Monthly Archives: November 2018

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 2, Eps 8 – 10

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Part 6: Bad dads and sad lads

Wherein war tastes bitter no matter the outcome

As Outlander whisks us from the Frasers’ return to Scotland through to the bloody climax of the battle of Prestonpans we’re left in little doubt that the laughs, luxury and light-touch of the French court (miscarriage and murder notwithstanding) are far behind us. Team Clamie’s last, desperate attempts to kick causality up the backside, and deliver the highlanders from the clutches of death – both cultural and literal – don’t generate that much in the way of guffaws. It’s almost as if war isn’t funny (Catch 22 and Blackadder Goes Forth notwithstanding).

Over the course of these three episodes Jamie gets to test his mettle as leader, and pit his wits against an unholy trinity of father figures (grandpa, uncle and spiritual father of the rebellion, respectively). Meanwhile, Claire endures a traumatic period of re-adjustment to the world of war, something she probably never expected to have to do again, given that she’d just lived through the ‘war to end all wars’. Pesky time-travel.

Her first world war, the world’s second, but the first in which she’d nursed, was bad enough, but this war, her second, which isn’t a world war but came first, before the first or the second, which were world wars, comes first in the worst stakes, principally because this time she’s cursed to be versed in how things will unfurl in the world into which she’s been hurled.

And try saying that after a night on the piss with Murtagh.

Because the Jacobite Uprising appears to have been a war in desperate want of soldiers, Jamie’s first stop along the road to rebellion is at the house of his grandfather, Lord Lovat, whom he needs to convince to send men to fight under his banner. Fergus comes, too, on donkey-back no less; Jamie’s very own Sancho Panza there to accompany him as he roams the Scottish countryside tilting at windmills.

The biggest problem facing the Frasers in the domain of Grandpa Greystoke, Lord of the Rapes, is Lord Lovat himself. It’s hard enough to get the guy to make you a cup of tea, much less donate troops. It quickly becomes clear that what Jamie’s grandpa wants most of all is Lallybroch. He might not have managed to get his grubby paws on it this time, but I’m sure this won’t be his final attempt.

While Lord Lovat looks positively humanitarian next to the series’ alpha-villain Black Jack Randall, that’s not to mistake him for a nice guy. Far from it. He’s actually a pretty bloody horrible guy. It’s like when Kim Jong Un calls Donald Trump ‘crazy’. Yes, Mr Un, you’re technically correct; your opposite number across the ocean with the equally unfortunate hair-do does indeed possess an abundance of undiagnosed psychological disorders, but you’re not exactly a stranger to the DSM-5 yourself, you vainglorious, reality-raping basket-case.

When Lovat isn’t tossing around sexual threats (seriously, the 18th century is such a relentlessly grim and rapey place it’s practically the BBC in the 1970s), he likes to spend his free time being cruel, cynical, covetous, mercurial, brutal, boorish and rude – and I’ll bet he leaves the lid off the toothpaste, too. This all makes him rather a hard man to negotiate with. Harder still when the curmudgeonly Colum is at his table, too, lobbying hard against Jamie. I’ve missed Colum. Not very much. At all. Especially. That stilted. Way of. Speaking he has. That makes it sound as though his words. Are running round an obstacle course. Strewn with full-stops.

Laoghaire’s back, too, principally to atone for her part in almost getting Claire killed in season one, but also to show us that the fires of her devotion to Jamie still burn fierce and bright– even if she no longer desires to burn Claire to death in their hot flames. The last time Claire was in Colum and Laoghaire’s company, being seen as a witch was something of a bad career move (death does little to enhance your job prospects). Here, as in Paris, the White Witch persona proves to be an asset. This time, Jamie employs the supernatural ruse to dissuade his Grandpa from sexually assaulting his wife. That’s a spectacularly depressing sentence to write. There’s an episode of Jeremy Kyle in there somewhere (substitute ‘Jerry Springer’ if you’re from across the pond).

Today’s episode: YOU SAY YOUR WIFE ISN’T A WITCH. THEN WHY HAVE MY BALLS BEEN BLASTED LIKE A FROST-BITTEN APPLE?

You may recall seeing the actor who plays Lovat, Clive Russell, in the death-n-dragons epic Game of Thrones. Clive played Brynden Tully, the member of the Stark entourage who very narrowly avoided becoming something red, then something blue at the infamous Red Wedding on account of having to step outside for a piss.

But it’s poo that Clive’s more closely associated with in the minds of several generations of Scots thanks to his memorable performance as a guest star in Still Game, BBC Scotland’s incredibly funny sitcom about Glaswegian pensioners growing old disgracefully. In Still Game he played Big Innes, a taciturn mountain of a man who returned to his inner-city roots from his new home in the remote Highlands to help his old friends deal with a band of unruly youths.

Innes is a vast, human Hagrid of a man, taken to bouts of superhuman strength – especially when he gets his hands on Midori – and with an appetite to match. And when appetites are big, so too are their consequences. Near the end of the episode Innes lays a log in his friend Isa’s loo that’s large enough to upset the sun’s gravitational pull on the earth, certainly large enough to have earned him execution at the hands of a certain jealous and desperately constipated French King earlier this season.

It’s a shite to behold.

If you hail from outside these lands and Outlander has caused you to fall in love with Scotland, I entreat you to check out Still Game. Scotland isn’t all about breath-taking vistas, kilted pretty-boys and tribal honour: we’re also big fans of excrement and violence. Plus, you’ll find quite a roster of big-league guest stars in this little show, from a pre-Hagrid Robbie Coltrane, to a post-Doctor Who but pre-Hobbit Sylvester McCoy, to late-night US talk-show king Craig Ferguson.

Anyway, once Lord Lovat’s double-dealing, smoke-and-mirrors, arse-saving gymnastics result in Jamie netting some soldiers, it’s off with them to Jacobite Boot Camp. The men there are in fine fettle, gloriously unburdened as they are by the knowledge of their deadly destiny. They’re fuelled by optimism and adrenalin, both of which they’ll need in droves with Murtagh – aka Full Tartan Jacket – as their drill sergeant, yelling in their faces like a psychopath for three weeks, no doubt in the process spraying them with enough flakes of porridge to feed an entire regiment.

Dougal (He’s back! Erm… hooray?) doesn’t share the men’s joviality. Sure, he’s stoked for battle, and excited at the prospect of ripping out a few rib-cages to use as CD racks, but he’s not terribly impressed with having to play second fiddle to Jamie. Since their last encounter, the pupil has become the master. Not that Jamie was ever that studious a pupil to begin with, and not that Dougal really had that much to teach Jamie, beyond Dougal’s favourite quasi-commandment, ‘Love thyself as… erm… thyself.’

I thought Dougal was uncharacteristically and jarringly meek in the face of the new command structure, and especially in the face of Claire’s face, which was telling him to fuck himself (beautiful and richly-deserved moment, incidentally). I didn’t expect him to let his accusers and abusers off the hook with nothing more than a withering look, but I guess he’s smart enough to know when the odds are stacked against him. And perhaps, serpent that he undoubtedly is, he’s simply biding his time to strike.

I’m not sure I agree with Claire’s assessment of Dougal as a narcissist. He’s an egoist, certainly, and a blaggard, a bully and an arrogant old sod to boot, but clinically narcissistic? I’m not convinced. When he said he loved his country, and would die for it, I was inclined to believe him. Anyway, though Claire and I mightn’t agree on the finer points, I’m sure we’re on the same page when it comes to the chapter that’s sub-headed ‘Dougal is an arsehole’.

While the baldy, bearded one may have been forced to toe the line, he still found various indirect ways to challenge Jamie’s authority without openly defying him. Some of them were quite subtle. Like when Jamie was giving a rousing speech to his troops about the horrors of war and why it’s essential that they conduct themselves in a disciplined and orderly manner, and Dougal chose that exact moment to come running down the hill screaming like a fucking mad-man, his face daubed in dirt and his hairy man-tits shaking in the cold highland air.

In fairness, sometimes the ‘AAARRRRGGGHHHHHHHH!’ approach works better. Sometimes what’s required to successfully resolve an armed stand-off is to take bravery and push it that extra furlong over the line into insanity. You can see this in action when Dougal tests the firing range of a line of English soldiers by riding his horse as close to them as possible over boggy ground, and gets his hat shot off.

“And now, I’m aff to change ma breeks – because the hero of the hour has shat his pants.”

