Highlander in release order

About this order

What is on this list

All six Highlander films: the 1986 original, the three live-action sequels, Highlander: The Search for Vengeance — the 2007 anime — and Highlander: The Source, which never reached a cinema in North America and went straight to the Sci Fi Channel.

All 119 episodes of Highlander: The Series, the Adrian Paul show that ran from 1992 to 1998. All 22 of Highlander: The Raven, the spin-off that gave Amanda her own show for a season. And all 40 of Highlander: The Animated Series, which is set in the 27th century after a catastrophe has drowned most of the world and has nothing in common with the rest of this list except a MacLeod.

Season one did not air in the order it is numbered

This is the big one. Every DVD, every guide and Wikipedia number season one of Highlander: The Series in the order it was meant to go out. That is not the order it did.

The show was well into filming before it found its feet, and several early episodes were shown out of the intended sequence. The production codes still carry the intention — each one ends with the slot the episode was written for — which is why the numbering everyone uses is the intended one.

Nine episodes move. The one you will notice is Family Tree, which is numbered second and went out eleventh, on 19 December 1992, two and a half months later than its number suggests. Innocent Man, numbered fourth, was the second episode anyone saw.

The rows here are in the order they aired. The Season and Episode columns keep the numbers everyone else uses, so the numbers run out of sequence down the page. That looks odd and it is deliberate: the number is how you find an episode, the date is when it happened, and this is a site about the second one.

The animated series is scrambled far worse

Its numbering is production order, and USA Network paid it no attention at all. The run opened with what is numbered as the second episode. The origin episode, the one that explains who Quentin MacLeod is, was held back to third. Countdown, written and numbered as the finale, went out twenty-first of twenty-seven, and the series limped on for another six weeks before ending on Eagle Valley.

That is what a 1994 viewer got, so that is what is here.

The dates are Saturdays and Sundays, and that is a decision

Both live-action series were sold into first-run syndication, where a station bought the week and put the episode wherever it liked in it. There was never one national air date.

What that means in practice is that the published dates are two different things wearing the same clothes. Some are the day the episode actually went out — a Saturday for most of the run, a Sunday for part of season four. Others are the Monday that began the offering week, which is a label for a week, not a date. Wikipedia prints both and does not say which is which; its own season five summary and its season four table give the same episode two dates five days apart.

Every row here is the day the episode went out. Where the only published figure was a week label it has been moved to that week's Saturday or Sunday, which is what the episode guides that work from station listings give. All 22 episodes of The Raven were week labels, so all 22 have moved.

Treat the Saturdays as the dominant slot rather than a promise. In 1992 syndication your local station may well have shown it on a Thursday.

Three dates that are not what Wikipedia prints

Double Jeopardy is dated 3 May 1997, not May 1996. It was held over and shown in the middle of season five's run, which Wikipedia's own footnote says — but its table prints 1996, which puts the episode before the one listed ahead of it.

Vendetta is dated 4 February 1995. Wikipedia has it as the last episode before the winter break; two episode guides have it as the first one after. It sits in the same place on this list either way.

Avatar is dated 4 October 1997. Wikipedia gives the Sunday, which would make a six-day gap in a run of sevens.

Where the cross-overs are, and why there are only three

For a franchise this size, three marked rows is a surprise, and it is a finding rather than an omission. The films and the series are near-separate continuities that happen to share a rulebook, and a shared rulebook is not a cross-over — immortals, the Quickening, the Gathering and the Watchers are the premise of everything here.

What is left is specific. The Gathering, the very first episode of the series, has Christopher Lambert in it as Connor MacLeod, handing the story to Duncan — and quietly rewrites the ending of the 1986 film, because killing the Kurgan turns out not to have won anything. A Matter of Time brings Joe Dawson over into The Raven, and he is the only character from the parent series to appear in it at all. And one episode of the animated series shows Connor MacLeod's death in flashback, which is the only time a live-action character turns up in that continuity.

Highlander: Endgame is where the two halves are deliberately welded together — Connor and Duncan in one film, with Joe Dawson and Methos from the series and Heather and Rachel from the 1986 original. Films carry no cross-over marks anywhere on this site, on the grounds that any film in a franchise is a cross-over of a sort, so it has none. It is still the place the two continuities meet.

What is not here

The Chad Stahelski film with Henry Cavill as Connor, Russell Crowe as Ramírez and Dave Bautista as the Kurgan. It has been filming since January 2026 and has no release date, so there is nothing to put in order yet.

The Methos Chronicles, eight one-minute animated shorts made for the web in 2001. They existed, Peter Wingfield voiced them, and no source gives a date finer than "March 2001" — so putting them on a list that claims to be in date order would mean inventing one.

Highlander: Reunion, a seventeen-minute short from 2008 with Methos, Amanda and Joe Dawson, made by people from the series and explicitly not canon. Same problem: no date anywhere.

Also off: the 1992 making-of documentary, which is about the programme rather than part of it, and The Adventure Begins, a 1996 tape that stitches animated episodes together into a feature rather than adding a new one.

Where the links go

Every entry links to IMDb, to Wikipedia and to the Highlander Wiki, bar two. Matsuda and Valka, both animated episodes, have no page on that wiki — the titles are taken there by the characters they are named after.

No episode of any of the three series has a Wikipedia article of its own, so those links land on the episode's row in the relevant list rather than on a page about it.