Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 1, Eps 9 – 12

Part 3: Burn, baby burn

Wherein things get a bit too hot for Geillis to handle, and Jamie gets addicted to smack

Non-Scottish Outlander fans: “It must be great being Scottish and watching Outlander. It must enrich the story for you, knowing the history inside-out, especially all the stuff that happened with the Jacobites.”

Me: “Och, aye. Teach a class in the bloody Jacobites, I could. I know more about the Jacobites than Bonny Prince Charlie and, erm… that other guy, eh… what’s his name… Jack… Jack O’ Bite?…” [nods]

[opens Google and frantically types in ‘Was Jack O’Bite an Irish King?’]

My friends, I know absolutely nothing about the Jacobites, save for the broadstrokes. And when I say broad, I mean broad. If I were painting my knowledge of the Jacobites instead of writing it down, I’d be using the Jolly Green Giant’s sweeping brush to paint a portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie onto the head of an atom.

My knowledge of the subject largely stems from these two things:

  1. When I was eight, my primary school class did a project on the Jacobites. I can distinctly remember drawing some wee ginger people in kilts. I can’t remember anything else.
  2. Scottish comedian Ricky Fulton once played Bonnie Prince Charlie in a comedy sketch on TV at New Year’s, circa 1988. I didn’t think that it was very funny.

And that’s it. Class dismissed.

Of course I know that my ancestors were beaten and bowed by the English state, and eventually decided to kick back against it, only to get their arses kicked, but the political and dynastic intricacies of the era escape me. Well, maybe ‘escape’ is the wrong word, because that would imply that I ever had the facts imprisoned in my skull to begin with.

Most of us here in Scotland are at the mercy of whatever liberties American writers and film-makers wish to take with our history. I was 14 when Braveheart hit cinemas. The Australian Mel Gibson and the American Randall Wallace (no relation) became, in effect, my history teachers. It was only in retrospect that I learned about the glaring historical inaccuracies present in the movie. Really, though, Gibson and Wallace had enormous power: they could’ve shown me the Scottish front-line propelling towards the English archers on unicycles as they juggled carrots, while William Wallace led the rest of his army in a rousing rendition of Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, and my teenage brain would’ve entered those ‘facts’ into the permanent record, no questions asked.

I sometimes hear people say things like, ‘Who cares about the historical accuracy if it’s an exciting story?’ It’s mostly American people who say things like that, but I’d like to see their reaction to a movie about the Civil War that featured Robert E Lee charging down the battlefield on the back of a rhino as Ulysses S. Grant prepared to take him out with a rocket launcher.

I know more about the American Revolution, The American Civil War, the French Revolution and medieval Europe than I do about Scotland’s past. Outlander, then, is teaching me bits and pieces about Scottish history as its story bobs and weaves and cuts and thrusts along, which is something I really shouldn’t be relying upon it to do. I should be immersing myself in books and educational films about my nation’s fraught and fascinating history, but I can’t. Not yet. Because, get this: I don’t want any spoilers. Not even from history itself.

That’s pretty messed up.

Anyway, a poor student of history I may very well be, but I’m reasonably confident that Scottish soldiers didn’t make a habit of carrying out daring raids on English forts to rescue kidnapped ‘princesses’. And if they ever did, they probably didn’t find themselves leaping from incredibly tall towers into the freezing water below as massive explosions rocked the fort behind them. It must be pretty hard to keep trumpeting historical realism when your 18th Century Scottish swash-buckler suddenly turns into a cross between Robin Hood Prince of Thieves and The A-Team.

“This is Mr McT. He’s absolutely terrified of horses.”

“I ‘aint getting’ on no mane, fool.”

Do you know what, though? To paraphrase that mish-mash of Americans I’ve encountered over the years, I didn’t really care about the improbability of it all, because it was pretty damn exciting. After all, this is a show about a woman who travelled through time by touching a rock, so let’s not cleave too hard to history, here.

If Claire’s rescue from a thoroughly rapey Black Jack seemed just a little too improbable for my tastes, then I was happier to embrace the realism – or what I supposed was realism – of the event’s aftershocks, namely the consequences to Claire of ‘running off and getting herself kidnapped’.

Now, I know very little about the specifics of gender relations in the 18th century, beyond the supposition that they must have been fraught and unfairly weighted in the penis-weilding sex’s favour, but a husband feeling entitled to spank his wife for ‘stepping out of line’ seems to fit with my impressions of the era. I guess it would’ve been unrealistic for Jamie always to have acted like an enlightened 20th century man, immune to the influence of the culture and country around him, especially since most of his pals are sweary brutes who always act like they’re on a stag do in Malaga.

