EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT! ANCIENT IMMORTAL WITCH ...
Well, you see there is this prophecy. At least Cassandra the Witch of Donan Woods is pretty sure there's this prophecy. And her former student Roland Kantos is pretty sure there's this prophecy. About this Highland kid, born on the the winter Solstice. Guess who fits the bill? Young Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. Yup. It's him.
Young Duncan meets Cassandra for the first time when he and cousin Robert MacLeod are trying to beat the men in finding the wolf which has been raiding the sheep. The wolf appears. Robert runs, and Duncan goes all unconscious, only to awaken in Cassandra's little cottage in the woods. Next morning, Cassandra bids him a fond farewell, and Duncan sets out and finds the men of Glenfinnan hunting for him.
In the meantime, Roland Kantos has been hunting for the foundling Highland child born on the winter Solstice and Mary MacLeod manages to fend off his use of the Voice by sheer guts and determination.
In present time, Roland is still hunting for the Highlander born on the winter Solstice, and Cassandra is hunting for him, too. Roland proves what a nasty K'Immie he is by using the Voice to convince a guy to shoot himself and his partner. Cassandra finds MacLeod first and tells him all about the Prophecy in which he plays a starring role. Child and man who yadda yadda yadda.
Roland and MacLeod meet sword-to-sword, and Roland starts using the Voice on Mac to convince him that he's way too tired to fight. Cassandra screams and breaks him out of his fatal trance, and spirits him away. Roland uses the Voice to convince some cops to bring Mac to him, and they do. Mac is kind of dispirited about the whole thing, not knowing how he's going to beat Roland when Roland can pretty much convince him to go to sleep on his feet.
And Mac has a vision of himself as a kid. He talks with the kid and the kid tells him that the way to beat the Voice is not to listen. The kid also assures him that good has to win over evil, just in case Duncan didn't know that. Duncan stuffs some candle wax in his ears before Roland challenges him again, and boy is Roland surprised when the Voice doesn't have the desired effect upon MacLeod. Roland's head goes rolling, and there's a Quickening.
Cassandra meets Duncan back at the loft, and they proceed to grow closer.
Questions:
1. Persons have expressed displeasure with the kiss Cassandra laid on young Duncan MacLeod before releasing him from her cottage in Donan Woods. If you figure that she got to wait a good 400 years before trying him out for real, and she really truly and obviously wanted to try him out for real from the moment she saw him, was it really so bad? Especially when you figure that he really truly and obviously wanted to try her out for real, and kept returning to Donan Woods to try and see her again? Was the reality of Debra Campbell any match for the fantasies that must have been spun by that one meeting in Donan Woods?
2. Why would Roland Kantos be so hot to find Duncan when the Prophecy seems to say that Duncan will defeat Kantos? Wouldn't you think he might actually avoid the Highlander instead of hunting him down?
3. We saw how Dr Anne and Amanda got along when they met. We saw how Tessa reacted to Amanda when they met. We rather wonder what Tessa would have done, had she ever met Cassandra. More than that, we rather wonder what Amanda would have done, had she ever met Cassandra. Would Duncan have been tempted by Cassandra's rather obvious charms if he had been in company with either Amanda or Tessa? Would Cassandra have had to settle for waiting another couple centuries before having her fondest wish granted by Our Ponytailed Hero?
4. Roland Kantos was a student of Cassandra. He learned her power of the Voice and became better at it than she was. A teacher should never teach all her tricks to a student, especially a student who would be inevitably drawn into battle through the constraints and obligations of TCBOO. If Kantos hadn't been Immortal, perhaps she could have retained the secret of acrylic fingernails to defeat him. Failing that, what other weapons might she have used against him?
5. Mary MacLeod was quite a woman, one of my very favorite characters in HL:TS. What would she have thought of Cassandra?