They must all have shat their pants as they later charged into battle, not only without armour, but into a thick pocket of mist and without even bothering to button up their shirts. Whoever was in charge of health and safety in that unit should’ve been sacked.

Claire naturally sees harrowing parallels between the war about to come, and the ‘future’ war just ended, made all the worse by her unique vantage point. Is it worse knowing or not knowing? Is it better to think that you might, if you’re lucky, die in your sleep at some point during your seventh or eighth decade on earth, or know without doubt that you’re going to be struck by a fast-moving train on the 18th of October 2026 at precisely 10:53? Is it better to bring yourself to believe that you might just bash the bosh and be back in Blighty by Christmas, or resign yourself to the incontrovertible, inescapable fact that you’re hurtling inexorably towards the fatal date of 16th of April 1746?

Claire’s and Jamie’s belief in their ability to unstick that fixed point in time is in many ways more fantastical than any faith that their 18th Century kinsfolk ever placed in white witches, baby-gathering faeries or good genital hygiene. No wonder Claire’s reeling from re-triggered PTSD. Even brief periods of camaraderie and jocularity among the men remind her of the brutal juxtaposition that’s surely just around the corner: the broken, bloody bodies; the reek of death. (Are Claire’s memories flash-forwards or flash-backs? They’re both, really, aren’t they?) I think the flashes work really well, chock-full of augury for Culloden, and allowing Caitriona to do some fine character work.

One man who seems to have no love of war or fighting is the man actually leading the rebellion, Scrawny Mince Charlie. I really like the portrayal of the character. The temptation must have been strong to make this romantic historical figure hopelessly noble, brave and true, but I’m glad they leaned into his whiny sense of entitlement and typical aristocratic disconnect from the common man he claims to serve. BPC is like a rich kid on a gap year looking to immerse himself in the full ‘ethnic’ Scottish experience – and what better way than by watching thousands of big hairy men fighting and swearing at each other before dying tragically young?

“The British are our enemies now but they may be our friends again.”

I don’t think that’s the galvanising cry the Jacobites expected to hear, Charlie.

War can also take its toll on the ears, with choice phrases like “You bushy-faced whoreson!” and “I’ll ram it up your arse until you taste it!” ringing in the air. I can relate to the raucous and bawdy banter of the troops. I don’t know if it’s a Scottish thing, a man thing, or a class thing, but it’s very rare for two Scottish males to express their affection and admiration for each other with anything other than vile insults and obscenities. Men have long been encouraged to equate love and tenderness with weakness and vulnerability.

If you’re walking down the street, and a bus goes by containing your best friend – and I mean this guy is your best friend, the guy you grew up with, the guy who’s always had your back, the guy you’d lay down and die for – if this bus goes by and you see your best friend’s face pressed up against the window pane, even before you know what’s happening your hand has curled into the near-universal sign for self-abuse, and you’re jumping up and down on the pavement gesticulating at your friend like an angry tramp doused in PCP.

Even if you’re visiting your best friend on his death-bed you still have to greet him by saying something like, ‘Looking a bit pasty there, you stinking, arse-faced donkey-fucker.’ (or “Ah’ll no allow that fat bawbag to die on me.”) With these parameters in place it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between extreme love and extreme hate. A little tip, though: stabbing is rarely a sign of treasured kinship.

All this talk of death-beds makes this a particularly apposite time to talk about a certain doomed duo…

When Rupert and Angus re-appeared, a smile spread upon Claire’s face that was one part happiness to two parts, ‘These cheeky little monkeys, what are they like, eh?’ To employ the language of the riverboat for a moment, I’m afraid I couldn’t call or raise Claire’s smile. What I did do was glare at my TV set with a poker face. I did this not because I was trying to hide my true feelings, as is traditional with the poker face, but because my true feelings were best conveyed by pursing my lips tightly together and staring forwards through cold, flat eyes. I hated Angus especially, the bastard off-spring of a tiny wild-west bandit and an angry Chihuahua.

I even jotted down in my notepad these exact words: “Oh great… it’s Rupert and Angus. Boy, I hope they get wiped out, and as violently as possible.”

Careful what you wish for, eh?

The gruesome twosome has always served as the show’s comic relief, the Keystone Cops of Ye Olde Scotland, although in terms of relief I’ve always experienced the greatest share of it whenever they’ve left the screen. The episode ‘Prestonpans’ does a good job of adding flesh to the bones of these two caricatures, turning them into real people with vulnerabilities and inner lives. Turning them into people, to my incredible surprise (especially in Angus’s case), that I actually started to like.

It was obvious that one of them was going to die the second they had a detailed discussion about what they’d like to happen to their possessions post-mortem. But who died, and how, was still a surprise. Not to mention surprisingly harrowing to watch.

Angus’s death sent out a strong signal: if the hitherto one-note comic relief can die choking in horrible agony, then don’t expect any laughs in the conflict to come. But always expect the unexpected.

A few final disjointed thoughts

  • Awwwwwww. Jamie holding a baby!
  • I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the little English boy who infiltrated Jamie’s camp. He’ll definitely be back. He doesn’t know how lucky he was to be captured by Jamie Fraser and not Shane from the Walking Dead, else he’d have had his neck snapped before his vow of vengeance had a chance to form on his lips.
  • I once talked about the sanitary considerations of cunnilingus in the olden days – but, Claire, I just watched you French-kiss a guy who had the arterial blood of sixty dead English men rubbed around his lips. IT’S LIKE YOU ALL WANT TO DIE?!
  • Dougal bayoneting that injured English soldier made him seem brutal, but then he is, and so is war. Still yukky though.
  • I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed an actual, literal pissing contest before. Thanks, Outlander.
  • Jamie does Dougal a great service by speaking up for him to Bonnie Prince Charlie. But, knowing history as he does – his faith in changing the outcome of events notwithstanding – he’s also technically handing Dougal a confirmed death sentence. Kudos.

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 9 – 12

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

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Part 6: Sometimes… they come back

Wherein of course he comes back.

Episode seven brings to a close the first phase of the Fraser’s failed time-travel experiment, a project I’m content to call ‘Cullodegeddon’. Despite Claire’s and Jamie’s best and most unscrupulous efforts, history is still drawing them inexorably towards the doomed battle. We know how this story ends, not just because history demands that it ends this way, but because we’ve already seen a distraught and defeated Claire lament her fate – and all their fates – in post-disappearance Inverness.

Now, however, having failed to stop the Jacobite rebellion by cutting off its funding, Claire and Jamie intend to defeat the curse of Culloden by winning the bloody thing – or at least trying their damnedest.

I’m watching the show along with my partner now, having caught up with her at the fifth episode of this season. Long-term relationships are amazing things, aren’t they? A good union never loses the capacity to surprise you. For instance, after all these years of near Olympic-level arguing, this week Outlander allowed us to add ‘the mechanics of time travel’ to the long list of things we’ve almost killed each other over.

“Don’t they realise that time is a closed loop and any effort to change the future is essentially futile?” I asked, though perhaps not as eloquently as I’m phrasing it now.

“Are you stupid?” raged my partner. “The future – i.e. 1940s Inverness – is already in Claire’s past, so whatever they do in their current present can’t change it, although that’s not to say that they won’t create an entirely different future.”

“You mean an alternate time-line, like in Back to the Future 2 when Biff stole the Almanac as an old man and gave it to his younger self in 1955, who used it to get super rich and transform himself into a somehow slightly-less unpalatable version of Donald Trump?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Preposterous.”

“Is not!”

“Is!”

“Is not!”

“Star Trek rules apply.”

“DO NOT!”

“DO TOO!”

“DON’T!”

“DO!”

“YOU’RE JUST LIKE YOUR MOTHER!”

“…YOU BLOODY WELL TAKE THAT BACK!”

Ronald D Moore

Although Outlander is based upon the books of Diana Gabaldon, conversations like this one remind me that sci-fi supremo Ronald D Moore is the man in the captain’s chair. Having cut his teeth on Star Treks The Next Generation and Deep Space 9, and the modern-day reboot of Battlestar Galactica, he’s the perfect choice to helm a show as otherworldly and ceaselessly peripatetic as Outlander.

Ron’s resume speaks for itself. He’s spent a career exploring the ins and outs of time travel; juggling large casts; telling grounded stories in fantastical settings; chronicling the sagas of weary protagonists who just want to go home (or find a new home), and pinging, plucking and unpicking the intricately inter-woven web of science and spirituality. He’s dealt with the perils of power and command, the interlocking of politics and religiosity, factional in-fighting, uprisings, rebellions, stretched loyalties, and infinitely more shades of grey than fifty.

