Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 3, Eps 1 – 3

Part 10: Let me be dead frank with you

Wherein everything everybody does to forget the past only makes things worse

It would perhaps be putting it a smidgeon too mildly to say that Jamie and Claire are a thoroughly unlucky couple. In the tragedy stakes they’re Shakespearian, Sophoclesian, and Soap-opera-vakian all rolled into one. But at least the valleys of their many agonies and sadnesses occasionally find themselves dwarfed by vast peaks of pleasure and purity. There is balance.

Rupert was a thoroughly unlucky man. He lived a life of drunken, violent fecklessness, barely rising above the ranks of toiling buffoon, surrounded wherever he went by death and drudgery. But at least he got to experience love and loyalty through his friendship with Angus, and at least in his final moments he was able to comport himself with bravery and dignity. There is balance.

Frank was a thoroughly unlucky man. He returned from war to be reunited with a woman who had become a stranger to him, only to lose her for another three years, and then have her return a stranger once more, but this time openly hostile to him, and carrying the child of a 200 year-old Scotsman in her belly. But at least he got to be trapped in a loveless marriage for twenty years while raising his wife’s lover’s child, and then get hit by a car and ki…

Oh.

Oh dear.

OK, Frank, you win, son. Despite Rupert’s hastily extracted eye, Jamie’s many lashings and jail-cell abuses, and Claire’s harrowing miscarriage, in the pity-and-misery stakes, Frank is still head and shoulders above them (with those head and shoulders being dismembered, placed into a rocket and fired towards the outer reaches of the galaxy through the unforgiving bleakness of space).

Identity isn’t just important: it’s vital. Its loss or lack can have catastrophic consequences: on a macro scale, it can lead a nation or a band of rebels to war; on a micro scale, it can erode a person’s sense of self to the point where they no longer know who, and why, they are. When Frank allowed Claire to substitute his Frankness (or Frank-nicity, or Frank-naciousness, or whatever invented descriptor you feel most comfortable using) for Not-Jamie-ness, he allowed the void inside of himself to be filled with anger, grief and resentment. He was Not-Jamie. That was his identity. Second-best to a dead man.

There were reminders of Jamie everywhere Frank and Claire looked, and everywhere that they didn’t look, too. Poor Frank was cursed to suffer frequent public assaults on his self-esteem, the first – and possibly worst – of these coming when the mid-wife set eyes on the newly-born Brianna and asked, “How’d she get the red hair?”

Even a seemingly innocuous article from a Boston newspaper managed to smuggle barbed commentary about Frank and Claire’s doomed relationship into their kitchen, and from there straight into Frank’s face. The article, about Ireland declaring itself an independent republic, free from British rule, is obviously intended to draw parallels with the concurrent situation in post-Culloden Scotland, but it’s also a very clear manifestation of Claire’s desire to be free from Frank’s rule.

While Claire’s self-interest and guilt-soaked sense of obligation won’t allow her to consider severing things with Frank – not at that point, anyway – she manages to find less overt, though no less insulting, ways to create distance between them. For instance, while her desire to become a US citizen is partly motivated by pragmatic concerns, it’s also a sure-fire way to cut ties to the England she knows is indivisible with Frank. England: his England.

It’s telling that the things Claire admires most about America – its youth, its eagerness, its passion, the way it’s always looking towards the future – are also the things she admires most about Jamie. Frank, by contrast, embodies in his person and outlook the forces of tradition and conservatism; of staid ceremony and hush-voiced acceptance of one’s station in life.

That difference is quite aptly demonstrated when we’re introduced to Frank’s boss at the university, who is, among other things, an arrogant, sexist bastard, of the type I’m sure was fairly typical during that era. He’s seen here balking at the idea of women being the equal of men in the intelligence and aptitude stakes, which instantly marks him out as a thin-domed dum-dum, though he’ll probably go to his grave unaware of his own shortcomings both as a man and a human being.

Although Frank does say something to counter the worst excesses of his employer’s misogynistic pronouncements, it’s a very soft and carefully measured something, more placatory in spirit than gallant. Frank effectively forces Claire to compromise and bite her tongue in the interests of maintaining the status quo. We, the audience, are left thinking to ourselves, ‘If Jamie was here, that guy would be hanging out the window with a mortar board shoved up his arse sideways.’ In many ways, Claire was freer to be who she was, and who she wanted to be, in 18th Century Scotland, than she is here in 20th Century America.

Later on, we meet one of Claire’s lecturers, yet another scoffing fuckwit of a man. The misogyny he displays – and its bunk-mate, racism – is, like that practised by Frank’s boss, of the sleekit, withering and wry variety, springing more from a sense of dusty entitlement than from any feeling of raw hatred, which somehow makes it much, much worse. I guess it’s because a man’s hatred might be cured, but a man’s sense of superiority over those he considers his inferiors probably can’t be. ‘A woman and a negro,’ he remarks flatly. ‘How very modern of us’. Universities don’t always attract the very best and brightest of us. Sometimes they only serve to amplify or institutionalise society’s existing divisions, or create whole new ones, breathing life into the very worst breed of entitled, conceited little wankstains.