As the show worked up to its possible spanking I stared at the screen in disbelief. ‘If Jamie puts Claire over his knee and belts her bum like she’s some naughty schoolgirl,’ I thought to myself, ‘then that’s him finished as fuel for female fantasies the world over. I know some like it rough, some like a dominant man, but not Claire, and not like this; never like this. This is domestic abuse, 18th century or no 18th century, and that sort of thing’s only sexy if you’re a fucking mental case. What’s this show turned into now, 50 Shades of Tartan?’

But he did it. Christ, he did it. I have to give the show credit for that, and extra credit for conveying Jamie’s change of heart, mounting guilt and eventual redemption in a plausible and relatable way. That’s no easy feat. Jamie realised that if he could pledge peace, respect and fealty to a miserable, duplicitous old bastard like Colum, then he should be able to pledge those same things a billion times over to the woman he proclaims to love above all else.

We can now safely file Jamie’s transgression under ‘I’ for [put on your best Basil Fawlty voice here] ‘I’m terribly sorry, he’s from 18th Century Scotland.’ [and now prepare to put on your best Manuel voice] ‘Ken?’

So rest easy, my adoring Heughanites (or are you Heughanistas?). Jamie was pretty much back to being an ardent feminist again by the end of the episode, so you can now safely resume the heaving of your bosoms. You must be relieved to discover that you aren’t in thrall to an ancestor of Trevor from Eastenders [Hi North Americans – Eastenders is an English soap-opera, where nobody has ever smiled, and everybody dies. Trevor was an evil Scottish character who mercilessly beat his wife – it’s nice that our neighbours across the border don’t like to stereotype us].

Aptly enough, all that was missing from the closing moments of episode 9 was Eastender’s trademark dirge; that quickening drum-beat to signify that a cliffhanger was in progress: dum dum dum DUM DUM du du du du. And what was Outlander’s shocking cliffhanger that would’ve lent itself so well to this particular drum-beat?

Had the English stormed Castle Leoch? Had Dougal barged into their room with his cock in one hand and his sword in the other to challenge Jamie to a duel to the death? Erm… no. No, Eh… Claire and Jamie… had found…they’d found… you see they’d found some flowers under their bed.

But they were nasty flowers, right? A wee girl had put them there. She was jealous of Claire.

I scoffed as the credits rolled, and probably said something like, ‘Ooooh, shit’s about to go down,’ in a really sarcastic tone of voice, possibly while pulling a face. But lo and behold, a couple of episodes later, shit did go down. Bad shit. Sorry for laughing, cliffhanger. I should never have questioned your cliff-hanging prowess.

Episode ten began with some slo-mo writhing and ye olde cunnilingus (Jamie got a tongue-lashing in the previous episode, so it’s only fair that he starts the next episode administering one), which was mercifully interrupted by Murtagh banging on the door with news of the Duke of Sandringham’s impending arrival. A lot happens in episode 10: Dougal’s wife dies; Dougal and Geillis are revealed to be lovers; Geillis is revealed to be pregnant with Dougal’s baby; Geillis’s big, farty husband dies; said big, farty husband is revealed to have been murdered by Geillis (and oh my God, it’s John Sessions – I didn’t recognise him when he first appeared earlier in the season); Colum sends Dougal and Jamie into temporary exile, and somebody puts a dead baby in a tree. Just another day at Castle Leoch. But it’s a testament to Simon Callow’s absolutely note-perfect performance as the Duke that he’s by far the most memorable element of the episode.

I love his vanity, his pomposity, his casual but polite disregard for everything but his own sense of aesthetics. He’d stab your back or cut your heart out, but he’d do it with a shrug, and send you on your way dripping with his false, honeyed charm. The Duke promised Jamie he’d deliver his letter concerning Captain Randall’s scurrilous behaviour to the appropriate persons in the King’s court in order to secure him a pardon, which of course means that he won’t, and Jamie is, in fact, doomed. Villains are always the most fun to watch (and I’m sure to play), even more so when they’re handled by someone with Callow’s range and skill.

Jamie’s legal problems take something of a back seat to Claire’s when she and Geillis find themselves arrested for witch-craft. This is the point at which young Laoghaire reveals that the bundle of flowers she left under Jamie’s marital bed augured much more than mean thoughts.

The subsequent trial is gripping and engaging. I love the big bag of quips Ned brings with him to the courtroom, and of course the return of Father Bain, who at first presents himself as a broken and contrite figure weeping in Claire’s defence, but swiftly – and slyly – reveals himself to be the final nail in her coffin, the twisted, cunning old rat.

