Part 7: Death Becomes Them
Wherein we say, ‘Adios, Dukey’, and consider the twin titans of love and death
I still encounter people, mostly men, who sniffily dismiss Outlander as a sort-of slightly more risque Downton Abbey: all frilly collars, bloodless duels, breathless embraces, passionate kisses, romantic outpourings and impenetrable ye olde speak. I can’t blame them. I counted myself among their number until very recently. Perhaps they’ll take the plunge, as I did, and find to their surprise and delight that Outlander is a fast-paced, funny, well-written, visceral and occasionally very, very gory show; a rollicking roller-coaster of pure entertainment that’s got more in common with Vikings than it does Howard’s End.
Help is at hand. Well… head. Every time I find myself slipping back into old habits and buying into the lie that Outlander is first-and-foremost a piece of soppy romantic fiction, I’m going to remember Murtagh hacking off the Duke of Sandringham’s head and kicking it across the kitchen floor like some horrifying football with eyes. It doesn’t get much less bosoms and bodices than that.
When the camera panned to Murtagh’s bloodied face I was a little disappointed not to hear him issue a classic action-movie quip, something along the lines of: “I guess he finally stuck his neck oot for someone,” or “This isnae the time tae be losin’ yer heid, duke.” Some things are better left unsaid, I suppose, and I’m sure I would’ve been disappointed had Outlander suddenly and inexplicably turned into an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. I did thoroughly enjoy Mary Hawkins’ parting line, though, which must surely qualify as one the greatest understatements of the century (indeed, of two centuries), not to mention one of the most blindingly obvious: “I think we’d better go.”
Yes, Mary. I think you might just better had. Mind how you go. Watch you don’t trip over all those bears shitting in the woods, and Catholic popes.
And, so, another baddie bites the dust. Farewell, then, Duke of S, you slippery, slithering, sociopathic little socialite. I’ll miss you – although in the hours leading up to your death your villainy lost a little of the nuance that had made me love it, and you, so much. I preferred you with your mask half-on, when your charm was the loudest instrument in that cross between an orchestra and an arsenal you always kept holstered in that sallow old soul of yours.
The Duke and Randall were certainly well-matched companions as they marched together along the merry road to complete-and-total bastardom, both wearing their narcissism on their sleeves, but with the Duke’s cold anger resting a little deeper beneath the surface than Black Jack’s. There was something cartoonish about the Duke’s savageness when he finally unleashed it, but I suppose as he entered his final gambit he had little need of charm or pretence, preferring instead to cast them aside and growl out the details of his fiendish scheme like some low-tier Scooby Doo villain. “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for that pesky, propulsive, all-consuming love between Jamie and Claire!” You silly man. Never bet against Jamie and Claire’s love. NEVER.
While the show doesn’t always have the outward appearance or traditional structure of romantic fiction, that molten kernel of Anglo-Scottish passion and devotion that sits at its core is hard as a thousand diamonds, and turns the very world of Outlander around it. Claire and Jamie are like a reverse Romeo and Juliet, whose tragedy is radiated on to the people around them, causing them to die instead.
Ultimately, the very thing that made the Duke’s plan ‘work’ – Jamie’s love for Claire – was also the very thing that guaranteed its failure. But we’ll let the Duke off the hook for that, because the poor love had no idea he was a character in a TV show.
While Sandringham’s mask was off (before his very head was off, too) he revealed to Claire his fiendish plot to hand over Jamie and her, his traitorous wife, to the King, so as to remove all suspicion from the Royal Court that he was, or ever had been, a Jacobite sympathiser. Which of course he was/had been, whenever it seemed to suit him. He seemed to be perpetually hedging his bets like some covetous, duplicitous cross between a Ferengi and a Vorta (dropping in some hard-core Deep Space Nine references, y’all). There were innumerable signals throughout the series that old Dukey Boy wasn’t exactly the world’s most committed Jacobite, but even if you didn’t know his history of self-serving treachery, his line to Claire “Gaelic – do you speak that barbarous tongue?” gives the game away somewhat. Claire has always had his number in any case.
Duke: “You know in my heart I’ve always been a Jacobite.”
Claire: “I’m reasonably sure you don’t have a heart.”
Hey, guys! Black Jack Randall’s back in town, too! But more on him later… The Duke also revealed that it was he who had hired the rape gang back in Paris, of which Claire had been the intended target, with poor Mary becoming the worst kind of collateral damage. It was for this heinous crime in particular that Mary Hawkins and Murtagh had vowed bloody revenge on the Duke (though they hadn’t known he was the guilty party when they’d made their vow), and it was revenge – foul and bloody – that they got. In the kitchens of Callendar House, no less. Callendar Park and House is situated across the road from my old high school. And my two kids were running around like possessed Tasmanian devils in that very kitchen during an open day last year. As much as I’d like to see their flash of recognition, I think I’ll wait until they’re at least… five before showing them that scene. I don’t want them to be scarred.