Claire and Frank attempt to return a physical dimension to their relationship, but Jamie’s ghost haunts every corner of their lives. When Claire whispers to Frank, ‘I miss my husband,’ we know whose touch it is she really mourns. This isn’t an earnest display of affection to Frank, but a hushed apology to Jamie.

Claire and Frank embrace before the open fire, the light from the flickering flames dancing over their bodies, but there’s no heat there; no passion. Their clothes remain on. It’s a distorted mirror-image of many such scenes she’s shared with Jamie in the happy past. We know her eyes are closed because she’s imagining that past while she’s with Frank. And Frank knows it, too.

[Back in the past, Jamie has an encounter in a cave with Lallybroch’s housekeeper. He can’t look her in the eyes either; his eyes are nothing more than vessels for tears. It seems that everywhere Jamie and Claire go in these episodes they’re tormented by memories and visions of each other.]

Claire never asked for any of the things that happened to her following that fateful honeymoon in Inverness (it’s hard to anticipate a rock that hurtles you through time). She was as much a victim of those unusual circumstances as Frank. Furthermore, out of the two of them, it was Frank who displayed the most agency by fighting to keep them together, a move that arguably invited twenty years of pain and despair. He was in many ways the architect of his own destruction. Despite all that, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for Claire – especially when she seems genuinely hurt by the idea that Frank might wish to seek out alternative sources of sex and affection after fifteen years of being cuckolded by a dead guy.

The worst thing about bearing witness to Claire and Frank’s many arguments about their loveless marriage is Claire’s voice, which tends to become more and more of an aural abomination the more upset she gets. It’s like nails down a chalk-board, expect your brain is the chalk-board, and the nails are actually samurai swords. The second worst thing about their contretemps is Claire’s face, which threatens to rip itself apart while it tries to convey seemingly every possible emotion at once. I half-expected her face to start twitching, and then slide and fold open like Arnie’s mask in Total Recall, with cries of ‘Two weeks, two weeks’ filling the air.

“I did love you,” Claire’s now mercifully steady face tells Frank’s corpse in the morgue. “Very much. You were my first love.”

How very hollow and perfunctory.

Bye, Frank.

And a big bye-bye, too, to Frank’s famous Randall namesake and great-great-great-grand-uncle (or whatever he was) – culled at Culloden just as fate intended. Black Jack gets a shorter, but somehow more resonant and emotional, send-off than Frank, which is odd considering that Black Jack is a murderous rapist. Christ, this show really fucking hates Frank.

As Culloden begins, the landscape is pregnant with sorrow; dark and grimy and dimly lit, even the daytime scenes. It remains so right up until Black Jack and Jamie lock eyes across the battlefield, at which moment the screen erupts in fire and colour. This is their destiny, the culmination of all the strange, dark feelings that have passed between these two men for a long many years. Theirs is a grudge-match, but their battle also carries a macabre and violent echo of romance. They repulse each other, each is set on the other’s destruction, and yet in some warped and wispy way they complete each other, like Joker and Batman.

There’s something quite tender and sweet about Black Jack limping alongside Jamie, and dying in his arms. Certainly there’s no trace of glee or hatred in Jamie’s eyes. On the dark and silent battlefield of Culloden, strewn with the twisted, snow-covered bodies of untold thousands, Captain Randall and Jamie lie together as they once did in a prison cell long, long ago. Both of them are at peace: one dead, the other ready to die.

But not quite.

Jamie has miles and miles to go before he sleeps.

Jamie’s decision not to kill John Grey, the young English scout who snuck up on his camp prior to the battle of Prestonpans, turns out to have been a very, very good one; not only morally sound, but literally life-saving. When a band of redcoats apprehend Jamie and a squad of other low-laying Jacobites, poor old Rupert included, Jamie’s the only one of them to miss an appointment with the firing squad, on account of the officer in charge being John Grey’s brother. The Grey family owes ‘Red’ Jamie a debt, and it’s repaid through the act of letting Jamie run for the hills, instead of turning him into a human collinder.

When next we meet Jamie he’s a fugitive living the life of a rural outlaw in a cave near Lallybroch; a man fading into song and legend even as the redcoats track and hunt him. Like Frank, Jamie is a man without identity, but where Frank surrendered his, Jamie’s has been taken. Everything has been taken from Jamie: he’s no longer a husband or a father; he can’t be a brother or an uncle or a Laird as long as he’s a wanted man, which he will be in perpetuity; he’s not a soldier, or a general, or a loyal subject, or even a rebel. He’s the Dunbonnet – nothing more – a walking myth that’s half-Robin Hood, half-Oliver Queen (“Sheriff of Nottingham, you have failed this city”); another in a long line of identities that have been foisted upon him by external forces.