Deep Space 9

Tonally, Outlander shares Deep Space Nine’s sense of humour, its belief in the strength and sanctity of the family unit (especially those families we construct from the friends and misfits around us) and a cautious optimism about the future. With Battlestar Galactica, it shares a grim and weary aura of danger and foreboding, a nihilistic streak a mile wide, and a sense that one must surrender to the journey, the chase, the pilgrimage, even if the destination isn’t always known (and sometimes especially when it is). With both shows it shares a sense of paranoia. Whom can we trust? Are the people around us who they say they are? Are we who we say we are? And, most strikingly, it shares a sense of prophecy and Godhood.

(Plus, is it just me who thinks of Klingons every time somebody says Lady Broch Tuarach? I keep expecting Claire to violently head-butt everyone to whom she’s introduced.)

In Deep Space Nine, Captain Benjamin Sisko was occasionally forced to lean into his (unasked for and unwanted) role as prophet/Emissary of the Bajoran people. He’d don the spiritual guise for utilitarian reasons or to dodge danger, and only when he felt there was no other option open to him. In a similar fashion, Claire occasionally throws on the invisible outer-wear of the white witch, mostly to save her life or the lives of those around her, but sometimes just to put the shits up someone for a laugh.

The scene in which the King of France compels Claire to embrace her role as La Dame Blanche and preside over the fates of diminutive dispenser Monsieur Raymond and wig-wearing bad-boy the Comte (or Diet Randall, as I like to call him) is tense and thrilling to watch. Catriona does sterling work here, in what comes over like a successful audition for Game of Thrones (hey, they’re casting the prequel soon: you never know).

The King wants Claire to use her witchy powers to divine whether or not the two gentlemen have been dabbling in outlawed black magic, with the guilty party, or parties, doomed to be dragged off by the resident executioner, who is literally standing next to them. I have absolutely no doubt that ITV will turn this into a game show at some point after Brexit.

This is a great test of Claire’s moral character, and it’s fitting that, despite both her occasional impulsivity and entirely warranted hatred of the Comte, she comes up with a plan intended to save all of their lives. Her plan is to make both men sick with a doctored drink, hoping to prove their essential purity and thus innocence, and at the same time satisfy the King’s love of theatrics.

Unfortunately, Claire yet again finds herself deceived by a mystical apothecary with whom she’s struck up a friendship. Monsieur Raymond sneaks some fatal poison into the Comte’s drink (beautiful touch and brilliant call-back with the whole necklace thing there, I’ve got to say) and it’s bye-bye for this season’s big bad. For any of you who do watch Game of Thrones, this won’t be the first time you’ve witnessed a man of noble birth choking to death on a drink that’s been poisoned by an angry little guy.

Sorry, Comte, my fiendish friend. You had to go. You were getting too close to the truth of Jamie’s highway-man high-jinks, and sooner or later – after losing most if not all of your money to yet another small-pox scandal – you were bound to snap and kill the Frasers, and we couldn’t have that. Plus, there’s only room for one irredeemable rogue in this show.

That’s right.

Black Jack’s back, baby.

The last time Claire and Jamie encountered Captain Randall was in a dark, dingy prison cell. This time around they meet him in the vast, immaculately-kept gardens of Versaille, surrounded by opulent explosions of bloom and colour under an endless blue sky. The contrast couldn’t be any starker. Black Jack is here both to convince his old pal the Duke of Sandringham to go easy on his brother (whom I was amazed to discover wasn’t Tobias Menzies’ actual, real-life brother) and to fulfil his destiny as impregnator of Mary Hawkins (though he doesn’t know it yet and, mercifully, neither does she, the poor lamb).

It’s always nice to see the Duke of Sandringham, a sort of Boris Johnson for the 18th Century. On the surface he’s a foppish, bumbling buffoon, full of praise, puffery and pointed remarks, an ideal choice to guest present Have I Got News For You, but there… just below the surface, just behind the mask, stands a cold and calculating figure, more ruthless and cunning than those who dismiss him with a snarky chuckle give him proper credit for. It’s also nice to see Captain Randall, if only because his presence means a whole bag of spanners in the works.

Jamie can’t kill him. Not yet. Not out in the open, in any case, as it’s a capital offence to draw your weapon in the presence of the King (something that probably applies in a euphemistic sense, too). It’s also an offence to duel someone to the death, but that’s exactly the gauntlet that Jamie throws down to Black Jack. He accepts, but Claire certainly doesn’t.

I don’t know why Jamie doesn’t get this basic principle: keeping Black Jack alive long enough to sire a child with Mary Hawkins isn’t just about showing deference to Frank. It’s about preserving the time-line so that Claire will be in Inverness to touch the standing stones of Craigh na Dun in the first place. Quite simply, if there’s no Frank, then there’s no Claire and Jamie.

“For Christ’s sake, Jamie Andrew, Claire has already touched the stones, so the decision to save Frank isn’t predicated upon any regard for their own future or present as a…”

“ARE YOU STILL GOING ON ABOUT THIS?”

“I’LL GO ON ABOUT IT UNTIL IT SINKS IN!”

“WHY DON’T YOU PULL YOUR HAIR OUT OF THE PLUGHOLES?”

“WHY DON’T YOU PUT THE BUTTER BACK IN THE FRIDGE, YOU WASTEFUL IMBECILE?”

“I WAS LYING WHEN I SAID I LIKED THAT DRESS!!”

Just when you think that Black Jack Randall has scraped the very bottom of the barrel, he turns up with the drill machine from some 1960s sci-fi movie, punctures the bottom of the barrel and then proceeds to tunnel his way into the molten core of the earth, through to the other side of the planet, and on, out into the infinite void of space, drilling through suns and planets by the million-load on his merciless voyage through a suddenly helpless universe. Yes, that’s right. This run of episodes reveals that Black Jack has a predilection for raping children.

Tobias Menzies must have opened his scripts for this run of episodes and said, ‘Oh thank you VERY much. What are you going to have me doing in next week’s script? Raping an entire family and then forcing their children to execute the family dog? And then raping it, too?’

How cruel of Outlander to introduce a quirky, cheeky, winsome little character like Fergus, an adorable slice of comic relief, and then within the space of four episodes subject him to life-long psycho-sexual trauma. What is this, Eastenders? A Mike Leigh film?

In any case, Fergus could never be as unlucky as our time-crossed lovers. The pairings of Romeo and Juliet, Heloise and Abelard, and Laurel and Hardy combined have got nothing on Claire and Jamie in the disaster-stakes. Rape, murder, peril, pursuit, miscarriage, death, loss, and that’s only within the first fragile year of their union.

I suppose, though, that a life lived without incident is a privilege that’s always been extended to the richer and more powerful among us, whatever the era. The heartache and misery at the core of Jamie’s and Claire’s relationship is perhaps something of a daily occurrence for people in poverty the world over, even now in 2018. Outlander, then, is at root a story about what happens when two relatively privileged people – one a well-to-do lady of good breeding, the other an estate-owning Lord – are forced through cruel circumstance to live the lives of fugitives, peasants and vagabonds.

To be fair, the bulk of their misfortunes spring directly from the evil agency of Black Jack Randall, whose rape of young Fergus in this clutch of episodes leads Jamie to break his vow to Claire, duel with Black Jack (he stabs him in the cock! What hope for Frank now?), and land himself in prison. And, of course, Black Jack’s behaviour indirectly brings about the loss of the couple’s unborn child.

Whatever your station in life, losing a baby is among the most wretched and harrowing things you can experience as a human being, magnified a million-fold for the mother who’s carried that incipient life in her belly: felt it wriggle and tickle and grow. If Sam Heughan deserved plaudits for his brave and visceral performance in the previous year’s ‘To Ransom a Man’s Soul’ then Caitriona Balfe deserves equal credit here for her unflinching, haunting, honest and heart-breaking evocation of a woman locked in the grief, anguish and turmoil of miscarriage. I welled up when Claire was cradling her still-born child. And, irreligious though I am, Mother Hildegarde’s defiance of protocol to baptise Claire’s baby so the little one could have a proper burial, was incredibly touching. The aftermath: her discovery of Jamie’s real reasons for breaking his vow, how she deals with Fergus’s guilt and shame, and how she expresses the full gamut of her feelings to Jamie, including her hatred, is all deliciously (if uncomfortably) rich, and earnest, and raw.

