Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 7 – 10

Part 17: Let’s do the time warp again

Wherein the whole gang’s back in the past, and things don’t exactly go according to plan

I’m convinced that a harrowing fate awaits the Frasers in the fourth season finale. Perhaps not the immolation fated in the archived newspapers discovered in the 1960s – that would be too obvious, and rather hard for the show to bounce back from – but something equally painful and transformative. Until then, we’ve got a veritable banquet of quests, grudges and reunions to feast upon.

In this clutch of episodes Roger finds Brianna, Brianna finds Claire, and Jamie’s fist finds Roger’s face. Many times. As the Frasers are moved around the chess-board of life by the wicked hand of fate, we discover that it isn’t God, or the devil, or Lady Luck that owns that hand, but Stephen Bonnett.

To describe the amoral, psychopathic Irishman as the Fraser family’s arch nemesis is to undersell his evil and understate his omnipresence in their lives. He’s the demonic force that shapes their feelings, their decisions, their movements, their every waking moments. His ability to wreak destruction upon the Fraser family even when he’s not even trying to or even really thinking about them makes Black Jack Randall in comparison seem about as malevolent as a little kid taking a surreptitious poo in the next door neighbour’s koi carp pond.

Bonnett is much, much worse than Black Jack. There was at least a twisted symmetry to Black Jack, some semblance of a code, a hint that some part of his soul might once have been salvageable. Bonnett very rarely bothers to put a positive spin on his actions. He knows he’s utterly bereft of noble impulses, and throws himself into murderous debauchery all the more enthusiastically for it. Black Jack occasionally fooled himself that he was righteous or justified. I don’t know. Maybe that makes Bonnett ‘better’, relatively speaking. It definitely makes his evil purer, even if it does make his character seem a little less nuanced.

In ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’, Roger and Brianna briefly become the series leads, and we get to imagine what Outlander might look like sans Jamie and Claire. The verdict? Perfectly fine for an episode, but I’m in no rush to see a spin-off series.

During their solo adventures the two young lovers find themselves trapped in a web of fate and misfortune; their respective journeys to Wilmington putting them at the mercies of their parent’s greatest and most dangerous (living) adversaries: Bonnett and Laoghaire.

Roger’s path through the stones leads directly to Bonnett and his ship, the crew of which Roger blusters his way onto to secure passage to the new world. Both men are unaware that the tendrils connecting them to each other will soon reach out and grab Brianna, too.

Poor Roger. We’ve all had bad bosses in our time, but I’d wager that very few of them ever gave us pause to think that they might chuck a baby into the ocean . ‘Don’t worry,’ Bonnett’s fixed smile seemed to say to us, ‘I wouldn’t throw a fecking BABY overboard, and frankly I’m offended at the fecking suggestion.’ He would, however, throw a little girl with smallpox overboard without a moment’s hesitation, an act of brutal pragmatism that revolts us in direct inverse proportion to how very little it surprises us.

When Roger later encounters his direct ancestors, a woman and her tiny little baby, the latter carrying a rash that might very well be mistaken for smallpox by a certain sociopathic sea-captain, Roger knows he has no choice but to play hero and help hide them. By helping them, Roger knows that Bonnett might very well kill him for his insolence and insubordination, but if Bonnett were to find and kill the baby, then Roger would cease to exist. As options go, it’s a lot like the choice between Butlins, and, well, Butlins.

Upon discovering Roger’s treachery Bonnett inexplicably becomes Two-Face from Batman, recalling how he once avoided death by the mercy of a coin-toss, and resolving to decide Roger’s fate in exactly the same way. Roger lives to tell the tale, of course, although one thing becomes instantly and abundantly clear: there’s no human resources department on Bonnett’s ship. Or if there is it’s a particularly bad one.

Things don’t go too well for Brianna, either. Within seconds of arriving in ye olde Scotland, she’s rolled down a hill and sprained her ankle, leaving her half-dead and hobbling before she’s even left Inverness. While Brianna shares her mother’s impulsivity, it isn’t tempered by her mother’s hardiness and resourcefulness. Never mind 18th century Scotland: Brianna wouldn’t even survive a night-out in Glasgow in 2019. Mind you, who would.

Brianna eventually – and literally – falls into the clutches of Laoghaire, who actually seems like quite a nice person when she isn’t repeatedly trying to kill Claire. It isn’t long before the spurned banshee learns the identity of the wandering invalid in her care, which triggers a reassuringly chilling primal response. Thought you’d gone all human on us there, lassie. Welcome back, Laoghaire, you narcissistic nut-case.

It’s clear that the intervening years haven’t expanded her repertoire of vengeful acts: decrying someone as a witch is still very much her cold dish of choice. Luckily for Brianna, Laoghaire’s daughter, Joan, isn’t an absolute fucking maniac, and helps Bri escape to Lallybroch, where her Old Uncle Ian secures her passage to the new world. Before she leaves, Bri redeems her earlier near-death prat-falling by doing something so utterly Claire-like that she almost out-Claires Claire. She rescues a young lassie called Lizzie from sexual servitude, and takes her with her to America as her paid assistant. Way to go, sister.

Far across the ocean, Claire is enjoying a rather warmer relationship with Laoghaire’s eldest daughter. Mind you, it’s not that hard to go warmer than ‘I’m going to have you burned alive as a witch’. Claire and Marsali’s mama talk is sweet, but demonstrates great delusion on Claire’s part, especially when she says: ‘Ah, your kids. You’d do anything for them. Anything.’

Em, except, you know, resist the urge to jump through a time-portal and abandon them for the rest of their adult lives.

Now that Jamie and Claire are landowners, they get to do things like swank around at big social functions and meet all of the big celebrities of the day, like George Washington, and a young Keith Richards. It isn’t all hob-nobbing and networking, though. While attending a play in Wilmington, Claire’s called upon to use her surgical skills, and Jamie has to play fifth columnist.

The two plot points weave into and around each like vines up a tree. Governor Tryon’s guest, and fellow robber of the people, Mr Edward Fanning, experiences insufferable pain from a particularly vicious hernia (HER-nia? Should be a HIM-nia, am I right, ladies???). When Claire mentions that he might require surgery, Fanning bats away the suggestion like it was a poo-footed blue-bottle, certain that Claire’s vagina disqualifies her from saying anything to him with any deeper resonance than, ‘Oooh, would you like some biscuits?’

When Jamie learns, half-way through watching the play, that his old pal Murtagh and his band of Regulators are about to be rumbled as they rob a carriage filled with tax money, on account of a government spy in their midst, he knows he needs a distraction to get the word out. This he finds in Fanning’s hernia, which he wallops with all of his might. ‘Accidentally’, of course. In steps Claire the surgeon, ready to rifle through Fanning’s guts for as long as necessary to make sure Murtagh doesn’t end up leaving this world swinging on a rope, his skin as blue as a sunbathing Scotsman.

It’s hard not to sympathise with Murtagh’s aims, and Jamie’s sympathy with them, when Governor Tryon is such a cartoonishly wicked elitist bastard, and the kind of man who says things like: ‘Those wretches don’t want their taxes to go towards my palace,’ stopping just short of adding ‘Muhahahahaha!’ after it. Murtagh’s moltenly socialists schemes, however violent in execution, can’t fail to seem noble when weighed against the extravagant and thoroughly corrupt spending plans of a cossetted, wig-wearing, arrogant buffoon like Tryon.

