This is for all my fellow-obsessed out there in the Wide World of the Web (and elsewhere), even those who are obsessed with DM - he may get on my nerves most of the time, but I know what it feels like to be obsessed, and therefore I feel like "there's a bond between us"...;) - and who am I to judge the object of other's obsessions?

I am very grateful for your being there, because it is good to know there are people who understand you, even if they're half a world away! I don't want to hurt anyone of you, so please remember:

1.) This is / was JMHO, it is very, very subjective, and if you don't like it, please simply try and ignore my opinion, because it doesn't really matter. That's one thing my obsession has taught me: It doesn't matter what other people think about it! (Credits to Jean, a Duncan fan from England, who copied the Methos eps for me, answering my desperate pleas on the forum: I'll be forever grateful for that! Maybe I'm writing this introduction mainly for you.)

2.) I wrote this over a space of three months about a year ago, when I hadn't yet fully settled into fandom. I was a very prejudiced person in some ways; you could have called me an intellectual snob. I was kind of overcompensating. Because I felt like HL was somehow below my intellectual level or something (As I said, I was a snob. Forgive me...), I tried to convince everyone, including myself, that I was not, in fact, a HL fan by finding all the faults the series had in my eyes - and it does have some, I still think. As the text below nears its end, you can see that facade slowly beginning to crumble...

Those of you who might really feel offended by some slightly derisive remarks about DM and HL:TS (by a deluded mind... ;)): Please don't go on reading. I don't know how this would score on the Duncan bashing scale - not so very high, I think - but really don't want to offend people. If you read it nevertheless and are bothered by it, please e-mail me. (You can, of course, also mail me if you like my thoughts...)

This was my first, instinctive reaction to this whole business of getting obsessed.

Obsession: What's instinctive about ten pages of reflections on getting obsessed?

Me: This is exactly how my instincts work: they just hand over the case immediately to the analysis department.

Thanks to Amand-r and K'immielvr who betaed this!

I have always taken pride in being a very reasonable kind of person.

The experience of the past six and a half months, though, has made me doubt that presumed quality of mine.

I am 21 years old: Well past the age of mooning over actors or the likes (which I have never done in the first place...), one would suppose. And yet - at first without me even being aware of it - such a state has haunted me.

Have I lost it completely? Or am I just catching up on a missed phase of development? I myself am not quite (not at all) sure which of these two hypotheses is right - maybe both.

Well, the fact alone is not necessarily embarrassing - it's happened to all kinds of people, of all kinds of ages, I've been told... It is embarrassing, though, to know where exactly I found the 'man of my dreams' (yes indeed; I have dreamed of him!) and it's embarrassing what I have done since in order to see him, find out more about him, and "preserve" him.

But first things first: Basically, my acquaintance with HIM (I am the first to mock myself; maybe that is keeping me from falling even deeper into this state - Postscript: No, it doesn't.), well, basically this acquaintance is about two years old already, though it was admittedly a rather fleeting acquaintance at the beginning.

I was channel surfing, when my gaze fell upon the face of perfection ;) for the first time - a face that caught my attention immediately. I consulted the program, which said "Highlander". Oops. (It was not something I would have watched deliberately at the time, to say the least!) Still, I hung on, because of that face. Next day: I'm switching on again. Big disappointment. Apparently whoever-he-was only had a guest appearance. Next day or so, I have already forgotten about it. Well.

Two years later: I am living in an unbelievably awful town, with just a handful of TV channels, and too much time on my hands. After a while, I find out that one of the few stations I can receive is repeating HL. I switch it on and consider it rather silly, but remembering that face, I sort of decide to take a look from time to time. And, one day, I'm lucky and come upon the episode I've seen two years ago, and the face - and the rest of the man, too! - is still perfect... (and I still don't realize which danger I am in!)

In the weeks that follow, I watch HL at intervals, hoping for the man to reappear. And reappear he does, and more than once. So that is how it happened; that is how I became hooked.

At first, I don't even admit it to myself, but in the time that follows, whole days are reduced to mere waiting time and an ever-increasing part of my thoughts centres on him.