Though the ordeal clearly destroyed pieces of Claire’s soul, some of which might never grow back, she’s too strong a woman to be felled by even this most unspeakable of tragedies. She allows herself to submit to the King’s sexual advances in order to secure Jamie’s freedom from the Bastille. The King’s performance might very well be what we Scots would term ‘two pumps and a squirt’, but it’s a horrible liberty for any man to take, regardless of how big his wig or his wallet is. I think, though, that after losing Faith (they probably shouldn’t call their next kid ‘Hope’), Claire was numb to the King’s fumbles. Her body was a husk, an empty vessel. What more damage could one lousy little prick possibly inflict on the site of such sorrow and horror?

Kudos for the ‘lie back and think of England’ line.

And so it’s farewell France, toodle-pip Paris, au revoir you randy raconteurs and rapacious rapists, but dinnae fash, cause we’re awa’ back tay the faitherland, ken? Back to Bonnie Scotland and its limping lairds, sleekit soldiers and bekilted cu… cu… stodians… of… honour. Alliteration can sure be dangerous sometimes.

I shall miss the pomp and ceremony of the French court, and the many flouncing ponces of Paris. I’ll miss how all the tough guys talk like Niles Crane from Frasier. I’ll miss seeing Claire dressed like a cross between Mary Poppins and Missy from Doctor Who, with big, poofed out dresses that look like they were designed to smuggle dwarves across enemy lines. And I’ll miss Jamie’s trademark Wee Wullie Winkie dressing gown.

Look out, heelands, here we come.

A few final disjointed thoughts:

  • I think the Duke of Sandringham speaks for us all when he sums him up Bonnie Prince Charlie thusly: “He’s an utter arse.” Also, I’ve finally worked out who BPC sounds like: the aliens from Galaxy Quest.
  • I really enjoyed how Murtagh responded to learning the full truth of Claire’s origins: by punching Jamie in the face. Not because he didn’t believe the story, because he did, but because Jamie hadn’t trusted him or loved him enough to be honest with him from the start. How classically masculine. No festering grudges, no enduring rancour, just THWACK. Now, let’s go get breakfast.
  • Future-child, eh? Interesting.

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 9 – 12

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland (and still won’t)

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Three thousand years ago two brothers, Scott and Brian, had a bloody battle across the entirety of what is now modern Scotland to decide who would be ruler. We were one thigh-bone-across-the-head away from being called Brianland.

History often records that the Highland Clearances were awful, but they were actually pretty great. Where else would you get a 3-for-2 on wolf-skin merkins and 75-per-cent off tartan bumbags?

Scotsmen invented the telephone and the television, but there was no-one to talk to and nothing on, so they invented alcoholism.

The Broons is loosely based on the Iliad of Homer.

The Scottish diet: lentils, quinoa, radishes, cress, aubergines, pumpkin seeds. There is NOTHING we won’t deep fry.

Scottish people are in danger of trivialising their heritage by always being too eager to mock themselves, said Professor Hamish Haggis McTartan Och Aye the Noo Nessie McWhiskey McTrainspotting.

Scots in general have such a poor sense of their own history, that most of them couldn’t even tell you what Jacobites were, which is a travesty, considering that they were the most delicious crisps ever made.

The dreaded Redcoats waged a campaign of terror upon Scotland’s west coast for many long decades, filling the countryside around Ayr with blood-curdling screams and hellish wails that carried through the black night, a campaign that was only brought to an end when Butlin’s Wonderwest World was shut down in 1998.

Golf was invented by a Scotsman who found his drunk friend sleeping in the grass, and decided to take a swing at one of his testicles with a human femur bone. Darts was invented as soon as that friend got to his feet.

If you took all of the ginger people in Scotland, and stood them one on top of the other, so they were stacked foot to shoulder in a gargantuan human tower, then most of them would probably die, so you probably shouldn’t do that you fucking monster.

In some parts of inner-city Glasgow, if you haven’t had your first heart attack by the time you’re 10, you’re considered gay.

A spider once played an important part in Scottish history. Crestfallen and weary after suffering defeat after defeat, and ready to throw in the tartan tea-towel, King Robert the Bruce retreated into a cave to lick his wounds and ponder his future. As he sat brooding, he chanced to see a spider trying again and again to build its web. It failed the first time, and the second, and the third, and even the sixth, but it never gave up, never stopped spinning and building until, finally, on its seventh attempt it had build the perfect web. This had such a profound effect upon Robert that at his next battle he took the English completely unawares by running out on to the battlefield, wrapping them all in silk and devouring them.

Global warming is causing the seas to rise, which may eventually cause England to be swallowed up by the ocean. By sheer coincidence, Scotland is set to hold its first Annual ‘get 5 million people to spray aerosol cans into the sky at the same time’ Day.

The people of Aberdeen have a reputation for being parsimonious, something that isn’t helped by their ‘Welcome to Aberdeen’ sign being made of tracing paper with stolen Scrabble tiles selotaped to it.

The people of Airdrie don’t know what parsimonious means. They think it’s got something to do with grouchy vicars.

The people of Airdrie do, however, know what pretentious means, and they think I’m a bit of a pretentious wanker for the previous jibe.

Only joking, of course they don’t know what pretentious means. They think it’s footwear for nine-year-olds.

It’s long been known that haggis is made from churned up bits of sheep guts and flabby piss-balloons, but less well known is that shortbread is made from the hardened effluent of Alex Salmond.

Archaeologists digging at a site in the Highlands recently found the remains of a settler from the end of the last Ice Age, around 30,000 years ago. He’d died of sunburn.

Scottish country dancing was invented the first time a Scotsman forgot to put on underwear beneath his kilt and grazed his balls on the coarse material.

Legally, when one Proclaimer dies, the other one is obligated to be buried alongside him, whether he’s dead or not.

Things happen IN most Scottish towns and cities, i.e. ‘There was a flood in Falkirk’, ‘There was a fire in Blairgowrie’, ‘Everyone died of abject misery in Bathgate.’ But things happen TO Glasgow. There’s clearly some kind of conspiracy or angry deity afoot. For example, if there is a simple road traffic accident anywhere in Glasgow, even if no-one is actually injured, hundreds of angry women will take to the streets, shaking their fists at the heavens, and proclaiming that ‘Glesga will rise again!’, and emphasising how funny they all are.

Unicorns used to roam free in Scotland, but died out shortly after someone came up with the idea of a deep-fried unicorn supper.

In the popular book and TV series Outlander, an English woman touches some stones that magically transport her back in time two hundred years. You can achieve the same effect by simply visiting Alloa.

William Wallace escaped from the English by merging into a crowd of hundreds of other people who were dressed a little bit like him. King Edward turned up on his horse, shouted ‘Where’s Wallace?’, stared at the crowd for a bit, and then said, ‘Fuck it, I hate these things,’ and rode off again.

A recent long-term study, drawing on the disciplines of geography, economics, philosophy and sociology, has confirmed Renton’s Law: it really is shite being Scottish. But, interestingly, not as shite as it is being Welsh.

If you say ‘Maggie Thatcher’ into a Scottish mirror five times, your fridge will start shouting ‘ZOOL’ and all of your milk will explode.

Scottish inventors and innovators are the envy of the world. Today, for instance, is the anniversary of the birth of Shuggie McGilchrist, the genius from Peterhead who first discovered that you could inject heroin into your eyeball if all your veins had collapsed.

The secret recipe for famous fizzy drink Irn Bru has finally been revealed as the delicious tears of ginger children.

Donald Trump’s mother came from Scotland. Why doesn’t Claire from Outlander travel back in time and sort THAT shit out?

It’s My Funeral and You’ll Cry if I Want To

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Clown-funeralWhat song would you like to have played at your funeral? It’s got to be something uplifting, right? Something that’s going to keep the tears from falling from your mourners’ eyes by reminding them of the good times.

Right?

Wrong.

Fuck that. If you’re coming to my funeral, you’re a convulsing, snottering wreck, or you can get your dry face the fuck out of my swansong. I’m literally going to have doormen throwing people out for not being upset enough:

“Sorry, missus, today’s funeral is a two-wail minimum, and you’ve barely scrounged up a sob. You can leave quietly, or big Davie over there will really give you something to cry about.”

