At some point in the 1980s, a screenwriter visited Scotland, where he saw a statue of a typical Highlander warrior. Upon looking at it, he wondered what it would be like if this warrior were still alive today. For him to be alive, he would have to be immortal. If he can be immortal, then others can too,… basically one thing lead to another, and thus the screenwriter ended up writing “Highlander”.
The plot of “Highlander” is simple. Several people, across the globe and across time, for reasons unknown to them, become immortal. As immortals, they are now partaking in the Game, where the immortals must kill all the other ones, a feat possible only through decapitation. And when that happens, the immortal left standing will absorb the powers of the immortal he just killed (a phenomenon referred to as the Quickening). One day, when very few of them are left, they’ll be drawn to a specific spot, the time of the Gathering (not to be confused with the movie by Anthony Horowitz), where they’ll keep fighting, until only one is left standing, who will claim the Prize. The main characters here are Connor MacLeod, the eponymous Highlander, and the Kurgan, the main antagonist. It is unclear what the Prize is, but it is said that if the Kurgan wins, it would be a dark time for us all.
So it’s your basic good versus evil story, where (not-really spoiler alert) the good guy wins. But the Game raises a lot of questions. When MacLeod first becomes an immortal, he did not immediately become aware of the Game, he had to be told about it, by his mentor Ramirez. Which begs the question, how did Ramirez know? If your answer is that Ramirez’s own mentor told him, then who told the mentor? Who told the previous one?
I can imagine many of these immortals thinking themselves as gods because they’re immortal. I can also imagine these people being afraid of other immortals for one reason or another. Not to mention that some of them were probably psychotic. Bottom line, much like how people would always find some reason to fight each other, I can imagine these immortals doing the same. And in a world where there is no real police to stop people from killing, of course a fight would be inevitable. On top of that, since they think neither will die, they don’t exactly hold back. As a consequence, not only do they figure out that decapitation kills immortals, they also find out that the dead immortal’s powers will go to the immortal that killed him. Now some of the more psychotic ones would not have any remorse for killing the other ones, but the genuinely good ones would feel bad for killing someone. So it would make sense to me if the earliest immortals came up with the idea of the Game, so to justify their kills. In other words, the immortals never needed to kill each other, the Game was never real, and the Prize itself is also made up.
And I know what some of you are thinking. If the Prize was never real, how do I explain everything else in the movie? The Gathering? The epilogue?
The idea of the Gathering is that the immortals will be inexplicably drawn to one spot. This could well be made up, and the immortals who came up with it didn’t think it would actually happen. But the movie did establish that the immortals can sense each other. And after killing many other immortals, each and every one of them become more powerful. So much so that the weaker ones can sense the stronger ones from a distance, or so much so that the stronger once can sense even the weaker ones, no matter how far away they are. So if a small group of these people are within a certain radius, they would sense each other, and just think that this is the time of the Gathering. Also, since these people have been fighting for their lives, most of them would flee to the new world (America) in the hope that their enemies won’t find them. I don’t know about the present day, but in the old days, when people fled to the new world, they would inevitably end up in New York. So it makes sense that most of the immortals are in or around New York. Enough for them to think that the moment of the Gathering had arrived.
This explains the Gathering, but what about MacLeod winning the Prize? The implication is that when MacLeod killed the Kurgan, the resulting Quickening was too much for him to bear. Which makes sense. He may be immortal, but not impervious to pain. Also, we have seen the Kurgan kill more people than MacLeod. One of them was Ramirez. So to receive all the powers from all the people that the Kurgan killed, that would be too much to bear, resulting in MacLeod getting knocked out cold.
Then there’s the Prize itself. The epilogue claims that the Prize is mortality, and the ability to hear what everyone on the planet is thinking. Really? Considering that MacLeod had for 450 years, befriending many people, even loving many women, but ultimately outliving every one of them, I would understand why he craved mortality. And considering that he had to fight for his life, often ended up trusting people who wanted to kill him, I would understand why he would want to hear other people’s thoughts. I would also understand why the Kurgan would want that, but why would he want to be mortal? Mortality would seem like too high a price to pay just to become a telepath. So I’ll have to assume that the immortals did not know what the Prize was, including Ramirez, who merely said that dark days would be coming if the wrong person wins it. He could merely have been expressing his fear because he didn’t know what the Price was. If he actually knew what it was, why did he not just tell MacLeod?
In short, MacLeod killed the Kurgan, goes through an unusually powerful Quickening, which knocks him out, and while he’s recovering, he’s dreaming of what he hopes the Price is. Mortality, and telepathy. But in reality, he just won the fight against his arch-nemesis, he did not win any prize, let alone thé Prize.
Desmond Scheerlinck writes... 