I yearn for the evening to arrive. Hours stretch like chewing gum. At long last, school is over, I can go home; there are another three hours to kill, so I lie down for a moment and doze off, thinking of him... - Someone's knocking at my door. It's my flatmate, informing me she has prepared dinner. A look at my watch tells me it is 7 pm. Fifteen minutes. I feel like throwing up.

"Terribly sorry, but I don't feel well; I'd rather not eat today."

Then, the big moment: Will he be there tonight or won't he? If he is, my evening is a happy one: I write long letters, call my friends, swept away in a euphoria no one yet knows the reason for.

If he does not appear that evening, there is always the hope for the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that...

Friday evenings are times of torture. Friday is the day I go to visit my parents. I'm too ashamed to explain to them that - and what's more, why - I simply *have* to watch HL; therefore, I refrain,silently suffering agony until, finally, my self-control is overcome and I make my confession, still playing down the feelings. As it turns out, I'm just in time, because in the following weeks the Adored One is often to be spotted on Fridays.

So what is it the man I honour with my attention does in that series? He is playing an agreeably cynical, refreshingly egotistical, slightly shady friend of the sanctimonious hero. Lean, often rather pale, with interesting, yet not by common standards handsome features (of face and of character), he provides a nice contrast to the hero. The hero is muscular, sports a healthy attractive tan, a ponytail and does, of course, what a man must do: i.e. fighting bravely and honourably for the right causes (this entails a rather pompous facial expression), defeating the Bad Guys, helping the Good Guys and being chivalrous towards ladies. My special friend, on the other hand, was one of the bad guys once, has Getting-out-of-the-way-of-danger-and-staying-uninvolved down to a life-prolonging art form, fights rather dirty and will kill a lady if he thinks it's necessary. He is, in short, not a Nice Guy, or at least he isn't at all times.

His appearances being rather rare altogether, he seldom gets more than two or three minutes on screen at a time, which he spends slouching casually on the fringes or in the background of the scene, hands in coat pockets, smiling ironically and emanating an aura of immense life experience. Since the series deals with people who live forever (until someone cuts off their heads), his experience is indeed immense: "I didn't last 5000 years by worrying about anyone but myself."

So much for the series character. About the actor who plays him I know hardly anything, not even his name, because he's not in the opening credits and th end credits are cut.

Comes a Potentially Black Thursday. Rather abruptly, the TV station is announcing the end of the running season and the beginning of the next. I have a gut feeling that the need for dramatic events at the end of one season might cost Methos' (enough circumscriptions) head. I think he's just important enough so it would have the necessary emotional impact, and not yet important enough for the whole series that his 'exit' would 'kill' it (except for people like me).

Due to these premonitions of doom, I call my parents so they will tape the ep. (Why haven't I started taping the eps earlier? I don't know. Maybe because I still was not able to admit to myself how important this had become to me.)

The end of the episode (One Minute To Midnight) does indeed suggest Methos will be absent for a while, if not even for the rest of the series, though, luckily, my premonitions were wrong. He says some Really Deep Sentences, then disappears into the dark, coat flapping. Still, the idea of now owning a few minutes of Methos Preserved sends me floating with bliss.

Thus I spend the greater part of the weekend kneeling devotionally in front of the tv set, stretching these few minutes by means of slo- mo to infinity, vaguely afraid of damaging my Most Precious Videotape, more clearly afraid I might really be going a little insane.

My parents indulge me, patiently listening to my endless soliloquies, which oscillate between self-analysis and pure drooling-and-thunking. My mother actually begins to like him a bit too well for my liking (considering potential future friends in real life). I, for my part, sort of stand beside me watching myself bemusedly for all this time. I've decided to consider the situation a kind of psychological experiment I'm performing on myself. At some point of the development, I argue to myself, I must have had a choice, and I chose obsession. (Today, I'm not so sure anymore whether I had that much of a choice!)

Well, in the two weeks following that fateful Thursday, I almost lose all hope of ever seeing the Incredible Man again and am suffering from a kind of diluted pain of parting. One day, I'm out of town all day, only returning home after the episode has started (and been running for a while already). Still, I switch on the TV and... see HIM! In close-up! (Heaven!) Of course, I've been taping the show ever since that Thursday, just in case...