I want ‘Everybody Hurts’ by REM played on a constant loop, and I want people to complain that it’s not sad enough, so someone puts on a tape of dogs being murdered instead. I want people banging on the coffin lid pleading to be buried or burned along with me, because a world without me is simply too nightmarish to contemplate. I want a queue of people lining up to grief-fuck my dead body. I want people openly killing themselves in the aisles. I want my funeral to look like a peasant revolt and sound like a hurricane ripping through a cattery.

I’m really looking forward to my funeral, actually.

I’ve got a few ideas for possible directions I’d like the service to take, if I can get a few volunteers to help make them happen?

  • About half-way through the service, an actor pretending to be a detective bursts in and says, “Jamie was murdered. And someone in this room is the murderer. And we’re not leaving until we find out who.”
  • Pass around song-sheets and make everyone sing organ-accompanied versions of ‘Killing in the Name’ and ‘Straight Outta Compton’.
  • I want a big, fancy funeral, worthy of a president or a pope, so I’m going to secure an obscene amount of funding by allowing Coca Cola to sponsor it. This means that all  speakers will have to endorse the product, but that’s a small price to pay for a platinum gravestone. “I think… the only thing that’s going to… (sniff) get me through this difficult time is the… (sob) sweet, sweet, full-sugar taste of delicious Coca Cola.” My coffin’s going to be shaped like a vending machine. No, scrap that, my gravestone will be a vending machine, so people can enjoy a nice Fanta when they come to cry over my rotting corpse. Plus, everyone’s going to have to wear red and white at the funeral or they’ll be in breach of contract. Passersby will think Santa has died.
  • My face is beamed on to a large screen at the front of the congregation, and I glare out at everybody like an angry God, before yelling: “I’M GOING TO HELL. AND YOU’RE ALL COMING WITH ME! SEAL THESE FUCKERS IN!” At this point, my paid henchmen will lock all the exits, and a smoke machine will start pumping smoke into the room. You’ll just be able to hear my maniacal laughter over the screams.
  • If I’m being cremated, just as the coffin slides out of sight along the conveyor belt and the curtain drops, a stunt-man will run out screaming and covered in flames.
  • Either that or I’ll have speakers in my coffin blasting out the panicked yelps of a trapped cat.
  • I’m going to hire a stand-up comedian for the wake, but they won’t know it’s a wake. They’ll be told it’s a seminar for morticians, and thus will be encouraged to use their sickest material, especially jokes about dead bodies and funerals. I won’t be the only one dead that day.

Thanks in advance, Handinistas.

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

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Part 5: The Ooh-La-Last Days of Sodom

Wherein Claire trots the globe, and the French King longs for the trots

Season two finds Claire and Jamie living a life of opulence and luxury in18th century Paris. Captain Randall is far behind them, at least geographically, but he’s still very much inside Jamie’s head. There’s no need to worry about the lack of a proper antagonist, though, because Claire and Jamie can’t seem to go anywhere without attracting the ire of at least one angry prick in a wig.

With that in mind, step forward the man who I presume is this season’s big bad (or Le Grande Mechant, if you please), The Comte St Germain. He’s arrogant, unscrupulous, petty, vengeful and hateful; in other words, a complete and total Comte. In the first four episodes alone he almost lets his avarice unleash an outbreak of smallpox on the unsuspecting Parisian populace; tries to poison Claire and her unborn baby; and is almost certainly the shadowy figure behind a street attack that leaves Murtagh unconscious, Claire shaken, and Mary Hawkins – Claire’s new friend – violently raped.

But somehow, strangely, even with all of that to his ‘credit’, the Comte still can’t hold a candle to Captain Black Jack Randall, one of the most unconscionably evil characters ever to have appeared on screen (with the possible exception of Janice from Friends).

My general impression of the second season so far is that it’s much funnier than the first. The presence of the young thief Fergus alone ramps up the chuckle quotient by around six hundred per cent (or should I say Claudel – which they agreed wisnae very manly). From laughsome lines like “You have beautiful breasts, madame” to “That’s ma snake, ye wee bastard!”, I’m pretty glad the pint-sized Parisian pick-pocket’s here to inspire so much mirth.

The ghastly aristocrats in their garish clothes, flouncing around the outlandish and ostentatious landscape of 18th century Paris, provide more than enough snickers on their own terms, but the contrast of their behaviour with the no-nonsense, almost austere wordly outlook of Clan Fraser multiplies the laughs ten-fold. Murtagh, in particular, is a man far out of time, despite still standing firmly in his own. There’s such a gulf between his taciturnity and gruff humbleness on the one hand, and the corrupt and foppish indulgence of the French upper-classes on the other that he might as well hail from hundreds of years in the past (or future, given how frequently Murtagh’s incredulity and horror seems to mirror our own).

If season one doesn’t exactly display the English at their best – and it’s probably fair to say that, with the exception of Claire, all of the English characters in the maiden season were either plotters, rotters, cowards, cuckolds, brigands, bell-ends, knaves or nincompoops – then the English can at least take some consolation from the fact that in season two it’s the turn of the French to be roasted. And, boy, what a roasting.

It’s almost as though the French heard the global audience saying to itself, “Wow. The English sure seem to be the most objectionable race on the entire planet,” and haughtily replied, “Huh! Hold my drink!”

Paris is awash with decadent dandies, randy rooters and potion-mixing miscreants. Would-be Kings hold their historic meetings in kinky cabaret rooms, and actual Kings take noisy, nasty shits in full view of their esteemed guests (or, as Murtagh more pleasingly puts it: “Only in France does a King need an audience to shite.”). Most of the French nobility appear to believe that rape and sexual assault are positively charming character quirks; minister of finance Duverney in particular proving that 18th Century France was in dire need of a #moi-aussi movement. After Duverney corners Claire and treats her like a cuttlefish at a budgie party, Jamie sends him toppling and splashing into the water. They later become friends, mostly for reasons of convenience, but what a strange bedrock indeed for a lasting friendship. Maybe they’ll all look back and laugh on that horrendous sexual assault in the years to come, possibly even as they’re escorting Duverney on a ship to America to take up his new position on the US Supreme Court.

Sex is everywhere so far this season. At one point I thought Carrie Bradshaw was going to start narrating. Murtagh romps with the maid; Bonnie Prince Charlie romps with Claire’s new sophisticated French friend, Louise; and Louise defies the crotch-based French stereotype by waxing her woo-woo, and offering the same treatment to Claire’s eclair. [On a side-note, I’ve never heard a lady’s bits being called a honey-pot before. That must be where the term ‘honey-trap’ comes from. One thing’s for sure: I’ll never look at Winnie the Pooh the same way again. DIRTY bear.] Elsewhere in Paris, bold female pioneers hold what looks very much like the world’s first Anne Summers’ party, cleaving dildos through the air like broadswords.

I suppose it makes sense that there’s so much carnality in the show. There probably wasn’t that much to do before the advent of television except rutting, reading and killing, and there can’t have been that many good books around.

If the show is funnier, flashier and brighter so far this season, then it’s also bleaker and darker, at least in terms of Jamie and Claire’s relationship, and the things they have to do to keep it alive. If season one was the honeymoon, then it’s clear that the honeymoon is now well and truly over. Claire and Jamie bicker and quarrel, rant and rage, doubtless wondering how it all ever came to this: so far from home; so far off the beaten-track of their lives. After all, falling in love is easy: it’s the next bit that’s hard.

The price of Jamie’s love for Claire is to be cast in the role of traitor to his country, and silent assassin to his country-men’s cause. On the surface, at least. Though the reason that Claire and Jamie seek to thwart the restoration of the Stuart blood-line is to save the denizens of Castle Leoch from slaughter (and Scotland from ruin), the mission weighs hell-of-a-heavy upon Jamie’s soul, going as it does against the grain of everything in which he’s ever believed.

Claire, too, is having something of a frustrating time. She’s bored. Unfulfilled. She craves purpose, and an outlet for her considerable intellect and imagination. She’s not happy slipping into the role of Real Housewife of Paris, sitting at home like her honey-pot-plucking friend, Louise, sewing doilies and talking about vol-au-vents (both of which are probably euphemisms for vaginas, anyway), while the men go out talking, drinking, thinking and fighting, with the emphasis on everything there except ‘thinking’. What a waste of a tenacious woman who was once – or who will one day be, if you want to get all time-travelly about it – a nurse in a twentieth-century combat zone.

