Tag Archives: Black Jack Randall

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.

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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

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

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

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Part 3: Burn, baby burn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s it. Class dismissed.

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

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

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

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

That’s pretty messed up.

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

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

“I ‘aint getting’ on no mane, fool.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Colum??”

“I played Trevor in Eastenders.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dum Dum Dum DUM DUM du du du du.

READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

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

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

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