Part 2: In and Out-lander

Wherein change is a constant, truths are revealed and Claire gets her hands aw covered in pish

My partner Chelsea is something of an Outlander veteran, having watched the first season-and-a-bit without me last year. She wasn’t being mean by leaving me out, you understand. She asked me at the time if I wanted a piece of the tartan action, and I said, well… I believe my exact words were ‘Fuck that.’ I didn’t think it would be for me. I loved porn, I loved Scottish scenery, I loved time travel, but I didn’t necessarily feel that I needed them all together in the one package, especially with the added threat of romance.

Five episodes into my binge she asked me if I was enjoying the show so far. Well, I know better now, don’t I, having dipped my toe in the heeland loch. I told her I was enjoying it greatly. How could I not be? It was well-acted, fast-paced, intriguing, and looked vibrant and beautiful to boot. What pleased me most, though, I told her, was that the heavily-promoted romance element of the show had remained somewhat in the background, or at least wasn’t as strongly emphasised as I’d feared it would be.

She gave me a puzzled little look, like I’d just announced that robots were great because they were almost exactly the same as bananas.

“No, really,” I continued, doubling down on my rave review, “I thought Outlander was going to be this quirky, 17th-century rom-com, where the main characters would get married really quickly, and there would be endless soft porn scenes, but, you know, mercifully, it doesn’t appear to be that kind of show at all.”

She looked at me with eyes full of sorrow and pity, as if a doctor had just told her I had weeks to live, and she didn’t yet know how to break the news to me.

At that exact moment, she must have been thinking about episode 7, The Wedding. I was soon to discover that said episode was essentially a quirky, 17th-century rom-com, where Claire and Jamie got married really quickly, and which featured endless soft porn scenes. What’s the Gaelic for bow-chick-a-wow-wow? Honestly, ten solid minutes of that episode were just the newly-weds checking out each other’s arses, followed by another ten minutes of them rutting like dogs.

I’m not entirely sure that what I just made there was a complaint.

Anyway, while it was a nice touch to see the typical male/female dynamics of the era (and of the genre) subverted, by having Jamie play the wet-behind-the-ears virgin to Claire’s experienced and in-control woman, it seemed ever-so-slightly gratuitous to focus on Jamie’s first ever blow-job, and even dwell on his delighted gasp and cheeky wee grin. ‘What’s this bloody show turning into now?’ I cursed at the TV. ‘Scotch Pie? Are McStiffler and McFinch about to burst in wearing lederhosen and trailing a shaved goat behind them?’

I thought about the hygiene aspect again, not to mention the lack of contraception (not even a stab at the rhythm method!). If this was real 18^th-century sex, and not a fantasy-rich, heaving-bosomed, skin-bathed-in-candle-light sort of a romp, then Claire would almost certainly have emerged from her marital bed riddled with everything from ringworm to the bubonic plague. And very probably pregnant. A man and a woman only had to shake hands, sneeze or play catch with a turnip in order to fall pregnant in the 18^th century. An enlightened 19^th-century nurse surely would have known better than to doff her daisy at a wrangler’s dangler like that.

Sex is a funny little devil, though, isn’t it? It’s not just love, lust and longing that joins our sweating bodies together like sexual Tetris pieces. Death, despair, anguish, fear, and anger – and alcohol, too, on its own or in conjunction with one or more of the aforementioned – can make us rub our bits in places and at times and with people we might not otherwise have considered to be sensible choices.

Even though poor haunted, hunted, homesick Claire had at that point been six weeks without a ride (Hi Americans – I’m using the crude Scottish vernacular to describe a bodily act again) I’m still not fully convinced by how quickly she abandoned her scruples and plunged into a carnival of carnal abandon with Jamie.

I was expecting, and hoping for, a bit more in the way of moral posturing and feminist fury, given how headstrong Claire had been up until then. I was, however, pleased that their wedded union was brought about in an interesting and unexpected way, in a bid to frustrate, through legal means, Black Jack Randall’s move to imprison and interrogate Claire. The flashback-framed farce that told the story of the hoops the Mackenzie men had to jump through in order to facilitate the couple’s wedding at record speed was undeniably fun and funny in equal measure.

Still, can’t really grumble about the romance element kicking into gear. It’s pretty much stitched into the show’s DNA. It’d be like watching Sherlock and moaning because he kept solving crimes. At least Outlander embraces blood and brutality to balance out the Mills and Boone-esque schmaltz. The world around Claire and Jamie, with its corruption, thieving, lying and killing, does a fine job of disabusing any notions of Scotland’s romantic past that even the most swooning of viewers may have brought to the show with them. In almost every episode someone is left with a big bleeding, spurting gash cut into their body, absent an ear or an arm, or almost raped. It’s a lot like present-day Airdrie.

Ned’s great, isn’t he? It was nice to see Claire interacting with someone who was her intellectual equal, someone a bit more ‘1945’ than the rest of the rabble; a man who had loftier ambitions than to spend his days farting and fucking. And I bloody love Bill Paterson, the actor who plays him. The last time I saw Bill Paterson in something about time travel (excluding Doctor Who) he ended up bludgeoned to death by cavemen, so maybe things don’t augur too well for old Ned.

