The New Highlander Reboot Is Blending Canon With A Crucial Character
Who watches the immortals?
The world of the immortals in Highlander has had a complicated mythology from the very beginning. In the original 1986 film, thanks to a moody and iconic voiceover from Sean Connery, we learned that all the immortals eventually will have to “battle to the last,” and when one immortal was left, that person would gain “the Prize.” And so — spoiler alert — Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) became the last immortal, and that was that. Well, not really. Because after that, thanks to film sequels and a beloved TV series, several other immortals and other folks entered the Highlander orbit. And now, with the new reboot film, canon from the TV show and one of the later films is being mashed up together.
New set photos from the Henry Cavill-led Highlander have emerged, and its been revealed that Jeremy Irons is playing a very specific type of character, one that comes from the TV show, not the movies. Here’s who Irons is playing and what it seems to mean for the new Highlander continunity.
Who is Jeremy Irons playing in Highlander?
According to MovieWeb and other sources, including the fan account Henry Cavill Updates, Irons will play the “antagonist” in the film who is a member of “the Watchers.” We don’t know his character’s name, but he will be the leader of the Watchers, which in series, was nominally another immortal character named Methos (Peter Wingfield).
Who are the Watchers in Highlander?
Sean Connery and Christopher Lambert in Highlander II.
First introduced in Highlander Season 2 (1992), the Watchers are a mostly-mortal group of historians who document the machinations of the immortals throughout the centuries. Starting with the character of Joe Dawson (Jim Byrnes), the Watchers were mostly allies of Duncan MacLeod (Adrian Paul), and later, Connor MacLeod, when the film and TV canons were combined in the 2000 film Highlander: Endgame. In that film, there were several bad Watchers, and it seems that is the direction that the new film is going, at least when it comes to Irons’ new character.
So, is this a true canon change? Let’s unpack it.
Highlander’s new Watcher villain could fix a lot of messy canon
Joe Dawson, a Watcher, and Methos in the Highlander TV series.
One of the biggest issues with Highlander in general is that the history and powers of the immortals are given to the audience piecemeal throughout the original franchise. Most of that is the fault of zero planning, with the best example being Highlander 2, in which, retroactively, the immortals were rendered as aliens with psuedo amnesia. While subsequent cuts of that film and additional sequels ignored that canon — even within the relatively consistent TV canon (in which Connor wasn’t the last immortal, but rather a clan-brother of Duncan’s) — the long immortal history and whereabouts of various immortals came from the Watchers.
So, although most Watchers were good in the Highlander show, making Jeremy Irons a bad Watcher who knows all about immortals solves two problems: It gives us a lot of world-building, and, crucially, it means that Connor MacLeod will have an enemy that isn’t another immortal. Unless of course, Irons is an immortal and a Watcher, which would make him like an evil version of Methos. Maybe.