Eric Joyce

I’m reminded of a real-world, close-to-home example of a political figure abusing the public purse, if you’ll indulge the brief diversion. Our town once elected an MP called Eric Joyce. Eric was one of the most prolific expense fiddlers and spender-of-money-that-wasn-t-his that Westminster has ever seen. Seriously, he almost topped the expense scandal league table. He eventually appeared on BBC’s Newsnight to defend his place at the top of the list, hilariously claiming that he spent tens of thousands of pounds on framed paintings for his constituency office, because his constituents ‘wanted to see nice paintings’ when they attended his surgery. Not if they’re at your surgery to complain about their MP spending tens of thousands of pounds on paintings with tax-payers money, Eric, you glutton.

Google Eric Joyce’s name and you’ll find reports of reckless spending, lewd and lascivious behaviour, drunkenness and brawling, a cocktail of behaviours that his opponents claimed made him no longer fit to represent the people of Falkirk. Of course, if you’ve ever been to Falkirk you’ll know that he’s probably the most representative politician the town has ever had. Eric being a Falkirk MP was like making Charlie Sheen the mayor of Sodom and Gomarrah. Namely, absolutely perfect. Anyway, I digress. Eric’s boorish behaviour does, however, lead us quite neatly into talking about throwbacks to another time and place…

Let’s talk about Claire, and the attitudes poured on her by the pompous pricks of the day, whether that day is in the 20th or the 18th century. Claire continually has to prove her skills, intelligence and worth in the deeply patriarchal societies she’s cursed to flit between, with the added worry that if she ever fails she’ll probably be thrown in jail or burned as a witch or something. When an old male surgeon arrives at Wilmington and sees Claire operating on Edward Fanning, he splutters: ‘What hath hell wrought? You’ve butchered him. All he needed was tobacco smoke up the rear.’

All he needed was… em, all he needed was what? Was tobacco smoke up the rear a real thing? Is that where the phrase ‘blowing smoke up your arse’ comes from? Being a doctor in the 18th century sounds like it was quite easy, doesn’t it? Seems all you had to do was sit back in your chair nonchalantly chain-smoking cigarettes, remembering occasionally to puff one up a patient’s arse. And if anyone came in with a mental health problem or a neurological disorder, you’d simply burn them as a witch. Then off to the course for a few rounds of golf, whether it had been invented yet or not!

Imagine going to the doctors with a stiff knee and the doctor smoking a pipe through your bum-hole. What remedies did they offer for people who attended surgery with sore arses? The mind boggles. Along with various other body parts. Did a tender butt-hole call for a different treatment, or just a bigger fire? ‘Nurse, this man is about to prolapse. Fetch the wicker man and a hundred gallons of kerosene. And be quick about it, by God, his star’s already starting to collapse!’

Anyway, this episode handled the tension, sense of mounting dread, rising stakes and intersecting plot lines very well. Mercifully, Fanning’s operation was a success, and Murtagh was able to escape the trap that had been set for him by Tryon, all of which allowed Claire and Jamie to retain their place unscathed at the top of the high-society power-couple league table.

Some time not long after after maw and paw’s close shaves at the theatre, Brianna reaches ye olde America. So does her dutiful, but also rather dastardly, beau, Roger, who surprises her with a make-shift marriage ceremony and the altogether less welcome revelation that he’d known about the prophecy of her parents’ deaths all along and deliberately chosen not to tell her. No sooner are they (sort-of) married with a bit of hand-fasting than the whole thing looks set to collapse quicker than a Mackenzie clansman at an all-you-can-drink whisky festival.

I’m sure I’m not alone in seeing the seeds of serial abuse in Roger. He’s an emotional rapist, a passive-aggressive man-child who uses guilt to get what he wants, reacting to any slight – perceived or real – with the whiny, self-regard of a spoiled toddler. I don’t know if this is because he’s a typical man of the 1960s, or if he’s just an asshole for the ages. In any case, you can’t argue with his love and affection for Brianna. It’s not every man who’ll literally jump through time, risking life and limb, to track down his lover. Mind you, it’s also not every man who’ll conceal the truth of said lover’s parents’ fiery death so he can get his leg over. Swings and roundabouts, I suppose.

Roger and Brianna’s subsequent fight feels rather stagey and hollow, hitting a note of theatrical melodrama where a more naturalistic tone would’ve better served the mood and the material. It’s perhaps not the fight we wanted, but it’s the fight that we needed, setting the narrative on a collision course with a most unpalatable, status quo-shattering event that will leave ripples in the timeline for seasons to come.

(sigh) Yep. Another rape.

This time it’s poor Brianna’s turn to bear the horror, running fresh from her fight with Roger straight into the lair of that dastardly fiend Steven Bonnett.

At this stage I think the only member of Jamie’s immediate and extended family who hasn’t been seriously sexually assaulted is his brother-in-law, Ian, and with that limp of his he’d best start taking some precautions.

Brianna’s rape is particularly ugly and vicious, and that’s saying a lot in a series that specialises in vicious and ugly rapes. Bonnett’s brutality and callousness is magnified by the insouciance of his equally callous henchmen, who sit around laughing and playing cards as Brianna screams and cries for help in the room next door.

I can’t see Bonnet making it out of this season’s finale alive once Jamie finds out about his attack on his daughter. I imagine Jamie will hang, draw and quarter Bonnett, sending each of his chopped, stretched and lacerated body parts through the stones to a different time zone. One to the age of the dinosaurs, one to the Mongol hordes, one to the battle of Ypres, and one, finally, and most devastatingly of all, to present-day Greenock.

Roger eventually makes it to Fraser’s Ridge – or near it, in any case – but unfortunately for him the first person to spot him is Lizzie, who saw him quarreling with Brianna before the attack, and in the intervening weeks arrived at the conclusion that Roger was the assailant. She reports the sighting and its significance to Jamie, who intercepts Roger on the fringes of his land, denying him the chance to communicate by repeatedly smashing him in the face until Roger’s eye-lids are like two boiled eggs sprouting from his brow, and his face is slick with blood. I genuinely thought Jamie had killed him.

Now THAT’S an awkward first-meeting with your father-in-law. Greg Focker might’ve regretted his evening of smashed urns and milking cats over at Robert de Niro’s house, but it’s certainly better than being beaten to death before you can so much as say ‘I’ve got nipples too, Greg. Could you milk me?’

Jamie and Bri’s first encounter is a little sweeter and more sanguine than the attempted murder that befalls Roger. In-keeping with Outlander’s signature style of marrying the sacred with the profane, Bri meets her father for the first time as he’s standing in an alleyway taking a piss. The scene quickly segues from slap-stick into real, intense emotion, the musical score and the performances combining to make this Jamie – the one who’s writing this rundown – leak almost as much as screen-Jamie did in that alley-way. But, you know, from my eyes. I realise I’ve made it sound like I’m saying the scene made me wet myself.

