Highlander 5x01 - Prophecy

 

A year later, I pick up after the cliffhanger of sorts at the end of S4. How will Joe and Duncan mend their shattered friendship? Where's Richie?

Most of the questions will have to wait a bit because this episode is more about setting the stage for the big main event of Season 5. I wonder if this is the only show out there that has its "main events" about 60% of the way through the seasons*. I'd say Buffy got it right by having the Big Bads show up at the end, but either way, I'll take it. * - Except Season 3, which felt much more like a traditional season arc.

This episode is a good one, and features the underrated and gorgeous Tracy Scoggins as mythical immortal Cassandra, known for being able to see the future. Yes, that Cassandra. Not sure how I feel about Highlander getting more "mystical" from here on out, but I'll need to get used to it because supernatural elements pop up quite a few times in the last arc of the show.

In Memoriam: Jimmy Carter 1924-2024

Very nice shot of NYC in 1996 here. Unfortunately the episode won't be in NYC, it'll be in lame old Seacouver.

Noted immortal Roland Kantos, who is basically Jacob Kell without the scenery-chewing, is asking a detective about another immortal that he has information on.

The guy is like "attorney-client privilege, m****f*****er, do you speak it?"

Little does he know that Kantos...

...has the power of mind control / suggestion, and is able to make people do what he wants by speaking in a sultry tone. Usually only women can do that!

After Kantos gets the information he needs, he shoots the detective and makes it look like this other guy did it. Was that necessary? Couldn't he just go "you'll remember nothing of this" and walk away? Why be such an a-hole?

Applause is heard from the studio audience as our hero gets back to his place in Seacouver and immediately gets the buzz. Who's hiding in here? And does the apartment have any locks on it? I've been wondering about this for a while. The door to the outside that we never see definitely locks, but then you've got the elevator to the dojo that I don't think actually locks, given how often people have just sort of come up uninvited. Presumably the front door of the dojo itself has locks, yet this is still a surprisingly lax amount of security. I'm overthinking everything today.

It's worth noting that before Duncan got the buzz, he was punching and kicking the pads as he walked by. It's probably about as visibly angry as the guy ever gets out of the blue. He's been under a ton of stress and this episode follows right after the end of S4. Suffice to say he's even more of a grouch than usual.

The visitor is his old friend Cassandra, who Kantos was looking/hunting for in the first scene. And by "old friend" I mean "childhood friend" and probably the first immortal he ever actually encountered, before he even knew anything about that stuff. So this is a pretty big deal.

1606! Scotland! Duncan is about 13 here. The cool thing is, they had the same actor playing Kid Duncan throughout this whole show, and him getting older fast worked out because they'd just change the year a bit to compensate. The guy on the left is Robert (yeah, the same Robert who grew up to be a jackass and insisted on fighting him to the death in Homeland). They both have the hots for Debra Campbell, who we don't see here.

Duncan's gruff dad is even angrier than usual because someone's been stealing their sheep. Ya doan steal a Scotsman's sheep!

There's a "witch" out in Donan Woods who gets blamed every time anything happens, so of course they default right to that explanation. SHE must have stolen their sheep. And YA DOAN do that!

This wisened old guy speaks of the witch legend, and Duncan's pops doesn't buy it. He thinks it's just a wolf, which makes a lot more sense.

Wisened old guy also says something about the witch coming for a child born on the Winter Solstice, motioning at Duncan. Well, now we know what Duncan's actual birthday is! Sort of.

Duncan wants to join the party to go find this witch / wolf, and after his dad says no, this other guy just sorta mocks him for being a mere boy. Weird part is that he tells Duncan, in so many words, that wolves go right for your ass. No, I'm not kidding.

Now Robert is also ribbing Duncan for wanting to go join the fight and says Duncan would probably just run away. You gotta have thick skin to be a 1600's Scotsman with all this barb-throwing.

Then Robert brings up Debra Campbell! ...and now I'm wondering how these guys were hanging out with Debra Campbell for like two decades without anyone hooking up.

Robert: "I suppose you'd rather face the wolf than actually talk to Debra Campbell!"

Duncan: "I suppose you wouldn't have the courage to do either one of those things!"

Then they go off on their own to hunt the wolf themselves. If they find it before the party of adults, they'll be heroes! Uh oh.

Turns out the wolf is Cody Rhodes' prized dog Pharaoh!

Duncan does what he'd do and stands his ground to hold it off while Robert runs for it.

It attacks, then he blacks out and wakes up later in the evening in someone's cabin. I wonder if that wolf is the one that... naaaaah.

Outside, he finds a naked woman bathing in a pond. Poor kid's hormones are goin' bonkers! Surprised USA Network could get away with this level of nudity.

He's basically mesmerized like he's never seen anything like it before. I mean, I'm sure his friend Debra Campbell is nice and all, but yeah, this is a full-grown gorgeous naked woman over here.