Change was the over-riding constant across these four episodes. Most of the major players went through significant changes, both in the way they saw each other, and in the way they saw themselves. The Mackenzie men moved from regarding Claire as a potential traitor or a bothersome sassenach to someone they’d happily fight, lie and die for. Claire, in turn, finally seemed to be finding a place for herself among the Mackenzies, and didn’t seem to view her time with them merely as a prelude to her next daring escape attempt. She also demonstrated that she could mulch piss with the best of them.

Ever since Claire was rescued from Randall’s rapey clutches at the end of episode one she’d viewed Dougal very much as a scary, starey, glarey bruiser of a man (good job she hasn’t seen him in AMC’s Preacher); an image he’d done little to soften by his habit of continually scowling, drinking, and talking about tits and dicks all the time. Her road-trip around the Highlands with the men as they collected rent from their tenants – coins here, a goat there – really seemed to open Claire’s eyes, both to the wider world and to Dougal’s true nature.

At first, though, she believed Dougal was even worse than she’d first imagined. She thought that he was supplementing his private income through skullduggery; using Jamie’s tale of harsh treatment and disfigurement at the hands of the English as a way to extort extra gold from the village-folks – to line his own pockets. Claire being Claire, she wasn’t content simply to think of Dougal as the 18th-century Highland equivalent of Negan from The Walking Dead, she pretty much accuses him of being a knave, an usurper and a rustler, right to his big hairy face, a move that struck me as either evidence of Claire’s skewed sense of privilege and entitlement, or an incidence of iffy writing. Given how much almost every single one of the men barring Jamie hated and mistrusted her at that point, it was nothing short of lunacy for her to take an angry, spiteful stand against Dougal.

Still, if she’d kept schtum she would never have worked out that Dougal was actually a secret freedom-fighter, raising funds to mobilise a Jacobite army to send the English homewards to think again, and to put the ‘rightful King’ back on the throne.

The following episode, ‘The Garrison Commander’, was a great episode of Outlander, but an absoutely peerless episode of ‘Come Dine With Me’. Jesus, that was tense. I think the dinner party at the end of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was possibly a little less fraught.

I wonder if the English gentry and middle-classes ever get tired of being portrayed on screen as the world’s biggest fops and arseholes. Claire flies the flag well for England, but every other English character we meet – or have met thus far – is a blustering, vain, arrogant, unscrupulous little toad. It makes me glad to be on Team Itchy-Skirt. The world loves us, man, even if they can’t always understand us (and even if we don’t always deserve it). I liked how Dougal got a little taste of what it was to be an outlander, a stranger in a strange land, as he stood at the foot of that English dinner-table being cursed and condescended to. He took it well, for his pride’s sake, and for Claire’s.

I’d like to talk directly to Claire now. Claire? I’ve got some good news and some bad news, sweetheart. The good news is, Dougal’s now your protector and chaperone; your very own little Greyfriars Bobby. The bad news? He wants to give you his little grey bobby. (Hi Americans, I’ll pause this sentence to give you time to get back from the Urban Dictionary). This surely won’t end well.

Black Jack Randall, of course, was a surprise – and deeply unwelcome – addition to the dinner party. He too showed that he was capable of change: capable of changing into something even more monstrous than our first impressions had allowed for.

Tension and terror flood from Tobias Menzies whenever he appears on-screen as the reprehensible redcoat. He plays it just the right side of cartoonishly evil, yet still somehow manages to make Black Jack feel feel blood-curdingly authentic. It’s a pitch-perfect study in cruelty and madness. The scene where Claire sits tear-stricken at the dinner table as she listens with mounting horror to Jack’s tale of how much he enjoyed brutalising Jamie is deliciously uncomfortable to watch. I, like Claire, allowed myself to believe, just for a fleeting second, that Jack was reaching out to her in his turmoil, that he was redeemable. Like all psychopaths, though, Jack mined hope as a means to further and better torture his victims, reveling in the quiet savagery of his deception. All the more agonising and impactful when he rips the mask from his face a second time. What a fucking bastard he is.

I’m glad he’s in the show.

And poor, poor Frank (Black Jack’s great-great-great-great-erm-great-don’t-know-how-many-greats-I-should-have-here-grandson), marooned and alone back in the 1945 version of Inverness. The mid-season finale taught Frank that time, anger and desperation can send even the most civilised of men running head-long into superstition and violence. Grief, and the shadows of his ancestral self, threatened to turn him into a monster, a theme I’m sure the writers will pick up again should he ever return to the story – which of course he must. He must, right?

I’m convinced that some sort of evil twin/sci-fi swapsie scenario is going to unfold, with Black Jack escaping to 1946 Inverness and becoming a serial-killer, or Frank accidentally landing in the past and having to convince any would-be murderers that he isn’t the infamous Captain Randall.

Anyway, because it’s the mid-season finale, something suitably seismic had to happen. And thus, Claire finally reaches the stones in 1743, at the same time as Frank does in 1945. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending upon your viewpoint) instead of running into her (first) husband’s arms, she runs straight into Black Jack’s clutches.

One minor quibble. Did the closing moments of the mid-season finale really have to lean into the cliché of the damsel in distress being saved from death and indignity at the last possible moment by her muckle, gun-toting man? Ach, that’s such a 2018 thing to say. It was exciting, ye ken?

I’m all in now.

Here’s to the next four episodes. Bring on the nakedness, Outlander. Just as long as you bathe it in blood from time to time.

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Why I wanted to binge-watch Outlander

Part 1: Season 1, Eps 1 -4

Part 3: Season 1, Eps 9 – 12