I didn’t wet myself! [OK, Jamie, don’t protest too much, son]

Outlander is good at the special moments; the big pay-offs: Jamie reuniting with Murtagh, Brianna meeting her father for the first time. It’s not always so good at following through. The longer Brianna spent in her father’s company, the more they seemed to settle into a ping-pong of hoary and expository dialogue. You could feel nothing of the weight of their shared but separate history.

For the reasons of rape and Roger already outlined, the happy family reunion doesn’t stay happy for long, and a very contrite Jamie has to help retrieve the hapless, half-dead Roger from the native Americans who bought him as a slave. Except Roger doesn’t need their help. He found his own way to escape their clutches. He may also have found another, less-traceable route of escape: another set of stones.

Should he stay or should he go now?

You probably already know what decision he makes. I’ve yet to find out.

Three episodes to go and then I’m in-step with transmission. Soon there’ll be no more bingeing for this late convert to the show.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

  • Wee Ian looked a little crestfallen when Brianna was introduced as his cousin, the wee perv. Don’t worry, Ian, just head south and take her with you.
  • Claire’s go-to face seems to involve her eyes shifting back and forth in her head like a haunted painting, or a ventriloquist’s bear.

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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

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 4 – 5

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 6 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 11 – 13

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 1 – 3

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 4 – 6

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 1 – 3

Part 15: The Unicorn Meets the Eagle (or ‘America… f*** yeah!’)

Wherein Claire and Jamie are slaves to fortune, and others are just slaves

The shape and boundaries of Outlander’s story changed in steady increments throughout its third season, building to a wave (a literal one) that swept the show off its axis and into the raw, thumping heart of America’s pioneering past.

Drawing purely on internet chatter from the many Outlander fan groups I follow, season four’s new direction seems to be the site of the greatest schism yet between fans. Some consider the season to be an evolution, others a metamorphosis (from a butterfly back into a caterpillar). Some see it as a revelation, others an abomination. The fans have split into factions as surely as the two warring sides at Prestonpans or Culloden, a fierce, head-on battle for Outlander’s heart and soul. The question keeps coming up: is season four a blossoming, or a blooming disgrace?

So far, I can’t see what all the fussing and fighting is about. Sure, the show looks and feels very different in many ways, but it’s still solidly and undeniably Outlander. As a litmus test I spent the duration of ‘America the Beautiful’ playing a game of Outlander bingo: pointless Claire monologue? CHECK! Soft-core pornography? CHECK! Occasional bouts of yukky, stilted, over-literary dialogue? CHECK! An irredeemably psychopathic bad guy? CHECK! Hanging; misery; betrayal; death; wonky accents… BINGO!

Characters may live, characters may die; characters may come, characters may go; here, there, back, forth, but there’s one absolute constant in the world of Outlander.

Rape.

We’ve already established that the old world was a minefield of sexual assault (plus ça change) with defilements and debasements round every corner, so kudos to Diana Gabaldon and the writing team for always finding new and inventive ways of putting a fresh spin on the horror. I swear that Diana’s rolodex must be a veritable encyclopedia of assault-based flights of fancy. I wonder what ideas lurk in there yet to be employed? Hot-air balloon rape? Man serially abused by evil trees? Elks held in sexual captivity?”

This time around the horror belongs to young Ian, who admits to Jamie he’s still traumatised by the Bakra’s blood-soaked predations. The knife to his neck was but the final straw in a campaign of bodily terror that saw his spirit broken, his pride punctured and his memories hijacked, all of it garnished with a liberal sprinkling of shame.

Is it really any wonder that the Outlander fandom idolises Jamie? He’s a thoroughly good egg, isn’t he? Jamie is more progressive, patient and understanding than many social-justice-seeking millenials I’ve met. “Some ghosts can only be banished by naming them and their misdeeds aloud,” he tells Ian, shooting for spiritual guidance and in the process stumbling across modern psychology and the healing science of talk therapy. Jamie’s own experience with sexual violence has given him greater empathy for people in general, and victims of sexual assault in particular, but more than that: he’s a man who’s always been several hundred years ahead of his time (give or take a few ill-judged slaps).

Black Jack Randall may be dead, but his spiritual successor is alive and well in pre-revolutionary North Carolina. Step forward Stephen Bonnet, Outlander’s latest dastardly villain. Bonnet’s a mad, bad Irishman with the nervous, twitchy energy of a thousand Rik Mayalls, but none of his zany, humanising humour. There’s something more shark than man about this greedy, thankless scoundrel, who repays vulnerability with attack, and kindness with death.

After Hayes hangs for a crime of passion, Bonnet – next in line to swing – takes advantage of a diversion caused by Hayes’ angry, grief-stricken pal to flee his own pendulum-based destiny. Claire and Jamie later discover that Bonnet has hitched a ride in the back of their wagon, and against their better judgement agree to hide and harbour him, smuggling him past squads of redcoats.

When they next encounter Bonnett, he’s a robber, rascal and all-round rotter. He boards Jamie and Claire’s riverboat with his crew of criminals and proceeds to beat, terrify and humiliate his saviours, taking Jamie’s gems and Claire’s wedding rings, and even slitting the throat of the aforementioned grief-stricken pal to whom Bonnett indirectly owes his life. He’s… well. How shall we put this?

He’s a bit of a c***, isn’t he?

I wasn’t entirely sold on the use of Ray Charles’ ‘America the Beautiful’ over the scene of the boat rampage. While I understand that the juxtaposition of the song’s cheery melody with the visceral horror unfolding to its accompaniment serves to amplify the senseless horror of the attack, I really needed and wanted to hear the angst, the screams, the threats, the slits, thuds and cracks. Not because I’m an irredeemable sicko, you understand (although in many ways I am). I just felt that the music both dulled the magnitude of Bonnet’s betrayal and softened the impact of the violence. I wanted to see, hear and feel it the way Jamie and Claire did, no holds barred. I wanted to share the totality of their pain, anger and thirst for retribution.

[Granted, though, there was something irresistible in hearing a song about America, performed by a black man in segregation-era America, playing over a scene that typifies the violence upon which modern American was built.]

It’s clear that Bonnet has much in common with the fabled scorpion who hitches a ride on the back of a too-trusting frog, but team Fraser’s not exactly lacking for stings. I’m sure there’ll be a reckoning, and soon. But I fear that before that day comes, Bonnett will do much worse to the Frasers and those close to them. Much, much worse.

So far, barring the obvious robbery-homicide, the very worst thing that Stephen Bonnet has done is… speak. What is it with this show and accents? If they aren’t always going to hire Scottish or Irish actors to play Scottish or Irish parts, they should at least seek to hire actors who can turn their tongues to multiple dialects with ease. Ed Speleers is a good actor, but his Irish accent is a little… off. It isn’t in the same league of aural atrocities as Geillis Duncan’s ear-murdering lilts, but it’s just out of alignment enough to hamper the suspension of my disbelief. I’m sure the people of Minnesota, Rhode Island, Durban and Tokyo aren’t all that bothered about a few stray Oirish (sic) intonations, but I know one picky, prickly Celt that sure as shit is.

Ditto Aunt Jocasta. Now, Maria Doyle Kennedy is a talented actress, still in the midst of a long, varied and successful career – and I adored her in Orphan Black as the world-weary, murky, but deeply maternalistic Mrs S – but her Scottish accent is too clipped and staccato to scan as wholly authentic. Again, it’s just… just… a little off. Ever so slightly. But enough for each syllable to boom in my ears like a bomb.