I sat there throughout most of that episode, shaking my head and thinking, ‘How could those poor, daft, ignorant peasants have believed in such outlandish horse-droppings? I’m glad we’ve moved past all that nonsense.’ At that exact moment my brain smiled a smug little smile, said to me, ‘You’d better take a seat, son’ and then pressed play on the cinema screen inside my mind. On that screen I saw slack-jawed men with side-burns and side-arms wearing MAGA hats and shouting about locking people up; people flopping and gyrating on the floors of evangelical mega-churches like they’d just been strapped to invisible pneumatic drills; Flat Earth shops opening the length and breadth of the country, with angry little people walking out of them, handing out pamphlets proclaiming that Gallileo, Copernicus and NASA had just been having a bit of a laugh these past 600 years; and I saw people enjoying Mrs Brown’s Boys. ‘OK,’ I said to my brain. ‘Point taken. We’re all still mental. We’re just mental about different things.’

Most people back then probably didn’t believe in witches anyway. Not really. Not in their heart of hearts. I’ll wager that the biggest barrier to people embracing the truth about witches was the ease with which the powerless populace could use the bat-shit crazy belief system to settle scores with those they hated (the flip-side of that was the state being able to use it against you for whatever spurious reasons best suited their agenda).

Can you imagine if that belief system made a come-back today? Half of the population of our housing estates would be wiped out. People would look out of their windows, see their neighbours coming home with a new car or a 50-inch TV, and snatch up their phones in a jealous rage:

‘Hello, is that the WitchBusters Confidential Hot-Line? Yeah, I just saw my neighbour doing some spooky shit with the Provident Loan guy, I swear she had him levitating six feet above her doorstep. How soon can you get here? Great news. See you soon. Oh, and she stole my 50-inch TV, so I’ll be needing that back.’

Even though I never really found myself taking to Geillis as a character, she got to shine in this episode. Her sacrifice was brave and poignant, and of course the revelation that she was a fellow stone-touching time-traveller, from 1968 no-less, was an unexpected and very welcome surprise. I wonder who else is from the future? What if they’re ALL from the future?

“Dougal, you’re from this period of time, right?”

Dougal shakes his head. “I’m a bank manager from 1988.”

“Colum??”

“I played Trevor in Eastenders.”

“Are you kidding me? Murtagh? Murtagh, come on, you’re definitely from this era, right?”

Murtagh bows his head in shame, and mutters: “Space pilot.”

“For fuck sake, is there anybody here from 18th century Scotland? Anybody? Raise your hands! …. Jesus Christ!”

Any show that features a main character who exists out of time must inevitably deal with the moment when they’re either discovered or choose to explain their origins. Claire’s explanation was always going to be a tricky one. Without any evidence to back up her claims – no VE-Day edition of the Inverness Courier sealed inside a Tupperware tub and tucked inside a leather jacket with ‘I Love 1945’ stitched into the lapel, for instance – and lacking any detailed historical knowledge of any specific events set to befall her friends and patrons (barring the broad-strokes of the Jacobites’ slaughter at Culloden), she risked sounding like the sort of person who in later years would be wrapping their head in tinfoil and having a bath in jelly while screaming about aliens.

In the end, faith was on her side. Or at least its bedfellow, love. Jamie believed the message because he trusted its source. Implicitly. Aw, that’s lovely, isn’t it? Mind you, he does live in a village where everyone believes in fairies and witches, so admittedly getting on-board with a story about a nurse who uses rocks to travel through time isn’t that much of a stretch. Nicely done, though. And as much as every fibre of my being tries to resist and fight against Outlander’s romantic side, the scene where Claire forsook the journey home in favour of her Scottish husband left a little lump in my throat, predictable as it was. Claire now belongs in Scotland, and at Jamie’s side. That’s sure to end well.

Jamie and Claire, then, go on to assume the mantles of Laird and Lady of Lallybroch, an interesting new direction and dynamic. I thought the way in which Jamie and his sister worked through their guilt about their father’s death, and their feelings towards each other, was satisfying, earnest and emotionally resonant. One thing’s for sure: there’s no way Jack Randall can survive beyond the end of this season. The story’s building towards too neat a conclusion. His presence beyond the end of the inevitable final confrontation between Jamie and Jack would be superfluous, and risk tipping over into cliche-ridden moo-hah-hah territory.

On the other hand, Jack’s such a good villain, how can they kill him? I guess I’m going to find out. But only once Claire and Jamie manage to extricate themselves from The Watch. Oooh, that’s a good cliff-hanger.

Dum Dum Dum DUM DUM du du du du.


READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 5 – 8

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16