The next day, he's present again. The day after that, some facts about his DARK past are revealed, which I take rather badly - it feels rather like a punch in the stomach to me... though I'm not quite ready to admit to myself I am being affected that way by a TV show I don't even especially like. I feel supremely silly.

Helplessly subjugated to the whims of script writers who can turn him into anything, even a mass murderer.

Finally, I calm down again and, on Monday, I am ready to accept his past as another aspect of his extremely multi-faceted character. (I wonder: how could someone like Methos happen to the show? Are the writers aware of how fascinating a character they have created here, so much more contradictory and intriguing than most of the series' other characters? Or was he merely an accident?)

I expect to lose him, though, because, I believe, it would be just like HL to have him redeem himself by dying. It would fit the morals of the show. Once again, I am surprised: He is left alive.

At the time, I don't seriously think I will see him again in this role, believing he has become much too complicated for HL. But I'm wrong again. Just a few days later he is back and holding a sermon on the unchangeability of the past and good and evil in the human soul.

(It is Friday evening. I am eating with my mother. We have prepared dinner together, me in the meantime explaining her the above. At a quarter past seven I tell her I just want to take a quick look, just in (the rather improbable) case of him reappearing... joking that, hopefully, he will not appear, or I would not be able to eat anything. Then, under 'guest starring', the name... Just on cue, my stomach goes mad. Damn these hormones.

By now, a lot of people know. My first 'outing' has triggered something I like to call the 'Go tell it from the mountain' - effect, and now I have to really get a grip on myself so as not to push the story of my conversion upon every defenseless victim...(which I am doing right now, in fact, to you who are reading this... ;-)) I stop just short of printing pamphlets and proselytizing in the city. Talking about it even increases the feeling, I have discovered.

The obsession continues. I try to understand what is happening to me. Is it a kind of hysteria? An addiction? Is this a weird way my psyche has chosen to tell me it is time I went looking for a boyfriend? (But is there anybody in Real Life who could compare to him? *g*)

That part of myself which keeps observing and analyzing classifies it as a kind of febrile infection that has to be endured until, finally, the climax is reached and the patient can recover.

Then the series approaches another end, a final one this time. He makes himself scarce. For two interminable weeks I feed on my videotapes - or rather, my obsession feeds on me. From leafing through TV programmes in the supermarket, however, I know that one of the last episodes is centered mainly on him. For two weeks I am waiting for The Day. When it arrives, at long last, two friends who know about my obsession happen to be with me; also present is my flatmate, in on my secret only since recent times, who is curious to see who has been robbing me of my appetite for weeks. I feel ashamed because of this massive attention, ashamed for every slightly silly scene he might appear in, ashamed for the silliness of the show in general.

Then, the episode starts, and the beginning feels strangely familiar to me... Some idiot at the station has scrambled up the episodes, the episode they are airing is old.

For the rest of the evening I rant and rave and probably am not very pleasant company. (Let down.) Later that evening, my guests gone, I call the station to rant some more (well aware all the while of the new level of madness I have reached). A sympathetic guy informs me that several people have called already and that the episode will pobably be skipped because the program does not allow for 'repeats'. This does not surprise me; I have expected this. I put down the phone and put my head in my hands, laughing helplessly. What is happening to me?

For the rest of the evening I wonder what kind of people - except nuts like me - will call a tv station to complain about a missing episode of HL.

(The next day, I call once again, telling a very nice woman that I do not like the show - heaven forbid people mistaking me for a fan! The very nice woman doesn't know how I might get to see the missing episode either, except by waiting six months, because the show is being repeated. This is not news to me. I've bought a little calendar some days ago for the sole purpose of counting the days until the episode 'Methos' will be shown again.)