To stave off her ennui she sets to work wowing Mother Hildegarde at the L’Hopital des Anges with her medical knowledge, quickly earning a spot (or a Bouton, if you like) in her volunteer force. Jamie expresses anger over this development, accusing Claire of being out indulging herself ‘with poultices and potions’. I don’t know how many spa-days Jamie’s been on, but very few of them involve tasting piss and watching people die, even through Groupon. Jamie might simply be expressing the prevailing patriarchal, nay misogynist attitudes of his time in relation to women and work, and perhaps that’s exactly what he’s doing, but I can’t help but feel that somewhere in his psyche there’s a lot of unexpressed anger about his being made to betray the Jacobite cause, not to mention his lingering PTSD.

In any case, the mission, their comfortable life-style, the cunning Comte and Jamie’s fraught mental state all seem to be conspiring to squeeze the tenderness and vitality out of Claire’s and Jamie’s relationship. Their maid, and Murtagh’s mistress, though, traces the entirety of the couple’s tension to just one element: not enough fucking.

Are we really so shallow and venal as a species that our greatest hardships and stresses can be soothed away and rubbed from existence by the simple recourse to rutting? As a Dad of two young boys, and the almost-husband of the buxom lady who helped me spawn them, I can confidently say: ‘Yes. Yes we are.’ Sex isn’t perhaps the be-all and end-all, but you certainly realise just how important it is once you’re prevented from doing it. In this Jamie’s case (me, your humble binge-guide) it’s because every time I even brush against my partner’s arm a child pops up to form a human barrier between us. At all other times we’re either too tired, or want to kill each other too much. In the other Jamie’s case, it’s because every time he becomes intimate with Claire, Black Jack Randall’s ugly mug protrudes through the cracks in his damaged psyche and stops him in his tracks.

Black Jack’s still alive! He’s still alive, dammit! I knew it, I’m sure I called it, but nonetheless, I still felt a frisson of excitement as the news was delivered by his younger brother, Alex, who is currently in the employ of none other than the Duke of Sandringham, another welcome villainous return. The baddies are back! Hooray! I can hate what they do while still loving that they do it, right? Right?

Black Jack’s survival presents Claire with a duo of horrific moral dilemmas. She comes to realise that her new friend Mary Hawkins is her husband Frank’s ancestor, and the girl fated to carry Black Jack’s baby. This means that in order to preserve the time-line she’s going to have to turn a blind-eye to the horrendous treatment the poor young girl will almost certainly receive at the hands of one of history’s most accomplished sadists. She also comes to realise that while Jamie got his mojo back immediately upon learning he’d been granted a second chance to end the life of his narcissistic nemesis, she’d have to frustrate his murderous resolve if Frank was ever to stand a chance of existing in the first place [and, you could argue, without Frank, she would never have been in Inverness to touch the stone to travel back in time to meet Jamie].

And so the trickery and double-dealing continues: following the money; trying to stay one step ahead of the Comte; trying to expose Bonnie Prince Charlie as a nugget to the potential investors in his rebellion; another uncomfortable dinner party, riven with adultery and murderous intent, and all the while the clock is ticking until Black Jack surely shows his face once again.

Of course, Captain Randall hasn’t just polluted Jamie’s love; he’s polluted the love in his own lineage. Back in McBlighty, in the premiere episode’s flash forward, Claire now can’t look at Frank’s face without seeing Black Jack’s dead-eyed sneer. How could Claire ever again let Frank touch her; have his face pressed against hers in the throes of passion; feel his hot breath on her neck, or look upon him with anything other than disgust, after what his ancestral face-sake put her through, both directly and indirectly?

It’s not fair that Frank should be punished for the sins of the father – Frank really is the victim here, at least as much of a victim as Claire was when she first pressed her hand against the stones – but on a human level it’s entirely understandable. It doesn’t take much to sour our perceptions. Sometimes we can take a dislike to someone because they share a mere name with someone who wronged us, never mind an entire body and face.

I hope, though, that the fist Frank raised in anger at Claire isn’t a foreshadowing of his eventual transformation into Black Jack’s spiritual successor. I don’t think there was anything deviant or devilish in Frank’s rage and frustration. I felt rather sorry for him, actually. When Claire disappeared – literally vanished into thin air – he was left broken and anguished, but for all the years of strain, sadness and pity he never once stopped clinging to the hope that his wife would one day return to him, and when she did he was willing to accept whatever story she sold him, even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it (in stark contrast to Jamie’s instant acceptance of her time-travelling tale).

I fear this whole sequence is intended to be the origin story of Frank Randall the villain: a Two-Face for his times. That maybe it wasn’t love that kept Frank close at heel to the site of Claire’s vanishing, but an obsession with the mysterious highlander thought to be connected to her disappearance: Jamie, in other words. Black Jack was already broken long before he encountered Jamie, but Jamie may very well form a bridge across the centuries, uniting Frank and Jonathan in hatred, anger and jealousy.

For now, Claire is with Frank, and in America to boot. She may not love him, but her alternative is to brave the attitudes of 1940s Britain to a divorced single-mother carrying another man’s child.

And, yes, I realise that Claire was pregnant at the end of season one, and is still pregnant in Paris in the episodes I’ve just watched, yet she isn’t in the flash-forward… well, she is, but it’s not possible that it could be the same pregnancy. Which means…

Well, it means something horrible is about to happen.

I hate being right sometimes.

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 9 – 12

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

The Walking Dead Rolls Rick

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I know what you’re thinking. Does this review of The Walking Dead S09 E05 contain one spoiler? Two spoilers? Three? Go on, punk. Click. Make my day.

Season 9 Episode 5 – “What Comes After.”

Word up, people. You’ve been Rick Rolled. Where did Rick Roll? Under a dumpster, motherfuckers. Only this one had wings.

I don’t know how I allowed The Walking Dead to pull this bait-and-switch trick on me again. In retrospect, dwindling audience figures notwithstanding, it seemed slightly desperate and insane to make a massive spoiler – ‘It’s Rick Grimes’ Final Episode’ – the focus of the show’s marketing campaign.

I guess it was technically Rick’s final episode. They never said ‘dead’. I assumed ‘dead’. But what else is there but ‘dead’ on The Walking Dead? In my defence: why else would a character leave? What other possible, plausible reason could they have for exiting the show? The chance of a modelling career in Paris, perhaps? A new job teaching community college in Mississippi? Mind you, Morgan left ‘The Walking Dead’ alive, but he immediately went on to join the spin-off show ‘Fear the Walking Dead’. So is that the future for Rick? Another spin-off show? ‘Fear We Go Again’?

Just after the bridge blew up I scribbled something down on my notepad and read it aloud to my partner: NO BODY – SEE YOU IN SEASON 13, RICK. We laughed and I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Watch this, he’ll turn up in a few seasons time and they’ll reveal that he was fished out of the river and whisked away in a helicopter.’ The idea amused me: Rick rocking up to the Hill Top disguised under a heavy cloak and clutching a walking stick, Willy Wonka style, and then casting off the cloak, chucking the stick away and doing a big comedy forward roll, before jumping to his feet and shouting, ‘Did somebody call 911?’

I quickly realised that I’d accidentally discovered the ending. Well, not the stuff with the forward rolls, of course, but the helicopter rescue. I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen – at least until Judith Grimes showed up. WHAT ARE YOU DOING, WALKING DEAD? YOU’VE ONLY JUST GIVEN US ETERNAL PEACE FROM ONE IRRITATING-AS-FUCK GRIMES KID – AND THE REPLACEMENT’S HERE ALREADY??

Negan goads Rick by taunting Karl’s eye again

Still, sad as Judith made me, I could never be sadder than old Saddam Hu-Negan, ripped from his cell by Maggie and ready to die cause he missed his baseball bat, or his dead wife or something. His whole reaction here is really in-keeping with the character, just as long as the character you’re talking about isn’t Negan. I always hoped they’d add a little colour and substance to Negan’s X-rated panto-villain schtick, but instead of nuance, we got no-ance.

On a side note, how strange that a show as nihilistic and violent as The Walking Dead would choose this time to take a stance against capital punishment, even if the show’s argument does appear to shy away from the moral and ethical considerations and lean heavily into the assertion that prison fucks people up more and for longer, so let’s do that!

So what did this episode teach us, apart from the two most obvious and painfully apparent lessons, namely: 1) that we should never, ever trust The Walking Dead, and 2) that we shouldn’t let four very good episodes fool us into thinking that the show is now fixed and back on track after two-and-a-half disappointing – and often downright duff and dull – seasons?

