Makati Cinema Square, 1986
There was a cinema across from my school when I was still in the Philippines. Makati Cinema Square, right there, sitting between my classroom and my dad’s office like it had been placed there on purpose. Some afternoons that’s exactly what it felt like.
That’s where we watched Highlander. Christopher Lambert with the sword and the accent that made absolutely no geographical sense, and Sean Connery playing a Spaniard, which made even less. None of it mattered. Immortals, quickenings, a man who had lived four hundred years and was still carrying the weight of everyone he’d lost. My dad loved it. I loved that he loved it.
We watched a lot of films together, and this is one of them that I somehow keep in my memories with him.
Six years later the TV series came out. Adrian Paul, Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod, a new immortal to follow week after week. And my dad wasn’t here to see it.
I watched it anyway. Loved every episode of every season of it. And every so often — usually somewhere around the flashback scenes, the ones set in the Highlands with the mist and the stone — I’d catch myself thinking he would have been all over this. He’d have had opinions. He’d have stayed up too late for the finale.
That thought never really goes away. It just gets quieter.
The Auction
So when this turned up on eBay around 2010, I wasn’t really looking at an action figure.
Sideshow Collectibles’ 12″ Duncan MacLeod. 1/6 scale. Boxed. And I knew, in the way you sometimes just know, that I was going to get it. Not “would like to get it.” Was going to.
Four days of bidding. Four days of checking the phone at odd hours, doing the maths in my head, telling myself a number and then quietly moving the number. Anyone who collects knows this particular flavour of madness. The figure stops being a figure somewhere around day two and becomes a thing you owe someone.
I won it.
The Figure
It’s a lovely piece, and it holds up.
The likeness. Adrian Paul’s Duncan, caught somewhere between calm and about to ruin your entire century. Sideshow got the brow right, and the brow is basically the whole performance.
The coat. The long dark duster is the character. It’s tailored properly, hangs with real weight, and doesn’t do that awful stiff-fabric thing that kills so many 1/6 figures. Under it, the deep red shirt and black trousers — exactly the silhouette you remember from the opening credits.
The swords. This is where it earns its shelf space. The katana, and the broadsword with the brass Celtic quillons — the one that matters. Getting a 1/6 blade that reads as heavy is harder than it looks, and these do.
The packaging. Celtic knotwork border, thick card, the Highlander logo on the display stand. It’s the kind of box you don’t throw away, and the kind you feel slightly criminal about opening.
The Display
I couldn’t just put him on a shelf.
He’s standing with a picture of the Highlands behind him, mist coming down the mountain, a castle in the middle distance and something burning at its foot. Celtic crosses either side. The Clan MacLeod banner on the drystone wall — castle, ribbon, name — and underneath him the motto:
HOLD FAST.
That was the whole point, really. Duncan MacLeod’s tragedy is that he outlives everyone. He carries them. He keeps going anyway.
I understood that story a lot better after 1992 than I did in 1986, sitting in a dark cinema next to my dad.
The figure’s been on the shelf for 16 years now. Every time I walk past it I still think about a man who’d have loved the series.
Some of them you buy. Some of them you win.
Hold fast.
Happy collecting — if something makes you smile, buy it. You’re investing in your happiness.
Sharing my piece of Neverland…
Figure This Out 