The Introduction: The Smoker Eureka
There I was, taking a Pork Butt out of the smoker, and suddenly, as one does when fighting the stall, an idea came to me ….”
What if “2001: Space Odyssey” gave us the clues to the origins of “Highlander”?
Forget Planet Zeist. That never happened. Don’t bring it up again.
The Immortals aren’t magical. They aren’t “Chosen.” They are the victims of a catastrophic, four-million-year-old hardware failure. Arthur C. Clarke wrote that the first Monolith that appeared at the Dawn of Man didn’t send a signal towards Jupiter. The FIRST signal was when the Monolith on the moon (TMA-1) was found, waiting for humanity to find it and signal the ability to achieve spaceflight. This is not the first INTENDED signal. The FIRST signal was SUPPOSED to be when the Monolith, Sun, and Moon were aligned, and hominids were curious enough to overcome their fears and touch the Monolith. That first signal to Jupiter would essentially say “Initial Contact Made,” and that’s it. No intended influencing of the mind. Full stop.
What Arthur C. Clarke didn’t know was that something went wrong. Possibly a large Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) hit Earth overnight, or there was a bug or flaw in this Monolith. As far as we know, an intern alien engineer was in charge of testing the Ground Fault Circuit Interrupters (GFCIs) or another safety device, but instead, he didn’t want to stay late and just checked the box. The Intern didn’t just check the box; he skipped the copper grounding mesh entirely. When that CME hit (that’s what we are going with), the Monolith didn’t have a path to the bedrock. It looked for the next most conductive thing in the immediate induction field: the apes’ nervous systems, which were currently touching it. The humans became the ground rods. It happens.
“But the Monolith is TOUCHING THE GROUND! you say. Yeah, I know, don’t interrupt me, I’m on a roll.
There was no intention of nudging the hominids forward in capability. Not at all. Monoliths are not designed that way. I know, I have one sitting on my desk, and it’s never nudged ME forward in capability.
Instead, with its criss-crossed, half-fried circuitry, it not only sent energy to ground (humanoids), it rewired their DNA and vaulted their brains forward to receive LARGE amounts of data. It was a massive, unencrypted data dump.
Their DNA wasn’t “evolved”; it was cauterized into a permanent repair loop. The Monolith’s self-correcting code, designed to keep a slab of obsidian-like material pristine for millions of years, accidentally synced with their biology. Suddenly, aging was treated by the system as a “corrupted file” that needed to be reverted to the last known good save, aka DEATH. Instead of a simple “status update” being sent to the home office, the raw power of the flare and the entire bandwidth of the Monolith’s data were dumped into the biology of the primitives. Their brains were vaulted forward to receive massive amounts of data, and their DNA was rewired in the surge, turning a planned evolutionary nudge into a permanent, undying hardware glitch.
And then we have Moon-Watcher.
In the movie, we see him staring intently at the bone, a femur, I assume, and hitting it on the other bones and the ground. You can FEEL his thoughts rearranging in his head, seeing possibilities. If he had a thought balloon over his head, you may see;
If this was a sword, possibly of Japanese origin, I’d totally cut the heads off some dudes. Wait, what?
Time to go to the mud hole and play whack-a-mole. He’s going to win and pull so much hominid tail, it won’t be funny.
Questions That Leap To Your Keyboard
As I was thinking about this whole thing, I had questions. That’s right, I had questions about something that I had just thought of. Who am I to not address them? This is HIGHLANDER, THERE ARE THINGS THE MOVIE MADE VERY CLEAR!
Sure. Let’s list the questions that I’ll address as we go forward.
- Why a Death to Get to Immortality
- Rules of the Immortals
- The Quickening
- How to Die
- What happens when one immortal cuts the head off another?
We will get to each and every one of those. I may even create links, who knows? Ah but that would just make it easier for you click foward, wouldn’t it?
Post Hominid
So we have a tribe of hominids whose fur has been knocked stiff. Were they now Immortals? I’m sure some are. But there also had to be some who were not, individuals who held the modified DNA and rewired brains just to pass them on to future, evolved-state humans.
Those descendants held the capability, but did the right conditions exist to switch on the programming that made them Immortals? It’s not fate. It’s just a genetically modified (GMO OMG) baby being born with near-impossible alignments happening. No big deal. We know the “last known saved state”, aka DEATH, is what finally flips the last toggle from “Bob” to “Bob the Immortal,” but why Bob? Why then?
Over time, the Monolith is buried in the sand. It’s still trying to fulfill its mission, though. It has to; the “Initial Contact Made” signal was never successfully sent, even though the machine attempted to send it. And it still attempts to send it.
Each time the Monolith is aligned with the Sun and Moon, it attempts to fulfil its mission. A signal to Jupiter fires off. Except it can’t send it. The Intern drinking Alien beers at the project wrap-up party made sure of that. This signal fails, so it goes to the backup Alien wifi, goes Earthwide-local (more on this later).
If the right GMO-Baby is born at or near the time that Earthwide-local signal is being transmitted, not only does the child RECEIVE the signal, but the Monolith KNOWS they received it. It’s an acknowledgement of some sort, a digital handshake. In that birth, involving a child with the modified DNA and vaulted brain capacity, something is switched on, or sideways, or off, and ta-da, you have a future Immortal.
The Sequence: The Global Ping
To understand how a 16th-century Highlander (for example) connects to a 4-million-year-old slab of obsidian, you have to look at the Monolith’s internal logic. It’s running a loop that it can’t escape. The sequence goes like this:
- The Alignment: The Sun, Moon, and Earth line up. This is the Monolith’s “Alarm Clock.”