It was a nice touch to see the Duke desperately trying to re-fasten his mask of civility when Jamie burst into the kitchen; even nicer to see the vain old sod clamouring to put his wig back on. Even when facing certain death, appearances were still the most important thing to the Duke.
While appearances are certainly important, they’re never that important, and they can be incredibly deceptive. Take Dougal, for instance. He’s a son of a bitch, to be sure, but yet he keeps committing genuinely selfless acts that confound my impression of him: like testing how far the English soldiers’ bullets can reach across a battlefield by proffering his bald head to the enemy, or daringly dashing to Rupert’s rescue after he’s been shot by a band of Redcoats.
Let’s talk Rupert. I’d like to submit old Rupes into the running for the ‘Unluckiest Man in the Universe’ award. First, he almost dies in battle; then his best (perhaps only) friend in the world dies violently in a froth of his own blood having risked his life to save him; then he gets his eye shot out; then he gets captured … I’m sensing a pattern emerging. What next? A giant piano crashing down on his head? An anvil? A massive stick of ACME dynamite? Rupert’s recent hardships bring to mind Chef’s ludicrously drawn-out death sequence in South Park. Worse still, even if poor Rupert recovers, the only future open to him is an unspeakably violent death on the battlefield at Culloden, which he’ll meet while wearing an eye-patch that I hope earns him the nickname ‘Nick McFury’. Maybe in another life Rupert will come back as a lucky white heather salesman.
Death is everywhere in these two episodes. It’s so ever-present it’s almost a character. Claire, especially, is submerged in it, giving palliative care to her greatest enemy’s kin, and euthanising her old boss cum gaoler. Everyone has come to Culloden to die, it seems: the soldiers; Colum; Alex Randall; Black Jack Randall (although he doesn’t yet know it). It’s the bloody Switzerland of the north.
Death has the power to transform, to soften, to redeem, and that’s as true in Outlander as it is in life. Death is both transformative in a literal sense and transformative in a retrospective, metaphorical sense. Literally, because… well. You’re dead. It doesn’t really get much more transformative than that; even a caterpillar would have to agree. And retrospectively, because at the very moment when someone’s light is extinguished we tend to remember the light of their life shining brighter than perhaps it ever really did. We remember the departed as being better and bolder; cooler and kinder. Our love and mercy are amplified.
Much of our wistfulness springs from our own feelings about death: we fear it almost as much as we revere it, so we tend to become awestruck in its presence. We sit and we ponder, and we think to ourselves, ‘One human being fewer in the great infinite canvas of the cosmos, and yet what an incalculable loss to the universe,’ and perhaps – depending upon who we’ve lost – we cry, our grief temporarily blinding us to the world.
This whole, sad process can sometimes make it easy to forget that the person we mourn was – if you’ll allow me to fall back on reasonably esoteric philosophical language for a moment – an absolute fucking dickhead.
Death’s looming spectre is the only thing that makes half of the characters in this show palatable. Not only did I almost shed a tear for the immensely irritating Angus during my last binge-watch, but this time I found myself bubbling up as crotchety old Colum breathed his last.
I never really liked Colum – the character, not the actor – and I’m positive I wasn’t supposed to, but the combination of Dougal’s goodbye, and the revelation of just how pragmatic, insightful, forward-thinking and measured a leader Colum could be (and undoubtedly was, though I was perhaps too blinded by distaste to see it) made me realise that I’d miss him. Although I won’t miss his dress-style. In many ways he deserved his death simply for turning up wearing that brown fur coat, looking more like a horse-racing pundit, or a 1st-division football manager from the 1970s, than a laird.
To be fair, Graham McTavish absolutely knocks it out of the park during Colum’s death scene, no doubt reveling in the opportunity to show some of the nuance behind the gruff and growling Dougal. It’s all there in the complex carousel of emotions swirling and spinning on McTavish’s face: the haughtiness, the hatred, the love, the guilt, the spite, the remorse. Despite all that’s passed between them, love prevails. That’s what stays with Dougal, and that’s what stays with us. Christ, it was moving. When Dougal hugged Colum and blubbed, ‘All this cause you couldnae stay on a bloody horse,’ I absolutely lost it. I’m not allowed to say I cried like a big girl anymore in 2018, so I suppose I should say that I cried like a big man, and that’s okay, because men can cry too. BUT ONLY AT TV AND FOOTBALL.