She puts some clothes on and it isn't much better. This episode might also be a retelling of Duncan's first boner.

She's amused by his questioning, like whether she's a witch, and how they say she's super-old, and whatnot. We don't find out what happened to that wolf. Did it transform into her? Did she use voice-hypnosis to get it to back off? ....Did she just slay it and make a rug out of it? Probably the last one.

She seems to know all about Duncan and says she foresaw his being here. Duncan has this nervous tick where he keeps glancing at her 'bod momentarily, and funnily enough adult Duncan has the same nervous tick when he's around her.

Funny moment: Duncan says that he heard the witch was evil, but she is beautiful, and concludes she isn't evil. He went to the Front Mission: Gun Hazard school of recognizing evil.

Back in the present, Cassandra likes this place he's got, while Duncan is totally taken off-guard. He hasn't seen her since he was a teenager, and seeing her again now seems to cause him to revert back a little bit. Like he actually seems unsure of himself around her and she's the alpha in the room, which is something you basically never see in the rest of this series.

She has a request. A very important request, so important that she needs to stand close to make it. Of course, he agrees. See, no hypnotic suggestion required!

Looks like she used a detective agency to track him down, so she isn't actually all that psychic. I mean, she's got some clairvoyance for sure, but it seems to be more of the "get a powerful vision on occasion when you're not expecting it" variety rather than the superpower variety.

Duncan is so nervous around her and it's hilarious. And his eyes keep wandering. In any case, she needs his help. Some guy named Roland Kantos wants her head, and he's particularly deadly because of his powers of hypnotic suggestion. He actually fought her once before, way before Duncan was born, and she won. However now Kantos is way stronger than he was while Cassandra hasn't done much in a while, and he's been right behind her while she tries to elude him.

I'm starting to wonder if his powers are actually supernatural, or just standard hypnosis honed over a long time. She makes it sound like he has a thousand years of practice and that's all it is. Also, she may have been the one who taught him these abilities. Oops.

She talks about a prophecy of a foundling born on the solstice, that describes Duncan to a T, right down to facing their dark side and emerging from it. Said person is supposed to be the one who slays "The Voice of Death", AKA Kantos. Well, this is all well and good, but in the grand scheme of things isn't Kantos kind of minor? How about a big prophecy, like how he's fated to face the Four Horsemen? Well, that one's in there too, just wait around a bit...

But wait! Kantos has found them. He really was right behind her, as she said. Who wouldn't want to be, though? What a stunning creature.

Here's a surprise, though: While he's been trying to catch Cassandra for a while, he's actually more interested in fighting Duncan, and sought him out in the past.

Back in 1606! You see, Kantos heard rumblings of there being a foundling in their village, and suspecting it to be an immortal, he traveled there. He made up some story about how his son had been stolen from him as an infant and he thinks the son ended up here. However, this coincided with the time that Duncan was missing / out in the woods with Cassandra, causing him to not be around when Kantos showed up (which was part of Cassandra's visions).

Ned Stark here denies that they have any foundlings here, though it's clear that internally he's wondering if perhaps this guy really is Duncan's real father.

So now I'm wondering what exactly this Kantos guy was planning here. Was he going to kill Duncan and then behead him? He did a lot of traveling just to kill a kid. More likely, his objective was to train Duncan and make him into his immortal lackey, or something to that effect, like that Matt Riddle looking immortal in that one episode. Or perhaps his plan for Duncan was something way worse. ...like the Matt Riddle guy. Who knows.

.....meanwhile, our 13 year old hero is out in the woods with a half-naked woman and her wolfskin rug. This episode is really tapdancing around some iffy subjects here.

After the men go out to find Duncan in the woods, Kantos shows up again to bother Duncan's mom about that foundling.

He uses his hypnotic voice to try and talk her into telling him about Duncan, though she manages to resist it. All she tells him is that Duncan isn't there, which is technically the truth but also isn't giving away very much.

Just realized, Duncan's mom's name is Mary. A little on the nose, especially considering he's a foundling, which is just a step to the side of immaculate birth. This is when the show decided to lean into the idea of Duncan being some sort of savior for the last 30 or so episodes (though I think they quietly kinda dropped it midway through that and went back to him just being a really nice guy).

Meanwhile, out in the woods!

Look at Duncan all sprawled-out. My God! What have they been doing? Absolutely nothing, and Duncan would be a virgin until like age 33 when he got the courage to talk to Debra Campbell.

Cassandra asks Duncan what he was dreaming about. The answer is, of course, mostly her. It's more than that though, in his dream he saw his grown-up self, and it was some distant time. Also he had a conversation with his grown-up self.