- The Mission Attempt: It tries to fulfill its primary mission—sending the evolutionary update toward Jupiter.
- The Failure: Because of the Intern’s beer-fueled grounding error, the long-range broadcast fails.
- Maintenance Mode: The Monolith triggers a fail-safe. It enters “Maintenance Mode” and switches on an alien version of Wi-Fi.
- The Global Dump: It broadcasts all the data it was supposed to send to space, but it sends it Earthwide-local. It then sits there, waiting for a response from anything that can receive it.
The GMO Registration
In some ways, the Monolith is acting like a cellular tower.
When a GMO Baby is born at or near the moment of that signal, their minds are “wide open”, a blank hard drive ready for an OS. They receive the signal, but it’s not a one-way street. The Monolith actually KNOWS they received it. It’s a registration event. The “tower” logs the new “mobile terminal” into the network.
From that moment on, the Monolith stays in background communication with that child. It monitors them. It pings them. The child grows up as a “Future Immortal,” carrying a live connection to a machine buried in the dirt halfway across the world.
And then, eventually, a Death occurs.
Why a Death to Get to Immortality
So, our GMO Baby has grown up. They’ve been “background connected” to the Monolith’s background alien wifi since that first handshake at birth. But for years, the system has just been idling.
Then, the fatal blow happens.
Bob dies somehow, maybe from a bullet, sword, or car accident. Think of it as pulling the cable off a hard drive while it’s in the middle of a write operation. When the “future Immortal” takes a fatal wound, the biological system doesn’t just “go offline”; it crashes while the Monolith is still actively communicating with it.
- The Fatal Exception: The connection is violently severed by physical trauma.
- The Error Response: This sudden broken connection initiates a hard reset. The Monolith doesn’t see this as a natural death; it sees a Hardware Violation
- The “Never Again” Procedure: To ensure this specific “device” doesn’t crash the network again, the Monolith initiates emergency procedures to harden the hardware. It forces the DNA into a permanent, self-correcting loop to prevent further “unauthorized disconnections”.
The result is what WE call immortality, but to the Monolith, it’s just a self-repairing, five-nines uptime guarantee. It’s slamming the “device” into a state where it literally cannot break again. The wires cross, the power hammers the cells back into their last known good configuration, and the “Save State” is locked in.
It isn’t a gift of eternal life; it’s a machine desperately trying to “bug-proof” a primitive biological terminal that keeps tripping its circuit breakers.
Social Protocol versus Hard-Coded Constraint
In any long-standing system, it’s easy to confuse a rule that came about because somewhere in society someone SAID it was a rule, versus something that society has nothing to do with. For example, in most parts of society, saying a greeting has become a social protocol. Trying to breathe molten lava and dying or being severely injured is a hard-coded constraint.
In Highlander, the 11 Rules of Highlander mentioned in the video below are often referenced. Of the 11 rules referenced, even the “bad guys” follow them. The big discussion is “Where did those rules come from? Who was the first to learn them and then pass them along?” Let’s dive into a few of them.
No Fighting on Holy Ground
Let’s ignore what The Watchers said—that the last time two Immortals fought to the death on Holy Ground, it resulted in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, destroying Pompeii. While there are suggestions that it’s a non-negotiable fact—that you’ll face physical consequences like weapons shattering or a nauseating “system feedback”, has it ever actually been proven?
In a since-removed movie scene, the villain Jacob Kell kills several Immortals at “The Sanctuary,” which was explicitly Holy Ground. If the world didn’t end and his sword didn’t turn into confetti, then the rule isn’t a Hard-Coded Constraint. It’s a Social Protocol with a really effective marketing campaign.
So, how did this rule come about? We know that, especially in religion, rules, rituals, laws, etc. are blurred into each other. What can be pointed to on a clay tablet as a deity-given law is no stronger than something a religious leader made up for their own benefit and claimed was real. o
The Shaman was a holy man in an area as far back as we can prove there were Shamans. He was as holy as you can be, and served his city well. However, one day he was weak and lay with a prostitute, after drinking more fermented fruit drink than he intended. On his way home, in shame, he was attacked, robbed, and killed. He died thinking of his shame. Then he woke up in the ditch. He was alive! How? Had God given him a second chance? He went to his temple, confused. He had intense shame, but being in the temple and thinking God had given him a second chance made him bear it. Why him? After he was resurrected, he began to notice things. Among them was that when he travelled to a neighboring town and went near the market, he felt hyper-aware, almost buzzing. He noticed another looking at him with a scared look. This other was a tax-collector, and was known to be corrupt. On his way home, he was again laid upon, but this time by the tax-collector’s men, who beat and eventually killed him. In a few hours, he again awoke. Surely this is the devil’s work, was he the undead? He rushed to his temple and prayed, sacrificing several animals. From then on he avoided the market in the next town. In two months, a man showed up at his temple, the tax collector. The tax collector was very stressed. He said “I knew I wanted you dead, but I now realize I must do it myself!” and he drew a sword. “Not on holy ground!” called the Shaman, and the tax-collector, having grown up his whole life around temples, agreed, and they stepped outside. The tax collector killed the Shaman and left. An hour later, the Shaman revived. This repeated several times, with the tax-collector trying different ways to kill him, until one day the tax collector beheaded the Shaman. On that day, the Tax Collector experienced The Quickening.