Nothing. It taught us nothing. Nothing that we didn’t already know, and in any case nothing of any real interest or consequence. We were reminded that Rick is a weird, kaleidoscopic chameleon of a character; a conveyor-belt of mixed bags and action archetypes spinning round and around on the carousel of plot; a man with no discernible qualities outwith his own exquisite ‘Rickness’.

“Why are we herding these thousands of zombies?”

“I AM RICK!”

“Why are we stabbing sleeping people through the head?”

“I AM RICK!”

“Why are you such a poorly defined character?”

“I AM RICK!”

It’s a shame, really, because there were elements of this episode that could’ve lent a poignant sheen to Rick’s death, had the show had the balls to actually bump him off. I wrote things in my note-pad like, ‘the herd represents the death that has stalked him from the pilot episode, that stalks us all, now catching up with him’ and ‘Rick is looking for his family – he will find them in death’. And what a nice touch it would’ve been for Rick to have died willfully destroying the literal and metaphorical bridge he’d spent the season wholeheartedly believing in and building. But in the end it was all a lot more wanky than that. (See also: ‘I GUESS YOU WERE MY FAMILY ALL ALONG, GUYS!’)

It was either this, or Shane, Hershel and Sasha appearing in the sky above Rick scored to a John WIlliams’ composition.

I went with the Rick Roll angle in naming this review, but the other title I was toying with was: ‘A Rickmas Carol’. After all, Rick was visited throughout the episode by three ghosts of Walking Dead past, each with some nugget of knowledge to impart to the man who had directly and indirectly caused all of their deaths. Shane said, ‘Hey, Rick, you’ve got to get angry and keep stabbing people, man,’; Hershel popped up to say, ‘Something something something big cuddle’; which left Sasha to cover the mystical angle: ‘Confucius say these aren’t dead people you’re standing on, Rick. This is a carpet of almost inscrutable super profundity, and we’re going to have a stilted, cod-philosophical conversation all about it, my friend.’ At one point in their dialogue, Sasha says something about going toward the good, toward the brave, and a teary-eyed Rick replies by splurting out ‘toward love’, which I felt was a rather an incongruous almost-coda for a man who’d spent so much of his time beating people to death with his bare hands and running them over with his car.

This was no ‘Rickmas Carol’ (or ‘Rickmas Corrrrrrrrrraallllll’, if you prefer), though. In ‘A Christmas Carol’ Scrooge emerges from his Xmas Eve hauntings a changed man; Rick emerges from his slo-mo horse-based chase… well, exactly the same, but exactly the same and flying through the air in a coma.

It was awesome to see Shane again, ditto Hershel, whose appearance was all the more poignant for being actor Scott Greene’s final time on screen. It was good to see Sasha, too, but ever-so-slightly mystifying, since I can’t remember Rick and Sasha ever even saying ‘hello’ to each other, much less having an actual conversation. I guess the production team’s rule was, ‘If they say yes to reprising their roles, then they’re in. Even if it’s the Bike Zombie from the pilot episode – we’ll find a way to make it work.’

In the final analysis, it didn’t work. Mainly because the analysis wasn’t final.

Rick may very well be alive.

But I’m not sure how much longer the show will be.

#10seasonsandthreemovies

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

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Part 4: Well, that was lovely…

Wherein Jamie is stunned into silence. Not the Jamie in the show. This Jamie. The one writing this now.

If I’ve got one complaint about the final stretch of episodes in Outlander’s maiden season, it’s that they’re just far too bloody nice. But that’s not really a complaint, is it? At least not one I’m prepared to lodge, because nice is… well, it’s nice, isn’t it? The world is so over-run with horrible things, that you should snatch up every crumb of nice whenever and wherever you can, am I right?

Of course I am. I mean, some people might have thought that the bit in episode 12 where Jamie was pardoned and given the keys to Scotland by the King himself was a bit far-fetched, but yah boo and sucks to them, that’s what I say – the bloody killjoys. Where’s the magnificence in their souls? I guess they didn’t like the bit where all of the bunny rabbits started dancing to ‘Feed the World’ underneath that rainbow, either. Or when Claire spent two whole episodes working her way up and down a line of seventeen-thousand soft, fluffy, dewy-eyed puppies cuddling every single last one of them, as Murtagh gave thanks to the sun through the medium of song, and Geillis came back from the dead, and everybody held hands and skipped and danced and cheered and EVERYBODY WAS HAPPY AND NOTHING, AND I MEAN NOTHING, BAD HAPPENED TO ANYONE.

NOTHING.

HAVE YOU GOT THAT?

NOTHING!

A soft voice calls to me from just outside the room. I almost don’t hear it over the noise of my own frenzied rocking. ‘Mr Andrew?’ the voice says, ‘Are you ready for your medication now?’

‘Yes, nurse,’ I tell her.

‘You haven’t drawn a smiling face on a watermelon, taken your clothes off and started hugging it against your tear-soaked breast again, have you?’

I ignore the question, and hug the watermelon all the tighter. ‘Everything’s…still lovely out there, isn’t it, nurse? I mean nothing… nothing bad has… happened… to anyone, has it?’

She doesn’t answer. The silence stretches to what feels like an infinity, each beat of its empty, noiseless drum causing my heart to leap and thump in my chest.

‘Nurse?’ I ask plaintively.

‘NURRRRSSSSSSSSSSE?!!’

A squad of twelve men in white coats bursts into the room, each man grabbing a limb or hunk of flesh and squeezing down, pushing down, hauling down, until they’re sure that I’ve been subdued. One of them snatches a syringe from between his gritted teeth, holds its needle aloft like a tiny fencing sword, and then plunges it into my bicep, the world turning to stars and jelly before me.

‘Went…,’ I mutter as I start to slip into the darkness, ‘Wi-wi-wen… Wentworthhhhhhhhh…’

FADE TO BLACK

I guess what I’m trying to say, in an incredibly indulgent and circumlocutory fashion, is: “Holy merciful fuck, that was absolutely soul-shatteringly, gut-wrenchingly brutal! Worse than Lem taking a grenade to the crotch. Worse than Negan giving Glenn an eye-ectomy. Worse than Ragnar ripping out some poor schmuck’s spine and ribs to commemorate the opening of Norway’s very first ‘World of Wings’.”

Gore, guts, blood, and brutality have been frequent visitors to Outlander’s highland vistas. And death: horrible, senseless, agonising death. Hangings, guttings, slittings, gougings, gurglings – every revolting, disturbing thing ending with ‘ing’ that you can think of, up to and including sing-ing (sorry, Claire). But Jamie’s treatment at the hands of Black Jack Randall outstrips and outranks the lot, certainly in terms of its haunting impact and savage, psychological cruelty.

I knew it was coming. Well, I knew something was coming. Not only thanks to the chorus of ‘Wait until you see the last episode of the season!’s I heard from everyone who knew I was bingeing Outlander, but from a one-star review on Amazon I foolishly read that – while it didn’t identify a recipient – mentioned a bout of rape and torture that the reviewer had found so foul and disturbing it had put him off the show for life.

I can see why the chap would have been disquieted. What happens to Jamie is horrible and harrowing, but while it’s unpleasant and hard to watch, I didn’t find it in any way gratuitous. Randall is a narcissist, a psychopath and a sadist. His treatment of Jamie – wooing him; beating him; smashing him; threatening him; envying him; loving him; hating him; hurting him; curdling him; soothing him; breaking him; reprogramming him; generally toying with him as a cat would a dying mouse – was absolutely in-keeping with the sort of full-spectrum assault a damaged and dangerous man like Randall would launch upon a victim, especially one so completely, situationally, institutionally and legally at his mercy as Jamie.

It was a grimly effective touch for the classic ‘hero races against time to save their lover’ cliché to be subverted by having Randall, and not Claire, arrive to rescue Jamie just in the nick of time. The hangman’s noose would’ve been kinder.

‘How does it feel to be alive, but wear so much dead flesh?’ Randall asks Jamie as he inspects his own handy-work. It’s a question that Jamie could just as easily have asked of Randall himself, a man who carries his deadness on the inside.

Claire attempts to rescue Jamie from Wentworth, but only succeeds in getting ring-side tickets to his torture, and almost earning a place by his side in the process. Jamie helps her to escape by killing Randall’s goon, leaving him at the mercy of the malevolent maniac’s grotesquely intimate end-game. Jamie is violated, beaten, broken, branded (or rather made to brand himself), all of which is viscerally upsetting, but in the end the most brutal parts of his treatment are those that would’ve seemed affectionate, even loving, in a different context. Randall weaponises tenderness, and uses it to inflict greater damage upon Jamie than a hundred-thousand lashes ever could.