Black Jack was in town, too, so it was time for us to dust off the DSM and have another game of ‘Psycho Bingo’. Except, initially at least, this was a different Black Jack. A more rounded, human version; one who seemed to show tenderness and compassion. He was in town to tend to his brother, Alex Randall, who was succumbing to the illness that had plagued him since Paris. Turns out old Black Jack had also been paying the bills for both his brother and his newly pregnant wife, Mary Hawkins. What a… nice… thing to do. It is nice, isn’t it? Is this still earth? Am I still me? Is up still ‘up’? Why is Captain Randall being nice?!
When Black Jack encounters Claire at his brother’s bedside he begs – begs?! – her to nurse him back to health, or out of suffering, but she refuses unless Black Jack agrees to reveal the location of the British troops.
“You would barter over an innocent man’s suffering?” he asks her.
This was delicious: the indignant nature of the sociopath, railing against injustice with zero sense of perspective or irony. It brought to mind Tony Soprano scolding his psychiatrist for ‘acting unethically’, or Ted Bundy complaining that it was inhumane not to have access to his prison library.
But Tony Soprano and Ted Bundy both, in their own way, helped people, too. Tony was capable of great generosity and gregariousness, and Ted Bundy volunteered at a crisis hot-line, often talking people out of self-harm and suicide. In both fiction and real-life there are plenty of examples of sociopaths doing good deeds, even if they could never be described as good people.
Black Jack ends up doing something else ‘nice’ for his brother: agreeing to marry Mary Hawkins so that she and her baby will have his protection. I must admit, Mary’s pregnancy brought me great relief. I’d feared that she was going to have to suffer savage treatment at Black Jack’s hands in order for the integrity of the time-line to be preserved, but this was a nice swap-out, and one that means two wonderful things: Frank isn’t directly descended from his evil doppelganger, and Mary Hawkins will only have to be joined to this monster for a couple of days before death officiates their divorce.
The road to Black Jack’s agreement to this union was an interesting if deeply uncomfortable one. At first, it seemed like Randall was using his discussion with Claire to indulge his sadism – revisiting his crimes upon Jamie just so that he could watch the pain and anger on Claire’s face – but he was essentially, in some weird and deeply warped way, trying to save his brother’s wife from his darker nature. Was that… noble? I’ve no idea.
Then Black Jack watches his brother pass, and the contrast between him and Dougal couldn’t be more stark. Claire once called Dougal a narcissist, and I disagreed. This episode carried the proof. Dougal is a complex, vain, bottled-up, angry muddle of a man, but there’s nothing pathological about him. He grieves, he feels, he loves.
Black Jack, on the other hand, rather re-affirms his narcissistic status here when he explodes in rage at the point of his brother’s death and starts punching his newly dead brother in the face. I laughed, very loudly, mostly at the shock and surprise of it.
When it comes down to it, there’s no changing Captain Jonathan Randall.
And there’s no changing Culloden.
See you for the finale.
A few final disjointed thoughts
- Let’s have one final nugget of appreciation for Simon Callow’s turn as The Duke. What a character: so deliberate, so poised, so deliciously wicked. “The last thing I’d do would be to blurt.”
- In episode 11, we see Claire extracting a woman’s tooth – now THAT’s a rational fear of the dentist. Us lilly-livered, pink-drink-drinking sissies don’t know we’re born.
- Pity poor Rupert as he sits lamenting the death of his friend, Angus, through the re-telling of bawdy stories about the hairy-faced little rat. Drunk and dead-eyed, Rupert turns to a young lad who’s waiting in line (understandably very reluctantly) for some 18th century dentistry, and adds to his trauma with the story of the time Angus swallowed some teeth. “Said he didnae shite for a week for fear of being bitten.” That made me laugh.
- I wonder how they made that horrible squishy-cracky sound when Claire retrieved the musket bullet from Rupert’s eye? That was appropriately revolting.
- The awful spectre of rape hangs over just about every episode of this show. Remember when Claire offered herself up to the English soldiers, claiming to be a hostage, to ensure the freedom of Jamie and Dougal et al? No sooner had I written in my notepad ‘I do hope she isn’t threatened with rape again’ than a sleazy English soldier cocked a leg and said, ‘You look like you need warming up.’ Talk about #McMeToo
- Jamie tried to convince the Bonnie Prince that the men were weary, and should be allowed to rest, replenish and regroup, to which the daring dandy replied: “I am not some frightened hare to be chased down by a pack of English dogs. I am a man. I am a soldier. And I shall comport myself as one.” At which point I offered an incisive critique of his tactics by shouting at the TV, “Fuck off, you wee wank.”
- Murtagh on Frank Randall: “Hasn’t enough suffering been had in the name of saving that mythical prick?” Murtagh, I bloody love you.
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
