Origin
The Immortals were first introduced in Highlander in 1986. They were created by script writer Gregory Widen who, according to Bill Panzer, producer of the Highlander franchise, "was a student at film school, and he wrote this as his writing class project. (...) He was apparently travelling through Scotland on his summer vacation and he was standing in front of a suit of armor, and he wondered, 'What would it be like if that guy was alive today?' And that's where everything fell into place - the idea that there are Immortals and they were in conflict with each other, leading secret lives that the rest of us are unaware of."
In the Highlander universe, the origin of the Immortals is unknown. Panzer states, "We don't know where they come from. Maybe they come from the Source." It is not known yet what the Source actually is. An attempt to explain the origin of the Immortals was made in the theatrical version of Highlander II: The Quickening (1991), which revealed that Immortals are aliens from the planet Zeist. Yet this was edited out of the director's cut of the film made in 1995, Highlander II: The Renegade Version, in which the Immortals are from Earth, but from a distant past. Neither of the two versions is mentioned in either later movies or the television series.
In either version of Highlander II, Immortals themselves do not know where they come from or for what purpose they exist. In Highlander, the Immortal mentor Ramírez, when asked by newly Immortal Connor MacLeod about their origins, answers, "Why does the sun come up? Or are the stars just pinholes in the curtain of night? Who knows?" In Highlander: Endgame, protagonist Connor MacLeod says, "We are the seeds of legend, but our true origins are unknown. We simply are." In the television series episode "Mountain Men", protagonist Duncan MacLeod expresses the same ignorance when he tells Caleb Cole, a fellow Immortal, "Whatever gods made you and me... made us different," and his next line, deleted from the episode, has him say, "They're just having a little fun."
Wherever they come from, the Highlander franchise assumes that there have always been Immortals on Earth, well before the beginning of civilization. In Highlander, Ramírez's narrative starts, "From the dawn of time we came; moving silently down through the centuries, living many secret lives..." and in Highlander: Endgame, Connor's narrative says, "In the days before memory, there were the Immortals. We were with you then, and we are with you now."
Read more about this topic: Immortal (Highlander)
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can paint, or make, or think nothing but man. He believes that the great material elements had their origin from his thought.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have got rid of the fetish of the divine right of kings, and that slavery is of divine origin and authority. But the divine right of property has taken its place. The tendency plainly is towards ... “a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.””
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)