I know I’ve often characterised Jamie’s and Claire’s romps as something akin to soft porn meets soap-opera, but in retrospect it’s a relief that those scenes exist. The couple’s lingering, loving, intimate embraces ultimately serve as a necessary counterpoint to Randall’s abuse, a crucial reminder of gentler, happier times – although you could also argue that Claire’s love only serves to accentuate Randall’s hatred.

Is there more to Randall than just evil and psychopathy? What does he want? The most terrifying answer to that question is that he just wants to love and to be loved in turn, but hates himself so much that in order to show any vulnerability or tenderness he first has to destroy someone’s body and spirit utterly and completely. It’s chilling that what Randall does could simply be a souring and a corruption of the human desire to belong. Randall is a mess of mental illness, malevolence and contradictions: he wants Jamie, he hates Jamie; he wants to be Jamie, he wants to destroy Jamie. He wants Jamie to love him of his own volition, yet he never wants to cede control and thus risk rejection. He wants to co-opt the ready-made love that Jamie feels for Claire, to erase her face in his recollections and replace it with his, so that every thought in Jamie’s head always leads back to him.

Sam Heughan and Tobias Menzies deserve plaudits for bringing this monstrous, one-sided love story to life with such pain and conviction. If it was hard for us to watch, then think how hard it must have been for them to play it.

Now, let’s get the hell out of Wentworth; regroup our collective sanities and have the psychological equivalent of a long, hot shower.

So much of Outlander deals with people trying to conceal their true natures, identities and intentions. Sometimes they hide it from others, sometimes they hide it from themselves. These secrets and subterfuges make for some entertaining scenarios, and also – as we’ve already seen before in this show – some of the most awkward dinner parties known to man.

The scene where Jamie and his family dodge volleys of suspicious questions from the Watch Commander, Taran MacQuarrie, was a masterclass in tension. When Horrocks showed up the next day with his big bag of slippery tricks and a tip-off for Taran, I knew the triple-crossing Irishman wasn’t long for this world. Even still, it was a nice surprise to see the death-blow landed by Jamie’s brother-in-law.

Things quickly descended into the realms of classic farce, and I braced myself for a brutal and bloody confrontation between the lads of Lallybroch and the Watch, but I’ll be damned if Taran didn’t welcome the news of Jamie’s outlaw status and the murder of Horrocks with a hearty laugh.

The ability to create secondary characters and bit players that the audience cares about is a good measure of a series’ overall quality (unless the main characters they’re supporting are less interesting to watch than paint drying on a dead tortoise’s back, in which case there may be a problem). Outlander has them in spades, and the show is never frightened to kill them off in service of the story, no matter how accomplished the actor or popular the character. The story is king, and I’d imagine even kings will be cast aside if they stand too long in the way of the show’s time-crossed lovers.

I was very sorry to see Taran go. He was a wonderful character and Douglas Henshall gave a commanding performance. There was a Chicken McNugget of nobility hiding beneath the cold fries of Taran’s knavery, and I’d like to have seen that nugget blossom – and, yes, I’m well aware that I’ve royally fucked that metaphor and you’re now thinking about fields of chicken nuggets blooming in the spring sunshine.

As MacQuarrie approached the gallows I kept thinking, “He’ll survive this. He’s too good a character. Think of the adventures he and Jamie will have together. He’s not going to… well, the rope’s going round his neck… ach, someone will yell ‘Stop’, any second now. They’ve pushed him off. He’s… he’s going rather blue now… but… but I dare say it won’t be long before Jamie’s punching a guard and running up there with a sword to cut him down, and then they’ll both fight their way out of that castle. Any minute. Any minute now. Annnnnny minu.. he’s doing a really good job of pretending that he isn’t violently choking to death up there… Annnnnnnnnny minute now…”

It wasn’t until one of the English soldiers swung onto Taran’s corpse and started pulling it groundwards with all of his might that I realised the only way Taran was going to walk again would be if his body fell through a portal in time and space and dropped down at Rick Grimes’ feet in post-apocalyptic Georgia.

One of the many things I admire about Outlander is how often and how quickly it moves. Neither the story nor the characters ever remain static for long. Just when Castle Leoch starts to become too familiar, Outlander takes us into the nearby town, or out on the road collecting rent. We could be in an English garrison one minute, a west-coast fort the next, Lallybroch the other, the characters in a constant state of propulsion and flux, growing and changing as they speed their way through the highlands, running from and towards both their enemies and loves alike.

Jamie’s disappearance gave Claire a chance to try out some different double-acts away from the core relationship. Her time with Jamie’s sister involved a lot of moping through the woods followed by an almost-death, but it was as part of Team Clurtagh that Claire really shone. While some pathos was wrung from the pairing, their time together was mostly characterised by dressing-up, singing saucy songs and boozy dancing – all in the name of smoking Jamie out of his Heelan hidey-hole, of course.

When Claire donned a dusty little jacket to help kick-start her singing career, she looked like she wouldn’t have been out of place in Christmas panto at the Edinburgh Playhouse; playing Buttons in Cinderella, perhaps. But the more I looked at her, the more I realised that there – right there before my very eyes – stood not just a viable front-runner for the next Doctor Who, but the perfect one. Caitriona Balfe is in many ways a far stronger candidate than the Tardis’s incumbent betitted Time Lord.

One thing I’ve noticed since starting this binge is that the Outlander fan-base is more rabid, fierce, animated and committed than the Star Trek and Star Wars lot combined, so if they want to make Caitriona Balfe the next Doctor Who, then Caitriona Balfe will be the next Doctor Who. If they sent a squad of Outlander fans back through time to Culloden, they’d win the fucking thing.

A few asides: What an unscrupulous and horny old goat you are, Dougal; Jack Sparrow gypsy guy? I hope you come back. You were pretty cool; and Sam Heughan looks a dash like Wentworth Miller (STOP MENTIONING WENTWORTH – starts rocking again), though doesn’t share his prison breaking skills. The award for best prison breaking skills of course goes to… erm, some cows.

Claire treated Jamie’s physical wounds, but his psychic ones will take far longer to heal. And though we saw Randall lying prone on the ground following a frenzied coo attack, he definitely isn’t dead. He can’t be. That would be too quick, bizarre and incidental a death for a larger-than-life, havoc-wreaking figure like Black Jack. Especially when Jamie has an awful lot of closure to reap from Randall’s violent demise. I guess I was wrong in my last: Jack’s coming back.

Or rather Jamie’s coming back, because as the season ends he’s on his merry way to France.

When Claire stood on the deck of that ship and revealed to Jamie the news of their impending parenthood, I smiled. And smiled again as they lost themselves in a sea of love and joy – their wounds, for the moment at least, healed; their bond strengthened by the age-old mathematics of procreative multiplication. I may even have offered an involuntary volley of affirming words to the empty room, like ‘Aw, that’s nice,’ or ‘You go, girl.’ Thank Christ I didn’t cry or anything. I’ve escaped season one with some small sliver of masculinity intact.

Never-the-less, I think it’s time to re-watch Game of Thrones and The Wire to remind myself of the callous indifference of the world before I end up perched on the couch with a tub of ice-cream on one side of me and a box of tissues on the other doing box-set marathons of Drop Dead Diva and Sex and the City.

In my defence, I think that after all Jamie and Claire had been through by that point, both separately and together (poor Jamie especially) they probably deserved a clichéd, soap-style coda. Some simple, honest-to-goodness good news and happiness.

Ah. [breathes a heavy sigh of relief]

She’s going to lose the fucking baby, isn’t she?

NUUUURRRSSSSSEEEEEEEE!

PS: I’ve been thinking about how Jamie’s ‘ghost’ appeared in 1945 Inverness during the first episode. That’ll be Jamie coming to say a final, silent goodbye just before his death in the very last episode of the final season. I’d wager three sheafs of corn, twelve gold coins and a goat on it.

PPS: Season 4 starts in the real-world this weekend. I’ll catch up soon. In the meantime, my binge-watch will continue, but less frequently than before (don’t want to intrude upon the fans’ excitement about the new season). I’ll return for Season 2 Eps 1 – 4 next Friday. Thanks for reading.

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 9 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

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