Anyway, enough nit-picking. It’s time to… well, whatever the opposite of nit-picking is. Putting nits back? Making nits great again? Establishing a comprehensive nit-breeding program? WELL, RELEASE THE NITS, because I think that the fourth season’s second episode ‘Do No Harm’ is among the best the show has ever done.

It’s exquisite: a harrowing tale of conflict, prejudice, hatred, hope, despair, tragedy, ignorance and helplessness, for which there are no easy answers and from which there is no method of escape for Jamie or Claire that won’t leave them drenched in the blood of innocents.

Jamie’s experiences suffering under the jackboots of the English forces in Scotland has given him an affinity with subjugated and dispossessed peoples the world over, which predisposes him to stand up for the slaves’ humanity and freedom. Claire cannot abide injustice, and seeks to overthrow it wherever she encounters it, by any means necessary, and no matter the cost or the futility of the act. But here their noble impulses are prostrate in the face of a system that won’t budge, no matter how firmly they press their pasty-white shoulders against it. Jamie knows that even if he could rally the slaves to overthrow their masters, he’d most likely get them all killed in the process – maybe even his beloved aunty, too. Claire, from her vantage point in the future, knows in which direction this particular path of history is winding, and if Culloden couldn’t be stopped… then neither can this.

With each fresh attempt to do the right thing, Claire and Jamie only succeed in making themselves more complicit in the unfolding horror. Their impotence in the face of systemic racism and cruelty is grueling and horrible, though as a narrative choice it’s delicious: a rich seam of conflict and tension.

What does justice mean, who does it really serve, if its points are calibrated so crookedly? When blind white hatred outweighs black lives and freedom? Slavery is a system and a way of thinking that’s a danger and a detriment to the bodies and souls of all men, women and children, irrespective of colour; although the heavier burden rests, of course, upon the shoulders of those with darker skin tones. Sometimes that burden rests upon them literally, forcing them to exist as human cart-horses.

Jamie can’t abide the sight of Rufus hanging from a hook, awaiting excruciating torture and death at the hands of his hate-filled ‘masters’. It sickens and angers him. Hayes being hanged was one thing, this is quite another. He saves him… or so he hopes.

Claire takes an equally bold stance – placing the Hippocratic oath before the hypocritical oath of hatred – by using her surgical skills to heal the wounded man. I thought Ulysses – Aunt Jocasta’s slave of slaves – was going to thank Claire for her efforts, but he instead rebukes her for having intervened. He tells her with some anguish that when the angry crowd gets its hands on Rufus now, which it will, the boy’s fate will be much worse… that they’ll make an example of him to put all of the slaves in their place

It reminded me of the time I stood up for a homeless person who was being verbally abused and threatened on a cold, Aberdeen street. ‘Thanks,’ the homeless man said to me, once I’d warned his would-be attackers off, ‘They’ll probably come back later and kick the living shit out of me now.’

The only choice open to Claire if she wants to safeguard the rest of the slaves, preserve the time-line and ensure a less harrowing death for Rufus is to kill her himself. Jesus, that’s dark, Outlander. Commendably dark. A different show might have seen Claire and Jamie fake Rufus’ death and smuggle him out of town to safety, but this show likes to revel in its impossible choices.

On that note: Claire’s turning into quite the little serial killer, isn’t she? A real Harriet Shipman. They’ll soon have to rename the show ‘Take Me Out-lander’. Who’s she going to poison next?

‘Claire, young Ian’s got a bit of a sore leg. I think he’s grazed it.’

[Claire nods] ‘You get the kettle on, Jamie, I’ll go fetch the [wink, wink] special ingredient.’

‘NO, CLAIRE!!! JESUS CHRIST!’

Claire’s send-off for Rufus was agonising but tender. In death, she handed him freedom, and returned him to his family – even if it was only in his mind’s eye in the brief moments before it winked shut forever.

Then the lynch mob are handed Rufus’s body. Nothing sums up the insanity of racism more than a bunch of angry, mad bastards hanging a corpse. What awful, terrible bastards we’re capable of becoming given the right (or wrong) circumstances. It’s no great surprise that Jamie and Claire decline Aunt Jocasta’s offer to join them on her estate.

I always start these diaries worrying that I won’t be able to write enough and then, once I hit my stride, I always worry that I’ve written too much. Outlander lends itself well to analysis, and because of my closeness to the country that started it all, and my love of TV and pop culture, there are always multiple routes to journey down off the main avenues laid down by the episodes. And, as you’re by now well aware, I do so love a good segue.

However, whenever Roger and Brianna dominate an episode my anxiety about writing too much vanishes. I’ve never found their arc especially compelling, a lack of enthusiasm that’s only been compounded by my indifference to Brianna – both the character and the actress who portrays her. I feel like I could get away with writing, ‘Roger and Brianna did stuff, and then they did some more stuff, and then all the stuff was done, the end.’

Well, blow me down. What a difference a year makes. Brianna and Roger seem really good together here. And I like Brianna now, both the character and the actress. Sophie Alexandra Skelton has really settled into the role, and the character seems at once more relaxed, and significantly wilder. Brianna definitely has Claire’s tunnel-visioned, devil-may-care-ness, but it’s untempered by the anguish of wars and death. I’m sure her impulsivity will spell trouble for Roger in the long-run.

He’s a real love-sick little puppy, isn’t he? That’s when he isn’t being all whiny, passive-aggressive and entitled. I thought their burgeoning romance, with all its confusion, angst and heartache, was handled very well. And Brianna’s blouse landing on the deer’s antlers like some sexy parachute made ma laugh. Still, say what you like about Roger, there aren’t many men who would travel all the way to North Carolina to attend what appears to be a Scottish-themed church bazaar.

The song that Roger sang on stage for Brianna made me cringe. The lyrics were horrible, the tune was crud, an assessment obviously not shared by Roger’s audience, who sat enraptured; smiling, nodding, and staring ahead with unblinking zeal. I’ve been at concerts, recitals and karaoke nights. At least fifty per cent of the people in any given audience are chatting among themselves; twenty per cent or more are off at the bar; fifteen per cent are asleep; and the other fifteen per cent are staring down at their shoes like they’re trying to figure out how to use them to kill themselves.