Cassandra then plants one on Duncan, and I'm not sure if I'm allowed to show this on the internet. This is, obviously, his first kiss. And probably last for a while. Now the poor guy gets to live with these bonkers hormones that he can't do anything about because the only girl in the village is Debra Campbell.

"Whoaaaaaaa"

He then immediately forgets about Debra Campbell for a few minutes.

It's been a magical weekend for our hero, but unfortunately his villagers are nearby looking for him and Cassandra doesn't want any trouble, so it's time for him to go.

He leaves to get reunited with his tribe, and when he turns around Cassandra's hut is gone. He looked for her in the woods for years, no doubt hoping to pick up where they left off, and never found her. He convinced himself she was a ghost, or maybe didn't exist at all.

Back to the present, these guys are about to fight, despite the protests of Cassandra who tries to tell Duncan they need to go.

They have a brawl, and Kantos is actually no slouch, a formidable foe. He's probably on that Luther tier of "above average bad guy who seems like he should probably be stronger than he is"

He whips out his powers of suggestion by telling Duncan how tired he is and how heavy his limbs feel. 

Jacob Kell Jr seems to like to toy with his opponents before going for the kill, and wears Duncan down with more hypnosis. Cassandra screams really loud and it causes Duncan to stumble and fall off the cliff before Kantos can close in. Also Kantos could have killed Duncan if he hadn't wasted so much time debuffing him while he backed away towards the cliff.

Cassandra drags his corpse away to the car and for whatever reason Kantos just watches instead of trying to climb down and pursue.

After the fight, he has to sit down, and it turns out that using the powers weakens Kantos as well, at least for a minute. Which makes it seem more supernatural again.

Duncan is frustrated at how things went and doesn't know how he can defeat a foe like Kantos. For some reason he's taking it out on Cassandra.

At this point Duncan is frustrated with her and her prophecies, and asks her why she didn't tell his younger self how badly things were going to go. Why didn't she tell him his clan would kick him out? Why didn't she tell him that the one woman he might have married, Tessa, would die over pocket change?

Bro it's 500 years of time you're talking about. She isn't the Encyclopedia Britannica of psychics.

Kantos crosses the "buzz" threshold in the gym, as he's here already. At this point he's just enjoying stalking them.

If he didn't have the buzz he'd probably be able to hear them upstairs arguing. "And why didn't you tell me about Little Deer? And what about..."

Cassandra: "He's here, we need to go now!"

Duncan: "...and why didn't you tell me about all the other bad things that would happen, like that girlfriend I lost in the Blitz? She was my favorite! WHY DIDN'T YOU WARN ME ABOUT THE BLITZ?"

Cassandra: "..........."

After our heroes very unbecoming-ly flee out the fire escape, Kantos lets himself in. Well, can confirm, nothing is locked around here. Guy just walked right into the dojo and took the elevator up. I guess this is an apartment building so anyone can walk through the first floor? However doesn't that mean any other tenants could take the elevator up to Duncan's place? What if someone gets off on the wrong floor and they're in here?

Kantos grabs the first photograph he can find off the shelves...and rips it in half, keeping the Duncan side and tossing the other one away.

What an asshole. Anything else he wants to rummage in while he's here? Why is security so damn light in this building?

"And what about Darius?? WHAT ABOUT DARIUS??"

Is she going to wear that green dress for the entire episode? God, I hope so.

Anyway, what they're actually talking about is how he's going to defeat Kantos, and how he has to embrace the prophecy (which did show him winning). Or just wear earplugs?

Cassandra does a mind trick and Duncan finds himself in the past, talking to his younger self. I wonder if this is the other half of his younger self's dream conversation? No, it's probably just a present-day vision.

Young Duncan talks about how he'll be a great warrior, and Old Duncan says that it's true.

After Old Duncan vanishes, Cassandra walks in and asks Young Duncan if he liked what he saw. I mean, he lucked out on the Future Self And Me front. Man, Cassandra is a real vision.

Cops show up that are under Kantos' control (he showed them the photograph and told them to bring that guy to him). Cassandra can't do anything about it either.

Duncan resists arrest!

He then runs for it! Times like this, it'd probably be really useful if this guy had a bunch of aliases like Connor...

In any case, they apprehend him, and bring him to some secluded location.

Cassandra is just kinda left here to worry. If Duncan loses, she's next. I'm unimpressed with her usefulness in this episode... probably because of how good his usual friends are. Amanda or Fitz would already be on their way to rescue him.

Kantos then proves to be the dumbest bad guy in this entire series. He has Duncan handcuffed to a wall and could completely disarm him with suggestion and easily take his head. I mean Duncan would be dead already if this guy were halfway competent. Instead he A) Doesn't have the cops take Duncan's sword away, B) Announces he's going to go out and take care of some business and return, leaving Duncan alone in here, C) He tosses the key to the handcuffs on the ground just out of reach so Duncan is eventually able to reach them and uncuff himself, D) He stays gone for a while to give Duncan time to formulate a plan. I mean Kantos did everything in his power to give himself a 0% chance of winning here.

