Dueling Boy Scouts. Uh-huh.
Amanda runs into this Immortal Steven Keane in a Paris disco, and he expresses a desire to meet Duncan MacLeod. Amanda accompanies him to his car, and tries to whack him while his back was turned. He caught her reflection in the car window and managed to disarm her, and use her now-vulnerable position to force her to contact Mac. Mac and Keane meet on Holy Ground and Keane explains why he has to kill Mac.
Mac had killed a mortal friend of Keane's during his rage after Culloden. Regardless of the fact that the mortal friend was the Earl of Rosemont, who had ordered the massacre of the Scots, Keane thinks Mac must now pay for his act. Later on, it also comes out that Keane's friend Sean Burns had talked Keane out of challenging Mac at the time, but recently Mac had killed Sean with no apparent reason. Unable to explain the Dark Quickenings, Mac agrees they should fight it out.
Amanda gets all upset and consults Methos in the middle of the night. Methos meets Mac before he can confront Keane in battle, and Methos shoots Mac. Then Methos goes to meet Keane. Methos is ready to behead Keane when Mac shows up and says if Methos kills Keane, he'll have to face Mac.
Methos lets Keane live.
Amanda takes Mac's life into her own hands and rats him out to the cops as a jewelry thief, a crime of which is he totally innocent, but hardly in a position to prove since Amanda hid some hot jewelry on the barge and told the cops where to find it.
A nice little scene in which Amanda is telling Mac that prison won't be so bad and maybe Keane will get whacked by someone before he gets out. Mac makes it plain that he has no intentions of serving time for the thefts, and Amanda leaves. Mac demands to see the inspector, who sees the reasonableness of being the cop who solves a whole bunch o' crimes with one fell swoop. Mac rats Amanda out, which pisses her off to no end.
Amanda meets Keane before he is next scheduled to kill Mac, and asks Keane to forego the pleasure of killing her friend. Keane is sympathetic but unyielding. Keane meets Mac who defeats him quite handily, and then lets him go, telling him to walk away from this one. Mac and Amanda and Methos are on the barge. Mac and Amanda are drinking and snuggling. Mac makes a fatuous statement about having to be forgiven for things, and Methos seems to take it to heart. It is soon apparent that he is the 3d wheel and leaves Mac and Amanda to their own activities.
Questions:
1. You've got two reputed Boy Scouts here: Mac and Keane. We know Mac has been a straight arrow, mentally strong and morally upright, with a few lapses. But we don't know much of Keane's background. Could he possibly actually really hold the moral high ground in comparison to Mac? Are we to believe that Keane hasn't ever fallen off the pedestal he's placed himself on? And how has he survived for so long if he's not as good a swordsman as Mac? Has he been saving himself for Mac?
2. Amanda doesn't see the humor in being ratted out herself after falsely accusing Mac of the jewelry heist. She was doing it for good cause and Mac wasn't? Is there any logic in her position?
3. Amanda and Methos apparently have some sort of past together. What might it have possibly been? They argue too much to be casual acquaintances. Are they two of a kind?
4. If Mac had whacked Keane or Keane had whacked Mac, and the Quickening been taken, would the resultant Immortal have been just too noble for words or what?
5. Hair. We gotta talk about hair. Mac's hair when he fought Keane was all loose and blowing in the wind. Magnificent. Worthy of slobbering and thunking and all sorts of overwrought reactions. Why was he wearing his hair down for this particular encounter?