Anyway, Roger and Brianna did stuff, and then they did some more stuff, and then all the stuff was done. The end.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

  • As Claire and Jamie’s first big bonk of the season got underway, my partner shook her head and said, ‘Why is Claire always just wet? No preamble, no foreplay: plop – in he goes.’ ‘Maybe because they’re constantly surrounded by the aphrodisiac of death and danger, and he’s got big muscles?’ She was still incredulous. ‘That’s not how vaginas work.’ It was my turn to shake my head. ‘Maybe this says more about me, than it does about Claire and Jamie.’
  • When the Scots were all gathered together drinking booze and singing Gaelic songs in a phlegmy warble, it reminded me again of how many similarities there are between Scots and that other long-haired, often-indecipherable warrior race, the Klingons.
  • So, the historical genesis of the drum-roll is as an accompaniment to hangings, is it? Thank you in advance, Outlander, for helping me to win a pub-quiz at some point in the future. What a wonderful, though slightly disconcerting, sprinkling of detail. I’m more used to hearing drum-rolls during a magician’s act. It’s a bit jarring to hear it accompanying a horrid, neck-snapping death, although what is hanging if not a magic trick without the ‘ta-da’ bit?
  • I hope we see more of John Quincy Myers – Hagrid’s little brother meets the bearded music teacher from the Walking Dead.
  • Ditto Phaedre. Good actress, good character. Wise and spirited beyond her years. I hope we see a lot more of her.
  • I wish Lt Wolff had been this season’s baddy. You can just tell he’s going to be a complete, unbridled arsehole.
  • What a big man-child I am. I found myself snickering away at the subtitles when they were describing animal noises. My partner shook her head in despair. Come on, though, ‘horse nickers’? A horse wearing a big pair of ladies pants? Who can blame a man for chuckling like a child? And the less said about the ‘gobbling softly’ the better.
  • Claire see the ghost of an Indian, and it leads her to Jamie. I’m sure that presages the appearance of some real-life native Americans in the show.
  • Frasers’ Ridge! Now I understand why that Facebook fan group calls itself that!

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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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 4 – 5

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 6 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 11 – 13

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

 

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 3, Eps 4 – 5

Part 11: Come Hell or Helwater

Wherein romance relegates the Fraser children to obscurity

(When I write these binge-watch diary entries I normally tackle three or four episodes at a time, but in this installment, and the next, I’m going to cover smaller blocks of two episodes. After watching episodes four to seven it struck me that a 2/2 split was narratively and thematically tidier. If you think that means I’ll be writing less, then, hi, you must be new to my work.)

I’m thankful for having been born in a place as beautiful and benign as Scotland, in a time relatively free from turmoil. Every era has its own particular battles and hardships, of course, and while we have Brexit, global warming and the looming threat of the Spice Girls reunion, at least I’m not: a) dying from cholera on my sixth birthday, b) being chased through the glens by an angry redcoat with a rusty musket, or c) playing ‘Mind that bomb’ in the trenches of Ypres.

I love Scotland and being Scottish – I love our proud history, heritage and humour; our rich culture; the way we’re regarded with such fondness by the rest of the world – but I’m by no means some short-bread-tin thumping, sword-dancing, past-harkening Celtophile who views the world through a tartan filter. I may be a Scottish nationalist – and have been known to carry the odd romantic notion around with me – but I’m a civic nationalist at heart. I feel no enmity towards the English; I love many of them as brothers (and sisters, especially my own actual sister, who was born in Essex, and so is technically English). People are people, and should always be judged on their own merits.

That being said, for all that the pursuit of pan-global solidarity is laudable, we Scots are different from the rest of the world, and certainly different from the rest of the UK. We have our own laws, our own courts, our own unique cultures and languages, our own shared stories, history and experiences, our own parliament, our own institutions, our own aims and values; and a trend-setting, progressive outlook on the world. We’re different enough to desire and deserve a country of our own. And, let’s not forget, ‘our’ country would still have been ‘ours’ if history had played out just a little bit differently. Claire and Jamie: I blame you.

So just to summarise: Scottish, Nationalist, peaceful, peace-loving, love the English.

Except…

The Earth’s skin is a thin veneer, beneath which earthquakes and volcanoes ready themselves to burst, and, I guess, so too is the nationalist psyche. All it takes is five minutes of Braveheart or a reminder of the existence of Margaret Thatcher to transform the average Scot into a flesh-and-blood incarnation of Groundskeeper Wullie, ready to tear their shirt open, grab a claymore and run towards York shouting ‘FREEEEEEEEEDDDOOOOOOOMMMMMM!’

I experienced a little taste of that feeling during the opening minutes of the Jamie-centric episode ‘Of Lost Things’, when the Earl of Ellesmere looked at Jamie and uttered the line: ‘If a child of mine had hair that colour I’d drown him before he drew his second breath.’ It filled me with a sudden, unexpected and all-consuming rage, that was only sated when Jamie walloped him in his stupid face with a bullet towards the episode’s end.

It’s little wonder that UK Prime Minister David Cameron was reportedly so concerned about the ‘Outlander effect’ in the run up to the Scottish independence referendum that he arranged a meeting with Sony to try to mitigate and control it. Diana Gabaldon later went on record to state that, to the best of her knowledge, the delay in bringing the show to the UK (it premiered in the UK many months after its US debut, and only after the independence issue had been ‘settled’) had nothing whatsoever to do with politics. It’s almost irresistible to conclude that it was. If the UK government is now taking pains to rebrand Scottish produce as British in Scottish supermarkets in a bid to dampen our sense of national identity, then it makes sense that they’d cut a deal to delay transmission of a TV show capable of turning even the most timid and anglicised of Scots into chest-beating, dirk-wielding warriors.

I wish Jamie would reclaim some of his trademark fighting spirit. If anyone needs an infusion of fury, it’s Jamie in ‘Of Lost Things’. He’s never seemed less warrior-like than he is here (with one notable, and harrowing, exception from the first season, of course), worn down to a nub by his heavy losses and hardships.

He’s now a groomsman working on the Dunsany family’s English estate, which, on balance, is probably a lot better than being chained to a galley ship and rowed across the Atlantic Ocean to a life of toil and turmoil on untamed lands. The reprieve is courtesy of his benefactor, Lord John Grey, who, as well as being indebted to Jamie for his life, also has the hots for him. We’re talking full-blown hots; you know: posters on the wall; inscriptions in permanent marker suffixed by IDT DNDT; nights spent converting the letters of both their names to numbers to calculate their love-match compatibility. Johnny boy’s got it bad. Without a doubt, Jamie has not only fate to thank for his good fortune, but genetics, too, both for making him such a handsome bastard, and for making John Grey gay.

It’s lucky too that Lord Dunsany is such a noble man. He knows that Jamie (or Alexander Mackenzie as he’s now known) is a Jacobite and former prisoner, but chooses to give him the benefit of the doubt, recognising that they’ve grit, integrity and sorrow in common. Lord Dunsany further promises to conceal Jamie’s true identity even from his own wife, who is still grieving the death of their soldier son on the battlefield at Prestonpans.

Jamie’s role forces him to spend a lot of time with the two Dunsany sisters, one of whom, Isobel, is courteous, noble, and all-round nice (‘It pains me that my father confines such magnificent creatures,’), while the other, Geneva, is wild, haughty, cruel and condescending. Isobel looks upon Jamie as a human being and an equal; Geneva looks down upon Jamie as a cat would a mouse.

When I hear the name ‘Geneva’ it transports my thoughts to Switzerland; which in turn takes them to clocks, rugged landscapes, and Dignitas, the institution where terminally-ill people go to end their suffering. It’s quite an apt volley of associations where the character of Geneva is concerned: she’s terrain that’s hard to navigate; she reminds us, and Jamie, of the time he’s spent and the time he’s lost; and she’s a place where men with few options left open to them go to die.