The end coincides with the beginning of my holidays. I compensate for the lack of new supplies by increased video watching, but I am well aware of the fact that the duration of my virtual affair is limited. I know that the effect of the images will cease after countless times of re-watching; I know that my obsession will fade away when the fuel runs low. The feeling will decrease, and then I will sense a kind of emptiness for a few weeks, a kind of longing. Then this will cease, too, and it will be over. Unpleasant, but not really painful. (postscript with hindsight: I did not know about the obsession-enforcing powers of the internet then...) I'm a bit afraid of it: I don't want to lose the euphoria that has been ruling my nights and days for weeks now.

But as yet, the feeling is still alive, and I am surrendering to it although - because - I know it's transitory, ignoring the futility of it all. And why should I act otherwise, as long as it feels that good. I should just try and not make myself more ridiculous than necessary.

(An entirely bizarre state of mind: constant near-ecstasy. I love life. Ironic that such a state should be brought about by an imaginary man, a TV image.)

I am talking with a friend who hardly recognizes me anymore about my situation. Amazed and amused but practical, she offers good advice: Why don't you take a look at the internet, she says. You'll certainly find something about him there. You can't be the only one who likes this man.

She's right.

My patient, indulgent father guides me on my first steps into the net. (Me, in a flash of realization: "I'm nuts." - my father, levelly:"Yes.")

It's the middle of the night. We let Yahoo search for 'Highlander' and are sent to a German fan's page.

I have heard things about the net, I've read newspaper articles and essays on what fans do there, but nothing could prepare me for the real thing. Someone has taken a lot of trouble to present an enormous amount of information about a not exactly great TV show to the public.

("This is crazy. Just plain and simple crazy. I mean, I knew there were obsessive X-Files or Star Trek fans, but this... I don't believe this!"

"Why, you are watching the show yourself!"

"Yeah, but not because I like it!!!")

I click on 'actors', then on 'Peter Wingfield'. After a few seconds a picture and a bit of text appear.

Born in Cardiff, 1962. Dropped out of medical school to become an actor. Holds an 'Advanced Stage Fighting Certificate'. Runs marathons. National Trampoline Champion at age 15. Then a list of films and TV series, all unknown to me.

Trampoline...

But basically, I realize, it is not Peter Wingfield I'm interested in...

I'm browsing the pages, find the key word 'Methos'. But the creator of the page is a Highlander fan, not a Methos fan. Information is scarce - as was to be expected, I tell myself; after all, he's only a side character...

On I go to 'International Highlander Links'. An almost infinite list of links is blinking across the monitor. As I'm scrolling down, my eye gets caught on this: 'The Methos Madness Page'.

"I don't believe it." ("You can't be the only one who likes this man!") Madness - how appropriate, I muse.

Click. The Index: The Methos Madness Gallery; The Essential Methos; The 'Only If It's Got Methos In It' Episode Guide; Methos Erogenous Zone... Subtitle of the first page: 'Does the term compulsive obsessive mean anything to you?'. At least these people are capable of self-irony.

I admire a few pictures (He, heartwrenchingly lonely in a long coat in the dark - I'd like to write in the rain, but I'm not sure whether this impression is right), beside which are offered characterizations by fans.

Here, too, there are links to other sites, commented by the creator of the page I'm on: Methos Methos Methos ('possibly a Methos site'); The Mostly Methos Sound Page ('sounds from... uhm... HL - mostly Methos'); The Kronos Madness Page (I had to link to it cause Kronos said he'd hurt Methos if I didn't'). On the latter, I find a comparison between Methos and Kronos, his evil friend from his ugly past: 'Ten reasons why Kronos is better than Methos:' - reason No. 5: 'Kronos doesn't spend half his life drinking beer.' - reason No. 1: 'Kronos wears cool black leather while Methos wears grotty brown pullovers that are too big for him.' (I like men in grotty brown oversized sweaters.)

(Everything in the paragraphs above is quoted from memory, and therefore might be slightly inaccurate.)

The greatest discovery waits at the page with the repetitive name. Thirteen pages of quotes in English. ('Why quote Methos? Because he gets most of the good lines, or at least the witty, cynical and philosophical ones...') We load them down and print them out. Now I can roll him up, put him in my pocket and take him everywhere I go...

That night, I go to sleep with the cheering but also slightly eerie feeling that there are people who are even more nuts than me.