Ultimately, life on the lam is too much of a hardship on the people he loves at Lallybroch, who will never be left alone by the redcoats as long as he walks free. So Jamie arranges for his sister to ‘turn him in’ to the authorities, freeing them from oppression and scrutiny, and sending him to prison for six years.

During that time, Jamie asserted himself as the prison’s top dog, which is hardly surprising given his ferocious spirit. It was interesting to see him through the eyes of other characters, far from the pull of Claire’s orbit. As Jamie growled his way around the prison, hooded in darkness and fixing the guards and warden alike with a piercing stare, I could understand why people feared him.

The Grey connection again proves handy. The mouthy little teen whose life he once saved, and who indirectly saved his in return, is now his warden. “Thank you for coming,” he says to Jamie, as Jamie is huckled into his private room in chains, a fine example of the English gentry’s fondness for politeness whatever the situation.

Their burgeoning friendship – characterised by dinner, drams, fireside chats and games of chess – is incredibly sweet, even if at one point John’s attentions led me to shout, ‘Oh, not another fucking rape. Give Jamie a break.’ Thankfully, John has developed into a fine and noble young man, one who clearly loves and admires Jamie too much to subject him to ill-treatment or force him to do something against his will.

I loved this exchange in particular. Jamie has just described John as having been ‘a worthy opponent.’

“If you found a 16 year-old shitting himself with fear a worthy opponent, Mr Fraser, it is little wonder the Highland army was defeated.”

“A 16 year old boy who disnae shit himself with a knife held to his throat has either no bowels or no brains. Ye wouldnae speak to save yer own life, but ye would to save the honour of a lady. I admire that.”

And so, Jamie’s historic good nature and John’s benevolence ends up saving Murtagh from a potentially fatal dose of the sniffles, and puts a post-prison Jamie in the service of an artistocratic family instead of on a galley-ship to America.

Jamie appears to have spent a long many years hopping between prisons of varying degrees of harshness. Claire has spent the same length of time in the prison of a loveless marriage. How long now before they both break free – through hurt, through time – and once again find solace in each other’s arms?

I’ve got a feeling I’ll find out very soon.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

  • Unless Claire and Jamie encounter Uncle Tex Randall when they head off to America in season four (“Yee haw, boy, yoo shoo got a purdy mouth, an ah aint had me a stiff Scotch since fo-eva, so git yo Highland heiny ova here!”) I think that’s probably the last we’ve seen of Tobias Menzies – barring flashbacks.
  • Bonnie Prince Charlie looks horrified that war could prove to be so nasty. What were you expecting, you wig-wearing dandy? A big tickle fight? The two biggest guys meeting in the middle of the battlefield to settle it all with an arm wrestle? A black-tie reception and drinks afterward?
  • I loved Jamie and Murtagh’s little moment of levity on the battlefield, where the two friends bonded over battering a man to death with a clod of earth. It’s the little moments you treasure, isn’t it?
  • Jamie may be skilled at a great many things, but disguise isn’t one of them. You can’t really hide your trademark red hair with a hat when your hair is long and you wear it down. With a green hat, to boot, which only serves to accentuate the red hair. In many ways, he should have just cut it.
  • The sequence where Jamie had to hide from the Redcoats inside Lallybroch, with his sister’s baby in his arms, was real edge-of-the-seat stuff.
  • Fergus has lost his adorable, Lord of the Rings vibe. He’s awkward and lanky now. He reminds me of Patrice from The Inbetweeners – ‘I… had a nice tug, em, sinking about your muzzer.’
  • I don’t know what was more painful: watching a suddenly 85-year-old Fergus having his hand chopped off by a self-hating Scottish redcoat, or enduring the acting skills of the aforementioned gentleman. Woof. He made panto look like Pinter.
  • In episode two, Jamie is grimy, hairy, doesn’t speak much, and shoots things with his bow and arrow – if he isn’t quite Robin Hood or Oliver Queen, then he’s definitely Daryl from The Walking Dead. That’s not the sole similarity with AMC’s flag-ship zombie show. Fergus even fires a gun and attracts a herd of walkers… I mean redcoats (wankers, I guess you could say). And, as happens so often in The Walking Dead, Fergus gets his hand chopped off, something that happened to innumerable freshly-bitten characters on the TV show, and Rick Grimes himself in the original comic.
  • I liked how Jamie, as part of a primitive early-release program, was sent to decipher cryptic messages from the guy who used to run towards the camera at the start of every Monty Python episode – a madman havering about gold in English, Gaelic and French.

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

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 11 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Ep 13

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 1 – 3

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

4 thoughts on “Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 3, Eps 1 – 3

  1. Pingback: Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 3, Eps 4 – 5 | Jamie Andrew With Hands

  2. It was John Grey whom Jamie let go. His older brother was William, the officer who returned the favor.

  3. Pingback: Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 2, Ep 13 | Jamie Andrew With Hands

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