When Jamie dropped Geneva in the muck following what I’m content to call her false-flag nag fall I was certain he’d end up a human metronome swinging on the end of a hangman’s rope. But it quickly became apparent that Geneva’s teasing and confrontational jibes were a somewhat childish manifestation of her desire for him. Most things about Geneva are childish.

Though attractive and sensuous, she was at root a spoiled and sheltered adolescent, deeply unconcerned with the rights and feelings of others, and completely uninterested in limiting her impulses. I’m not sure if she acted this way because she was hopelessly narcissistic, or simply rich. I guess the two aren’t mutually exclusive. In any case, she elected to pursue Jamie through less-than-traditional romantic means. And by that I mean she discovered Jamie’s secret identity and used it to, em, leverage him.

It’s odd to call this a rape scene, even though it kind of, maybe, sort of is. Is it? I concede I may be guilty of some double-standards here. It’s hard to push back against a life-time of culturally-reinforced gender stereotypes that say men can’t be raped by women. Not only men, but teenage boys, too. While a male teacher who seduces one of his female pupils is unambiguously decried a criminal and a sex offender, we allow for shades of grey when the gender roles are reversed – informally and conversationally, if not legally (and as long as the victim isn’t one of our own sons or brothers). The implication is clear: men are mighty, women are weak; a stiff penis implies cast-iron consent; and men are horny machines who would never pass up an opportunity for sexual release.

Rape, abuse of power, blackmail, unethical and underhand, call it what you will, it’s also undeniably erotic. When Jamie realises how vulnerable and naive Geneva is behind the brashness and bombast he’s able to reassert some form of control, and wields it with sensitivity and passion. Geneva, in her own way, is being held hostage sexually, having been promised to the perfectly hideous Earl of Ellesmere, and Jamie – though he has every right to feel violated and aggrieved – responds compassionately.

What happens between Jamie and Geneva is a through-the-looking-glass re-imagining of Jamie and Claire’s first love scene, this time with the roles reversed. Here, Geneva is the virgin, and Jamie the tender and patient mentor. Geneva’s resemblance to Claire is no accident. He misses companionship. He misses sex. He misses Claire. He misses love.

‘I love you,’ declares Geneva, which Jamie quickly but kindly shoots down. ‘Love is when you give your heart and soul to another, and they give theirs in return.’

Love is Jamie and Claire.

Geneva falls pregnant, and later dies in childbirth. Her baby – their baby – almost dies shortly thereafter, when the Earl of Ellesmere threatens to murder it with a knife, suspecting his young wife, quite correctly, of having cuckolded him.

Jamie tries to defuse the situation, standing between one Lord with a knife, and the other with a pistol. It’s a testament to how thoroughly Outlander has established its brutal credentials that I wasn’t really sure if the baby would survive. A commendably tense stand-off that ends, as previously mentioned, with Jamie saving the life of his secret love-child with the help of a bullet.

The next episode – as you’re all acutely aware – brings us one step closer to the moment fans had been waiting for since the end of the second season: a long overdue break from Brianna.

I’m being devilish, of course. It’s the reunion of our stone-crossed lovers, an event that must’ve coaxed from Outlander’s loyal viewership (who’d waited a year or more for it to happen) a squeal loud enough to smash every window in the Empire State Building twice over, and caused thousands of bottom lips to blubber and jump like washing machines on their final spin cycles. The cumulative force of all the gasps that were surely gasped when Claire and Jamie locked eyes again after twenty years apart would’ve created a vacuum powerful enough to suck the earth inside of itself and spit itself back out again, before shattering in a cosmic thunder of swoons.

Me? I just shrugged and went, ‘That’s nice’, which prompted my partner to look at me like I’d just force-fed a child to a lion. (Hey, I cried when Claire visited Jamie’s Culloden graveside. I cry at ‘Up’ and ‘Watership Down’, what else do you want from me?) I’ll concede that the reunion was a jaw-dropping moment, despite its inevitability. It was also a Jamie-dropping moment. The Laird of Lallybroch went down like a bagpipe filled with bowling balls. Making Jamie the fainter was a neat touch; a funny and memorable subversion of the ‘over-emotional woman’ trope we’ve been conditioned to expect from the genre.

Before the universe could bring them back together, each of the lovers first had to walk away from their children: Jamie, because he would never be able to stake a claim to his lad’s paternity (how very Dougal-ish of him); would be in big trouble if he did, and might not want to even if he could, since it was clear that his boy was developing into a desperately kickable little arsehole; and Claire, because… well… because… because she’s a bad mum. THERE I SAID IT!

Before Claire ran back to the past, she first tried to run from it. She left Scotland to return to Boston, content to leave Jamie in his long-ago grave. But there was no running. The past pursued her, in the form of Roger, who crossed the sea to be with Bri, and stayed to help mother and daughter crack the case of Jamie’s life after Culloden.

I haven’t read the books, but it was blatantly obvious from the moment we first saw Roger resplendent in his turtle-neck that he and Brianna were going to have their own for-the-ages-style romance. Claire was prepared to cross time for her love, Roger an ocean for his, gestures equal in scale when judged on their own merits.

I didn’t particularly like ‘Freedom and Whisky’, ‘Claire’s’ episode. It’s the first time it really felt as though Outlander was treading water. I understand that the episode’s function was to pave the way for the dramatic cliff-hanger in the episode’s closing minutes, but there was no excuse for the preceding thirty-five minutes to feel like an exercise in joining the dots. The dialogue was overly scripty, filled with blandishments and too many moments that were too on-the-nose, particularly the moon-landing analogy. There was no heat or depth. Just noise and light. And while I knew the story had to reunite Claire and Jamie, I didn’t buy how readily both mother and daughter accepted what was about to happen. I’ll say it again: CLAIRE’S A BAD MOTHER!

I like Caitriona Balfe. I do. She’s a good actress. And I like Claire, too. She’s tough, capable and head-strong. That being said, I occasionally struggle to sympathise with the character on account of how blinkered and selfish she can be, and that’s despite the good many times she’s risked her life to heal friends and enemies alike. Is it down to Caitriona? Good as she is, is she good enough to really fully sell it – the turmoil, the nuance, the duality? Yes. Yes, I think she is. Then what is it? Is it the character? Is it possible that Claire’s moral grit – the thing we admire most about her – is actually nothing more than a manifestation of pathological stubbornness? Is she exactly as selfish and dismissive as she sometimes seems?

I interrogated my own perspective so I could be absolutely sure that my feelings weren’t being skewered by gender bias. Men can sometimes judge women and fictional female characters more harshly than male characters, often without realising it, and while I’d like to think that I’m less prone to this kind of mental framing, it would be impossible for me to claim that I was exempt from it, or somehow above it.

Lots of Breaking Bad fans, not exclusively but predominantly male, regularly poured steaming hot mugs of scorn over the character of Skylar. Her crime appeared to be playing spoilsport to her dying husband’s burgeoning criminal career. They called her whiny, uptight, disloyal, a nag. Why couldn’t she just give Walter a break? This was an almost laughable mis-reading of the Whites’ marriage, and indeed all marriages in general, given that the average husband would struggle to avoid the divorce courts after an illicit blow-job, never mind the transformation from a mild-mannered chemistry teacher into a murderous, drug-dealing kingpin. We may have ‘loved’ Walt, even understood him, but he was always the villain. At least by the end of the second season.

