Forgive Us Our Trespasses

Forgive Us Our Trespasses
Series Highlander: The Series Season Five Episode 16 Protagonist Duncan MacLeod Friends Methos Amanda Enemies Steven Keane Set In Paris, France Flashbacks 1746 Battle of Culloden 1779 in England with Sean Burns 1917 in France (identical to Deliverance) 1996 in France with Sean Burns Previous Story The Stone of Scone Following Story The Modern Prometheus
Credits Written by Dom Tordjmann Directed by Paolo Barzman Produced by Ken Gord Broadcast On May 5, 1997 Running Time 60 min. Production Code 96516-104

Synopsis

After the destruction of the Clans at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Duncan MacLeod was a man possessed, obsessed with killing the English bastards who had destroyed his people.

Now Immortal Steven Keane has come to make MacLeod pay for his murders. Amanda urges MacLeod to take Keane's head and be done with it, Methos schools him on accepting his past as part of him, but in his heart MacLeod wonders if Keane is right -- if he is a murderer.

Cast

• Credited Cast: Adrian Paul (Duncan MacLeod)
• Guest cast: Elizabeth Gracen (Amanda), Peter Wingfield (Methos), Chris Larkin (Steven Keane), Michael J. Jackson (Sean Burns), Barbara Keogh (Grandmother), Geoffrey Bateman (Richard Dunbar), Marine Jolivet (Inspector Begue)

Crew

• Directed by: Paolo Barzman

Quotes

Methos: Do you remember what happened after Culloden?
MacLeod: Yeah. I went after innocent men and slaughtered them.
Methos: No, that's how Keane tells it. I want to know how you remember it. Because they weren't innocent, were they? There were murderers. They were the English bastards who had destroyed your people, and they deserved to die, all of them.
MacLeod: You sure all of them did?
Methos: You were. You wanted to kill, you killed them.  You know, Keane is just like you. He wants to divide the world up into good and bad. Well it's not that simple. We are all both. Good and evil. We have rage and compassion. We have love and hate. Murder and forgiveness.  Why don't you try forgiving yourself, for once?

---

Methos: I love good guys.

Continuity

Since this was the first episode in which MacLeod and Methos appeared in together after the events of Comes a Horseman and Revelations 6:8, Adrian Paul and Peter Wingfield felt it was still too soon for the pair to be comfortable together,  Duncan could never forget that Methos was a part of the Horsemen and it would probably always be between them to some extent. So Adrian and Peter altered the dialogue and body language enough to show more uneasiness between the pair than the writers originally intended.

Details

• Original air date: 10 May 1997
• Written by: Dom Tordjmann