That's my story so far. I have told it to quite a lot of people after I'd finally decided to accept my feelings and my own behaviour, no matter how crazy they might seem to others. Reactions varied, but no one has declared me insane, at least not to my face ;-). Then again, I didn't tell my story to just anyone, and I didn't tell everyone the whole story!

Some people expressed their pity and wished me that something like that would happen in my Real Life. Usually, I answered to this by claiming that this thing I'm experiencing at the moment is probably preparing me for reality, that it is a kind of rehearsal people normally go through a little earlier - but I've always been a bit slow!

Partly, I think, this is a plausible explanation. Yet I am not sure it is all there is to it.

I have always spent a considerable amount of my time in unreal places. I am using the word 'places' deliberately, because my daydreams have never been of a fleeting, transitory nature. They were always a world in their own right, a parallel universe. Now, this does sound a bit like madness. Am I fleeing from reality? Sure, in a way, and yet I am not: I was always aware of reality, as well. What is reality, anyway? Things that happen in my head are as real as things that happen in the 'outside world' in their own way. As long as I can keep my worlds apart from each other, there is no real danger for me - I hope. (Note: Here it seems appropriate to me to ask whether what we consider as 'normal' is but a very inadequate idea maybe... Maybe anyone's 'internal life' would appear a bit crazy if exposed to the general public?)

The worlds I mentally move in are not necessarily my own creation - if they were I could become a writer. Any novel, any film or computergame, and even a not-so-great TV series can become a door to another world. Or, to find a more fitting analogy: Reality, books, films etc. are all gigantic quarries where I can pick and choose bits and pieces to work on.

My short visits to the internet have shown me that I am not the only one to create my very own second reality in this way. Many people apparently have a similar method of dealing with the 'realities' offered to us by the media. Maybe this phenomenon can be observed best with fans of TV series.

Series have an especially quarry-like character. They are unfinished by principle, made to be continued. There are always loose ends left to be taken up again later - or sometimes not to be taken up again, as the case may be.

In a film or a book, usually all threads of the story are brought together or resolved at the end to create an impression of (completion). Series, on the other hand, are more like Real Life in this respect, even if they tell stories that are so unbelievable they make your hair rise - you always feel it will go on somhow. Today's adventure may be over, today's problem solved, but the protagonists will be back tomorrow (or next week) to solve another problem, have another adventure...

An accidental viewer might be led to believe that in the dozens of series that are aired each week on more than thirty channels 'action' is of prime importance, but this is not true. For, if you've watched a certain number of episodes of a certain show, you will find that the action suddenly retreats into the background and the 'background' becomes all that really matters. For a fan it is often only of secondary interest if the Cardassians conquer Deep Space Nine, Superman saves the world once more, or the conspirators from () Street control the UN. The really important things, however, are those that are only hinted at by a look, a word... The things that are forever doomed to remain unfulfilled because otherwise the series would gain a sense of completion quite contrary to its necessarily unfinished nature.

The average episode takes approximately 45 minutes, and these 45 minutes are often stuffed with enough action to make a whole movie. This means, by necessity, that some things will have to be neglected. Most often, the need for action takes its toll on character development.

The following is just guesswork, a hypothesis I haven't yet fully thought through: Perhaps this deficiency is just what provides the appeal of many 'never ending series' :) - What the audience really wants to know about the protagonists will never be revealed, what (they) really want to see will never happen - at least not on screen! But anything is possible in the viewer's head. The series provides the raw material, a roughly hewn block of stone, yet the actual end product is created inside the veiwer's mind, and it doesn't have to bear much resemblance to the raw material anymore. The audience lives with the series, and the series lives only through the audience.

And so the man who fascinates me so much exists but in my imagination. He has Peter Wingfield's face and Methos' personality, but he is more. (How to create the Man Of Your Dreams, Lesson 1)

Since the beginning of my report a month has passed. At present, it's half past one in the morning, technically speaking it's Sunday already. I should go to bed now, but I can't. This demands to be put down on paper immediately.

Devastated by the news that the series is going to be cancelled soon, in mid-rerun and long before the completion of my taping of the Methos eps, I've been searching frantically for a way to get my obsession new fuel. And tonight it happened: Again, full aware of the danger this time, yet at the same time convinced of the inevitability of this step, I have jumped into deep water.

Any minute I spend on the net makes it clearer to me that I can get lost there, that I can lose my ground and drown in there. (How can I be so weak, how can it be possible that I am losing control like this?)

No half-hearted attempts this time. I started a search for 'Methos' - and the collected madness of possibly thousands of fans crushed down on me like a tsunami. (Late at night my style grows flowery.)

Yahoo offered me a seemingly endless list of pages. For some obscure reason this flood made me feel a little sick.

Clicking my way through the list, I soon began to understand that what had amazed me so much a few weeks ago was nothing but a (small) foretaste.

One of the first sites I visited was, I believe, 'The Methos Harem', a 'close knit sisterhood' of 57 people, presumably of female sex (but how do you know on the net?) who are dedicated to worshipping the 'Blue Faced Love God' - with special attention to his toes, it seems to me.

I refrain from filing in an entrance form for the time being. But who knows how far I will fall yet into this state of fandom?! One thing is certain: Just a few weeks ago I wouldn't have thought it possible that I would ever call a TV station to complain, let alone visit fan pages on the net.

In the meantime I am ready to accept that I have got it bad and inclined to believe that of the two explanations offered at the beginning of this essay, probably the first one is right. That part of myself which is still able to think coherently hardly ever stops shaking its head...

During my long internet odyssey I am swept ashore pages that contain countless pictures, some of them showing a rather scantily clad Methos - probably from the episode the chaotic program planners have defrauded me of. There's also one of Peter Wingfield standing on his head at some fan club meeting(?). Looking at this photo, I am wondering whether he feels flattered or rather molested, being the object of desire for so many people, and whether I think his committment is nice or perhaps a bit embarassing. I witness a quite philosophical discussion about the psychological consequences of eternal life, gain information about the official fan club pig Matilda and a certain rather holy fork in the possession of said fanclub and realize that any feeling I've felt has been felt a thousand times, any observation made a thousand times, any question asked a thousand times - though not necessarily answered. (Most frequent question according to fan club statistics: 'What is the colour of his eyes?!' - Hmmmmmm...)

Also quite nice: A page where one can listen to a few seconds of Methos speaking: 'I'm just a guy!' - Maybe a reminder for all those who are already calling him a god.

My obsession proceeds in waves: On some days the feeling increases to almost unbelievable inensity; then again, for days or weeks nothing special happens. At high times he is indeed the centre of all my thoughts - all associations lead to him. It is really quite ridiculous how my brain contorts to connect even the most trivial shreds of a conversation to him. At times of intense video consumption I sometimes feel I might begin to move like him; I'm looking into the mirror, spooked into expecting to see a strange metamorphosis take place. (Lacking an Other, you become an Other)

At least part of my fascination is rooted in a strong sense of identification.

Talking about it makes it more real. Writing about it does the same, and that's why the net is such an excellent means of keeping an obsession alive. All those fans who are publishing their fanfiction on the net are maybe not so much looking for an audience for their literary attempts, but trying to make their private world become more real. Allowing other people to enter your own imaginary world means extending this world, and while it becomes real for others it also gains substance for you. (Trying to put things I rather feel than understand into words, failing pathetically...)

Again I have entered the net, hanging around 'private' fan pages and the 'official' Peter Wingfield Fan Club, to which I have sent an e-mail, hoping that someone there might help me get copies of the missing eleven episodes. (I haven't joined yet, though.) On these pages I have found short autobiographies of many of the members, which I could only skim through since I was in a hurry. Still, it was instructive.

Of course, as one of the 'normal people', you know of the existence of such clubs. Maybe you think these people are a bit strange; maybe you even think there's something lacking in their lives this is serving as a substitute for. Miserable, lonely people who don't know how to deal with 'real' people, who can't deal with their 'real' lives and withdraw to television fantasy worlds or the internet for fear of reality. (My own prejudices.)

I've been revising my prejudices, my arrogance towards 'these people' for some time now. Step by step, I've started to discard them since I've become aware that I have a lot in common with these people.

So, when I read these bios, a warm feeling of understanding flooded me. - All the more so because some of them expressed the same kind of amazement at themselves that I am experiencing when I look at my own development of the past months.

What kind of people join a Peter Wingfield fan club? Pretty normal people, people 'like you and me'.Young women, married middle-aged women with two kids and/or two cats; older women (e.g. *1931); college/university students; office workers; fantasy writers. No hysterical teenagers, but people who appear to be pretty "sensible". I am putting this in quotes because I am now fully aware of the stupidity of the prejudice implied by the phrasing.

I am summarizing: Contrary to my long-fostered beliefs, my visits to the net - my first contact with 'real' fans that is not filtered by the media in some way - have shown me these are mostly rather 'normal' people with families, friends, 'normal' jobs and hobbies.

Even long after I'd told many of my friends about my obsession, I wanted to make myself believe my case was different. I told myself something distinguished me from other fans, whose behaviour I considered as somewhat undignified. I was not able to admit to myself I was part of a group of people looked upon by others - not just by me - with a mixture of pity, contempt and irony. I tried to save myself from this insight by means of satirizing myself. (- Look here, folks, you don't have to bother and make fun of me; I am taking care of that myself already!)

Only slowly I am learning - out of necessity, since I have lost any control over the run of events anyway - to really respect these people and myself, too. I don't want to and I don't have to make fun of my emotions or excuse for them. The feelings are real. That they are caused by an unreal person is nothing to feel bad about.

A closer examination of my feeling of embarassment: Maybe I am most ashamed because the BFLG, a.k.a. ROG (LOL!) is part of a show that doesn't live up to my standards. Or, even more honest: I am ashamed because a part of that show does meet my standards. I am afraid of what this will say about me in other people's opinions.)

As I stated somewhere above, I am mainly interested in Methos, not in Peter Wingfield. I am in love - to use a serious word for a serious feeling - with a fictitious, amoral five thousand year old, not with an actor I know very little about except for the fact that he will stand on his head for his fans. This means that I have to accept to a certain degree the premises of the universe this man lives in. Which I do. I have always - well, ever since I've had an opinion on this kind of thing - been of the opinion fantasy doesn't have to be flat. Over the past months, I've also begun to realize that quality is not only an elastic term, but also has very little to do with why you like a show.

In my opinion, Highlander doesn't deserve special attention among the many series currently on TV. For a while, I claimed it was in the 'Worst Ten', but some time has passed since then and I've taken a look or two at the TV program! Now I know there is a lot of really bad stuff around! My somewhat overly harsh judgement was caused, I suppose, by my wanting to discourage even the slightest speculation among people who know me that I might be a HL fan.

I have mentioned my 'quarry theory' on television series above. To keep that analogy, the HL quarry is a place where mostly quite rough material is won that requires a lot of 'work' still from the watcher. You have to be a much-forgiving person if you want to enjoy HL. Silly looking special effects, the often lecturing tone and the hero with his muscles and heroical look - these are just a few examples. Mind you, I can live with the basic plotline. This plot doesn't have to be flat, it has a lot of potential.

What fascinates me about Methos is his loneliness, his aloofness, his deviousness, his will to survive. He is, to me, the essence of immortality, and therefore in a way the essence of the series itself. (Of course, I'm biased!) Methos can send shivers down your spine - not just because he has an interesting face, and undefinable eye colour, beautiful hands and, yes, I noticed that, too, wonderful feet. I haven't seen much of the net yet; I can only give my first impression here, which seems to indicate many fans of the series think similarly . judging from some discussions and a bit of fanfiction I've read. I am quoting someone from a discussion: "He added to the series something that had been missing."

I've also met lots of 'real' HL fans among the Methos fans on the net, and of course I've started to wonder what makes all these people like the show so much. I have come to the conclusion that there are only two possible explanations: Either these people and me have already become irredeemably trivial, or, quite on the contrary, we are able to perceive the depths below the surface. Maybe these depths weren't put there by the creators of the show on purpose, but ultimately, this doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is our imagination.