Ditto Carmella Soprano. She was arguably complicit in her husband Tony’s crimes – or she was, at the very least, as one of her own therapists put it to her, ‘an enabler’ – and entered his world fully cognizant of the consequences of the mob lifestyle, but that doesn’t mean that she should’ve just quietly accepted his behaviour and infidelity without question or rancour. Standing up to her husband didn’t make her a nag, or a bitch, or a hypocrite. Just human. Just a fully-formed character.

So, no, I’m not some hard-hearted misogynist with an axe to grind, which means, ipso facto, that there must be something wrong with Claire. Sorry, Claire, but as you can see I’ve spread a thin layer of spurious reasoning across a handful of paragraphs and arrived at a cast-iron conclusion, from which there is no escape. Case closed. This court finds you guilty.

Guilty of being a dick.

Why wouldn’t you try to take Brianna with you at least? Why wouldn’t you promise to make some mark on history to let Brianna know you’d made it back safely? Why would you risk going in the first place when there was absolutely no guarantee you would emerge in the correct time-frame? Most strikingly of all, why wouldn’t you take a History of Scotland book with you – your very own Grays Sports Almanac?

Great Scot? Prove it, Claire.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

  • Doctor Who references abound in this show, at least to my consciousness. Roger is the Rory to Brianna’s Amy. Which makes Jamie…em, The Doctor? A larger-than-life, time-travelling figure! Or perhaps Claire’s the Doctor. I’ve already remarked in a previous binge-diary entry that she’d be a good choice as the Doctor (if they insist on continuing to go down that route).
  • Diana Gabaldon got the idea for Jamie from watching an episode of Doctor Who called The War Games, from Patrick Troughton’s tenure as the second Doctor.
  • ‘Are you actually offering your body to me in payment if I promise to look after Wullie?’ My head swirled with euphemisms after John said this to Jamie.
  • ‘History is just a story – it changes depending upon who’s telling it. History can’t be trusted.’ I liked this line of Brianna’s. Very apt.

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 2, Ep 13

Part 8: Love Me Do

Wherein the years fly by, and everybody swaps tartan for turtle-necks

I’ve admitted in previous entries that I’m woefully ignorant of the intricacies of my own country’s history, and have tended to glean most of my impressions of life in the 18th century highlands from fictional sources, Braveheart and Rob Roy among them. Although Outlander is yet another fictional source to add to my pile of well-intentioned misinformation, atleast the show has recently half-inspired me, half-shamed me into picking up a few history books.

I’m ready to share with you already, class. The following passage, which appears early in John Prebble’s 1963 book ‘The Highland Clearances’, seemed to jump up from the page and lodge itself into my brain: “Beyond the mountains the Highlander was despised and hated. Mi-run mor nan Gall, he called it, the Lowlander’s great hatred. And this hatred was to persist until Walter Scott and his imitators took the Highlander out of his environment, disinfected him, dressed him in romance, and made him respectable enough to be a gun-bearer for an English sportsman, a servant to a Queen, or a bayonet-carrier for imperialism.”

I wonder if Outlander, despite its unflinching portrayal of blood, death and violence, has been guilty of this ‘disinfection’ of Highland culture through the romantic figure of Jamie. It’s certainly guilty of the disinfection of the Highland sex life. As I’m on record as saying, many times over, I rather imagine that sex in those days was more of a leaky, itchy, dirty, pus-filled sort of an affair, as opposed to a slow, sexy and cinematic experience: warts-and-all, both literally and figuratively.

Putting my sex obsession aside for a moment, I think it’s fair to say that late 18th century Scotland is unknowable. Not unimaginable, but unknowable. We can draw on a range of physical, historical and literary evidence to construct a workable facsimile of the era in our minds, or on our screens, but we’ll never know for certain if the world we’ve created looks and feels right. We’ll never know exactly what it smelled like, what it sounded like, what it tasted like. If the future is an undiscovered country, then the past is an undiscoverable one.

We don’t, however, have to travel too far back in time to reach the limits of our knowledge. It struck me while watching ‘A Dragonfly in Amber’ that the 1960s are just as unknowable to me as those heather-strewn highlands of the Jacobean era, despite the wealth of audio-visual evidence, and the functioning memories and recollections of the hundreds of millions of still-breathing people who lived through that decade in all its swinging glory. Although the 1960s finished only ten short years before my triumphant emergence into this world, they might as well have been the 1860s for all the connection I feel to them.

I suppose the recent past can seem so otherworldly in large part due to how quickly the world moves these days. Whereas the gaps between us used to be measured in multiples of generations, the size, scale and frequency of the leaps we’re now making in science, technology, industry, law, ethics, and art can render a person socially and technologically obsolete within a handful of years. There isn’t a generation gap: there’s a generation minefield, and it’s expanding every day.

TV and pop culture has helped both to enshrine and demarcate the different decades of the late 20th century. The 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s all seem unique and wholly distinct from one other, even though the blends, blurs and overlaps between them would’ve made them difficult to tell apart if not for our habit of partitioning the stories of our lives into acts, blocks and scenes.

Of course, each ‘distinct’ era means different things to different people depending upon which stage of their lives they’re experiencing as they pass through them. My great-grandmother, for instance, was unlikely to have spent the 1960s lounging around a squat, smoking joints and listening to the Monkees. Likewise, I’m reasonably sure that my grandmother didn’t shave her head on the morning of January the 1st 1980 and then spend the rest of the 80s togged up in denim, and throwing bricks at police cars while chanting ‘Death to Thatcher’s fascists!’

AMC’s stunning, 60s-set series Mad Men first brought the duality of the decades home to me. When Don Draper and his debauched colleagues in ad-land come into contact with 60s counter-culture, they’re amused, bemused and repulsed by it in equal measure. It runs past them, and over them, but not to them, or from them. Their world isn’t one of swinging hips, pop music and loose-fitting fashions, but of double-breasted suits, stiff upper lips, jaunty-angled hats and incredibly heavy-drinking at all times of the day and night. Don Draper may have been living through the 1960s when we met him, but he came of age in the 1940s, and that era and its attitudes left an indelible mark on his head, heart, and… many other organs, too. In many ways, the world that washes over us in our adolescence tends to preserve the larger part of us in, well… amber.

What, then, must it feel like for Claire, who began her journey at the end of World War 2, jumped to the beginning of the second Jacobite uprising, and now finds herself a middle-aged woman living in the age of beatniks, Beatles and Bob Dylan? Who is Claire now? And who are Claire and Jamie without each other?

‘Dragonfly in Amber’ sees Claire return to Scotland to attend the Reverend Wakefield’s funeral. Along for the ride is her now-adult daughter Brianna, who’s as snappy, sarcastic, and sassy as she is just occasionally very grating. The Reverend’s adopted son, Roger, serves as their host, splitting his time between eulogising, drinking whisky and rocking that faux folk-singer look. I’m pretty sure Roger is going to try to, if you’ll forgive the crudity, well… roger… Brianna. Frank is with them all in spirit, if not in body, on account of him being so hip that he’s actually dead.

He’s not the only one…

Back in 1746 – if you’ll permit me to nip through the stones for a second – it’s time to bid a rather gruesome farewell to Dougal.

