickening trick. They've played with that instead of writing about characters. That's missing the point.
One minor niggle is that the four horsemen call themselves Death, Pestilence, War, Famine. Caspian quips he's Famine because he joined last and all the good names were taken. But that's not right, they were four horsemen, one of them ate people, he's a symbol of famine. It's not, like, band names or RPG handles. They didn't label themselves. They earned them from their actions.
Except in this CD Caspian doesn't have a fridge full of people because he's eating them. He has lab records, in the form of the heads of Immortals. Because he's trying to do the new Quickening trick.
See, his entire personality, ate by this new trick they plopped into the story.
I don't want to see what they do with Methos. They'll mess it up.
I'm currently regretting I bought these.
I didn't buy the first season because I thought they'd have a different idea of What Highlander Is About than the (mostly female fanfic writer) fandom I knew did. I kind of wish I'd stuck with that idea, because really, very much correct.
Bored and icked.
Highlander is 'romantic talmudic discussion with swords'. This... isn't. It's a three episode horror story about grotesque ways to die and things worse than death. I'm at once grossed out and bored.
And it's repetitive. It comes up with a new bad guy and a new bad thing he does and then it just repeats it. Why bother?
So now there's just the Methos story left to listen to, but I don't think I want to, because right now I only need to erase these mucked up fanfic versions of the other three Horsemen, and I know plenty versions of them already. A mucked up Methos would be... well, rather worse.
Details: The Kronos story didn't do anything too distorting to his character. I guess I was okay with that one, I just found it a bit pointless. The stories are set up like Companion Chronicles, limited voices, one of them acting as a narrator, not fully acted plays. So Kronos or Silas or Caspian is telling a story to someone in each section. Kronos is telling a Watcher the real truth behind Melvin Koren. He starts with how he used to protect a tribe with a band of brothers, but some bastard turned up and strangled him to death. Apparently being killed was an almost sexual thrill, but he could see the guy killing him was getting even more out of it, so his last thought was regret that he'd never killed anyone so intimately he could feel that way. It's all very lovingly described. And I know there's a strand of fanfic that's big on the sex-and-death, but it's not what I'm there for. It's creepy, and it's not very interesting.
After Kronos wakes up Immortal the story gets interesting for a bit. It's about how the four horsemen break up. Somebody splits them up by making Kronos all paranoid. And then he tells Kronos he'll do that to any set of friends Kronos ever has. And Kronos, telling the Watcher millennia later, believes that's what happened. And it's pretty weak, really, the way they're split up, but if you believe Kronos is a paranoid crazy bastard who has been blaming invisible enemies for his inability to keep friends then it works.
The trouble is the next two discs make it clear that actually it's not imaginary invisible enemies, it's one all powerful Big Bad who controls a whole network of Immortals. With mind control. With this new magic tweak where he can steal and put back pieces of Quickening, and take stuff out he doesn't want there and put stuff back in to suit. So it's not Highlander, it's not about Immortals facing each other with a sword, it's some kind of mind control magic.
Also in the next two discs we learn that Silas and Caspian:
(a) Used to be good guys
(b) Got operated on by this magic mind control guy
(c) Got left permanently altered and full of hate and murder and so on and so forth
(d) Killed magic guy's friends so
(e) Every once in a while he picks them up, cures them, tells them all about it, makes sure they understand what they're about to lose, and puts them back to their usual damaged personalities, the murderous bastards.
That's two discs of the same story with different clothes on. And in neither case is it a Highlander story. It's just a horror story.
Also that's two discs about people who are not the Silas and Caspian we knew. It is in fact the point that they're not the people we knew. So it's two discs about two original characters that happen to have the same voice.
At this point, what is the point?
On to specifics: it medicalises and diagnoses Silas and Caspian, makes Silas an 'imbecile' because he has a rock stuck in his head (no, really), and Caspian have multiple personality disorder because of a combination of a Dark Quickening and this new magic guy eating bits of his mind. In both cases it's not a result of choices they made, they didn't just set out to kill a bunch of people, it just kind of happened to them because of this Big Bad.
... WTF???
Highlander is a story about how upbringing shapes us, how people we're not related to by blood can still be the making of us, the complex reshaping of self through experience, through eras of history. At its finest it examines the way one eras good is another eras evil, the way someone can be a hero of might-makes-right and a villain of egalitarian democracy. And, yeah, it does this by making people try and kill each other with swords, but seriously, it's about how we become who we are.
The thesis of these two big finish audios is that Silas and Caspian became who they were because someone drilled a hole in their head.
Seriously. That's 100% it. Someone drilled a hole in their head.
Silas got the drill bit left in his brain, so he was stupid. Caspian had his goodness fall out the hole. No, I'm not making it up. All the good in him fell out of the hole in his head.
I need now a list of any time any Immortal suffers a head injury. Bullet to the brain pan, sword in the head, arrows, I don't know. If there is evidence I need to have the knowing of it. Because this can't be right.
It's also really boring. We learn something about Silas and Caspian that doesn't apply to anyone else, that can't be a question in our own lives. Do we need to worry about someone leaving a drill bit in our brains? No!
Silas is interesting because he's a big cuddly guy who is nice to animals... and likes chopping people up with an axe. Explore that! How is he like that? Why is it not a contradiction to him? In these audios the answer is brain damage. I hate that answer. It's boring, it leaves no questions, it explores no morality. Why bother? Plus it demonises people with brain damage, and yuck to that.
And Caspian... the idea that he's a good man who suffers a Dark Quickening is interesting, the idea that the more good people he kills the more he tilts back to the good is interesting, but it draws on explanations that applied in all of two Highlander episodes. Still, say that's what Immortals believe about themselves. In killing monsters they become the monster, solid story. In killing good men they realise what they're wrecking and learn to regret it, again a solid story. You know what's not a solid story? The Big Bad Stole His Brains every time he started to realise. That's nothing! There's no equivalent to that in the real world. It's not a moral issue. Some magic reached in to his brain and sucked the goodness out. He didn't make a choice.
Okay, actually, he made a choice to seek out a pain eater to take his pain away. Lets try and be fair to the story and see if that works as a theme. Hoping someone else can make you stop suffering, when you suffer because of things you've done... and then it goes horribly wrong because they... eat your Quickening in edited slices. Nope, I'm not feeling it.
It's the new Quickening trick. They've played with that instead of writing about characters. That's missing the point.
One minor niggle is that the four horsemen call themselves Death, Pestilence, War, Famine. Caspian quips he's Famine because he joined last and all the good names were taken. But that's not right, they were four horsemen, one of them ate people, he's a symbol of famine. It's not, like, band names or RPG handles. They didn't label themselves. They earned them from their actions.
Except in this CD Caspian doesn't have a fridge full of people because he's eating them. He has lab records, in the form of the heads of Immortals. Because he's trying to do the new Quickening trick.
See, his entire personality, ate by this new trick they plopped into the story.
I don't want to see what they do with Methos. They'll mess it up.
I'm currently regretting I bought these.
I didn't buy the first season because I thought they'd have a different idea of What Highlander Is About than the (mostly female fanfic writer) fandom I knew did. I kind of wish I'd stuck with that idea, because really, very much correct.
Bored and icked.