After Duncan frees himself, he starts seeing things. It's his younger self, who explains to him that he doesn't need anything to defeat Kantos. He's good, Kantos is evil, and good always wins. "Don'tcha knoo that??" he says. Ya know, this kid version of Duncan is kind of a dick.

Duncan looks kind of pained when the kid asks "Do I win many battles?" as if it's a cause for celebration, and Duncan says yes, you do. Problem is, after a while, it isn't really winning anymore. This episode is good for giving you glimpses into Duncan's tired, battered psyche.

Kantos finally returns, and E) Instead of immediately using his powers on Duncan, proceeds to have a regular fight with him just so he can toy with his prey some more. This is one of those fights where it's too dark to see anything, and the earlier fight in the cliff was better.

Kantos starts telling Duncan that he's tired and slow, and Duncan poses like the guy from Sekiro.

But wait! After playing along to lure Kantos in, he leaps to his feet and is completely fine! The momentary shock of seeing this stuns Kantos long enough to get his head lopped off.

He then takes out his earplugs. All that fussing about prophecies and how he wouldn't be able to win and yada yada, and all he ever needed to do was wear earplugs. Not sure where he got the earplugs. I think he made them by rolling up candle wax, because before Kantos got back he was dripping wax from a candle that Kantos helpfully left in here for light.

THISH ISH! THE QUICKENING!

This is a really cool one where he sees all kinds of visions from his past, mostly of things he needs to let go of. ...which is all of it.

Cut to later, where he's depressedly meditating back at his unlocked loft. Yeah, it was the candle.

Cassandra finally changed out of that green dress, only to now be wearing a fetching silk nightgown. Would it kill her to put on some overalls or something? Eh, she'd probably find a way to make even that stunningly hot.

Duncan totally no-sells her at this point and says that since the prophecy is fulfilled, she can go now. LOL.

He's been in a terrible mood for this entire episode and has mostly just seemed annoyed by Cassandra and her problems, despite her being such an important part of his teenage years. Guy spent years trying to find her in the woods, and here she is, not a day older. I don't know, I'd be pretty excited.

She says there's one more thing that they need to do before she goes. Korean BBQ?

She then helps herself to the guy.

Duncan: "Is this part of the prophecy too?"

Cassandra: "No, this is for me."

I like how he doesn't even bat an eye at the fact that they're gonna do it, he just completely lets her be in charge.

They have a pretty extended make-out scene, and as the strap falls down, I realize that this is, no lie, one of the sexiest scenes in this entire show and it ends way too soon. USA Network standards and practices were probably standing right off camera hitting their hands with batons.

This is the infamous scene from the bloopers where she goes "I'm going to need to find some birth control if we do this much longer".

Suffice to say, prophecies weren't the only things getting fulfilled that evening.

They should call this show Phi-lander.

This guy was around for a while. So many of these guys Duncan kills are so much older than him and probably a lot wiser too. That's how it goes with this immortal thing, though. It's interesting that this guy was Cassandra's student before he got tired of it all and became entirely out for himself. Makes me wonder if Richie could go through a similar renaissance of evilness eventually, despite having a good teacher, and also meet his end at age 1650ish in the 37th century. That said, given the weapons of the 20th century, I suspect humanity has very little actual chance of reaching the 37th century (something that would have been a given in any other millennium). Maybe all the "put it in a post-apocalypse and make it dark!" writers were just being realistic.

As for Cassandra, she'll be back. At a cool 3000-ish years old, she's actually one of the oldest and most relevant characters in the entire run of the show. I just wish we got to see her in combat because she's supposed to be formidable (just not as much as she used to be). She's basically like Methos: Even though she's powerful, she usually chooses to just avoid conflict instead. Can't lose a fight if there isn't a fight, and every fight carries the risk of losing.

One more note: Season 5 is what I consider the high point of the whole show, and it certainly isn't something to be rushed. It's good to finally get here and I'm looking forward to some of the best episodes, as well as Duncan having some serious challenges. The biggest and baddest foes in the series are mostly found here. After the previous high of late Season 3, the show kinda coasted through S4 and I don't think anybody in that entire season was a challenge to Duncan. I mean people bring up Kanwulf the Viking as being S4's "big bad" and to that I just kinda lol. He's an interesting foe, but he doesn't pose much of a threat.

S5's elevation of the competition would have been a perfect setup for The Gathering being at hand, but I'm alright with the show just kinda forgetting about that whole thing considering it'd mean almost everyone we like has to get killed by the end. The whole canon benefits from The Gathering just being this distant event told of in legends that may or may not be where they're going. I like the idea of immortals being around forever and new ones continuing to be born occasionally, instead.

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