I knew Dougal was going to die. Not only because narratively, and perhaps even historically, there was no other way, but because somebody let the cat out of the bag without meaning to. Or, I suppose you could say, they put the cat into the bag and killed it right there in front of me. It can be dangerous to share binge-watch re-caps in Outlander fan forums on Facebook when you’re seasons behind the herd, and happen to share a first name with one of the show’s main characters. One blissfully unaware lady accidentally tagged me in a post to tell me that Jamie killed Dougal, without meaning to tell me, or even realising that she had. Don’t cry for me, ladies and gentlemen. I knew the risks going in. Besides, the particulars of Dougal’s death were thankfully still surprising.

Dougal’s death felt a little sudden and perfunctory, but I guess the character had already made his big exit – certainly his emotional one – in the previous episode. The tears he cried over his brother’s body – and those he coaxed from my eyes – were plenty enough for both brothers. When it came time for Dougal to actually die, by a Clamie tag-team take-down no less, there was nothing left to feel.

Dougal’s fierce patriotism and nationalist zeal had been so firmly established that when he overheard Claire and Jamie discussing the best way to bump off Bonnie Prince Charlie, there was a grim inevitability to what came next. Culloden would’ve killed him anyway, but death decided to knock a day early for Dougal. I guess the bureaucrats in the afterlife had occupancy issues to consider for the following day, so tried to stagger admission a little on the Scottish side.

Ah, Claire and Jamie. You know what they say about the couple that kills together, don’t you? That they, uh… suffer… from… some description of shared post-traumatic stress disorder together…em, I’d assume. That’s not very catchy is it? I’ll try again: the couple who kills together, em, chills together?Would a murder bring you closer as a couple? I suppose it would. In its own perverse and shocking way, it’s rather an intimate act.

Even still… they probably shouldn’t make a habit of it.

Anyway, time to go back to the future.

The segments set in the 60s begin with Claire and Brianna being haunted by Jamie’s ghost, and end with the tantalising, life-altering revelation that Jamie might not be as dead as Claire had believed. Even though, you know, he’s still dead, because it’s 1968, and Scottish people don’t tend to live past 50, never mind 200. But you know what I mean.

Claire’s goodbye to Jamie, as she touched ‘his’ grave-marker on the battlefield at Culloden, wasn’t sad or emotionally affecting at all, and I DIDN’T CRY, SO FUCK OFF. (coughs) OK? I did NOT cry…

STOP GOING ON ABOUT IT, CAUSE IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.

OK?!

It’s hard for me to judge how well the Outlander team has captured the essence of 1960s Scotland, but it seems to me that you can’t go far wrong with putting everyone in turtle-neck sweaters.

Whatever else the show may have got right, I found myself deeply sceptical that an Inverness college in 1968 would have been a place of fervour, passion, bustle and enthusiasm. I cringed a little as Gillian Edgars – aka Geillis the Witchy Wifey – led a chant of ‘We are Scotland’ inside the college. It wasn’t the sentiment that registered as incongruous – after all, I’m a card-carrying member of the SNP, and passionately pro-independence to boot – but the articulation. I suspect that the American writers responsible for adapting this episode for TV, Toni Graphia and Matthew B Roberts, let a little bit of spiritual Americana bleed into the mix.

Just for future reference: modern and semi-modern Scottish people don’t tend to gather excitedly to pronounce unabashedly life-affirming sentiments to all who will listen; unless they’re so drunk that they can hardly hold their fish supper aloft, or locked in the fury or fervour of a football match’s assault-ridden aftermath.

In the corridors of colleges and polytechnics the country over – even now – Scotland’s youth are far more likely to be found huddled in hostile sub-groups, nary a second of eye-contact shared between them, kicking, shuffling and grumbling their way down the blank-walled corridors, with blank minds to match. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief long enough to believe in shards of stone that can send people hurtling through time, but a Scottish college brimming over with happy, healthy and reasonably attractive people? Come on, Outlander. There are limits to my credulity.

And who’s got these students whipped into a frenzy with all their talk of patriotic duty? Hey, everyone, Geillis is back! Well, she’s not back, if ye ken whit a mean, for she hasnae left yet. Och, dinna fash, it’s the time travel, ye ken. Spins yer heid, so it dis.

I guess it doesn’t matter too much to non-Scottish ears, but I always found something a little off-kilter with Geillis’ accent. It was almost-nearly-sort-of-okay, but the enunciation was too over-stated, and it had a weird twang to it. It was obvious to me that the actress wasn’t a native Scot, but I’ll tell you something, I respected her attempt all the more once I discovered that she was Dutch. Everybody thinks they can do a Scottish accent (in reality, there are a multitude of languages, accents and dialects in even this small country), but few can do it well. Lotte Verbeek, when I say that your attempt was almost-nearly-sort-of-okay, believe me, that’s a supreme compliment.

Geillis functions to bring us full circle to the first season of the show, and to make fresh connections going forward. The burning tableau Geillis makes of her alcoholic husband in the centre of the stones, and her subsequent disappearance into the winds of time, make a believer out of Brianna, who up until that point had been understandably sceptical of her mother’s story of having been impregnated by an 18th century highlander after falling through a magical portal into the past.

Now that Brianna knows the truth, and Claire knows that Jamie survived Culloden, how will she get back to him? And how can she be sure she’ll be able to jump back into his time-line at the correct point – even supposing that he lasted much past Culloden? More importantly, how can she leave her daughter behind to go gallivanting through time once again?

Only time will tell.

Here’s to season three.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

  • There’s a lot of accent horseplay and sleight-of-hand in Outlander. In this episode, Brianna, a character born and raised in America, attempts a Scottish accent, which moves Roger to pronounce: ‘That is the worst accent I have ever heard.’ Even funnier, the actress who plays Brianna, Sophie Skelton, is actually English. So she’s an English woman pretending to be an American pretending to be Scottish. Hats off to you, Sophie. That’s a tricky hat-trick.
  • I’ve also just recently learned that Duncan Lacroix is ENGLISH! Jesus, that threw me. Again, there was always something just a teeny, tiny bit unusual about Murtagh’s accent, but Lacroix always inhabits Murtagh so completely, that I didn’t even stop for a second to consider the actor’s heritage.
  • There are a lot of lovely little touches in this episode. Like when Brianna asks her mother – ‘Do you miss him?’, meaning Frank, the man she’d always believed to be her father. The look of hesitation on Claire’s face, and the torturous duality of her answer, all unbeknownst to Brianna, works really well.
  • Claire to Roger, as Geillis’ husband smoulders nearby. “Roger – go get help.” Em, I think we’re a little past that, Claire. You’re not the world’s most perceptive doctor, are you?
  • There’s a neat, if a little on-the-nose, symmetry at play here: Geillis burned her husband, and got burned in return. Hell begets hell. And Dougal and Geillis beget Roger, by the looks of it, give or take a few begets.

I’ll be back with season three of my binge-watch in 2019. Thanks for coming on this journey with me, and rediscovering your favourite show through fresh eyes. It’s been a blast, and as much as I may sometimes jest, I’m really enjoying it so far.


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 3, Eps 1 -3

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland