Tag Archives: Claire Fraser

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

Posted on by

Part 4: Well, that was lovely…

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

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

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

NOTHING.

HAVE YOU GOT THAT?

NOTHING!

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

‘Yes, nurse,’ I tell her.

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

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

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

‘Nurse?’ I ask plaintively.

‘NURRRRSSSSSSSSSSE?!!’

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

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

FADE TO BLACK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah. [breathes a heavy sigh of relief]

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

NUUUURRRSSSSSEEEEEEEE!

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

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

READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

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

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

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

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

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

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

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

Posted on by

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

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

Posted on by

Part 2: In and Out-lander

Wherein change is a constant, truths are revealed and Claire gets her hands aw covered in pish

My partner Chelsea is something of an Outlander veteran, having watched the first season-and-a-bit without me last year. She wasn’t being mean by leaving me out, you understand. She asked me at the time if I wanted a piece of the tartan action, and I said, well… I believe my exact words were ‘Fuck that.’ I didn’t think it would be for me. I loved porn, I loved Scottish scenery, I loved time travel, but I didn’t necessarily feel that I needed them all together in the one package, especially with the added threat of romance.

Five episodes into my binge she asked me if I was enjoying the show so far. Well, I know better now, don’t I, having dipped my toe in the heeland loch. I told her I was enjoying it greatly. How could I not be? It was well-acted, fast-paced, intriguing, and looked vibrant and beautiful to boot. What pleased me most, though, I told her, was that the heavily-promoted romance element of the show had remained somewhat in the background, or at least wasn’t as strongly emphasised as I’d feared it would be.

She gave me a puzzled little look, like I’d just announced that robots were great because they were almost exactly the same as bananas.

“No, really,” I continued, doubling down on my rave review, “I thought Outlander was going to be this quirky, 17th-century rom-com, where the main characters would get married really quickly, and there would be endless soft porn scenes, but, you know, mercifully, it doesn’t appear to be that kind of show at all.”

She looked at me with eyes full of sorrow and pity, as if a doctor had just told her I had weeks to live, and she didn’t yet know how to break the news to me.

At that exact moment, she must have been thinking about episode 7, The Wedding. I was soon to discover that said episode was essentially a quirky, 17th-century rom-com, where Claire and Jamie got married really quickly, and which featured endless soft porn scenes. What’s the Gaelic for bow-chick-a-wow-wow? Honestly, ten solid minutes of that episode were just the newly-weds checking out each other’s arses, followed by another ten minutes of them rutting like dogs.

I’m not entirely sure that what I just made there was a complaint.

Anyway, while it was a nice touch to see the typical male/female dynamics of the era (and of the genre) subverted, by having Jamie play the wet-behind-the-ears virgin to Claire’s experienced and in-control woman, it seemed ever-so-slightly gratuitous to focus on Jamie’s first ever blow-job, and even dwell on his delighted gasp and cheeky wee grin. ‘What’s this bloody show turning into now?’ I cursed at the TV. ‘Scotch Pie? Are McStiffler and McFinch about to burst in wearing lederhosen and trailing a shaved goat behind them?’

I thought about the hygiene aspect again, not to mention the lack of contraception (not even a stab at the rhythm method!). If this was real 18th-century sex, and not a fantasy-rich, heaving-bosomed, skin-bathed-in-candle-light sort of a romp, then Claire would almost certainly have emerged from her marital bed riddled with everything from ringworm to the bubonic plague. And very probably pregnant. A man and a woman only had to shake hands, sneeze or play catch with a turnip in order to fall pregnant in the 18th century. An enlightened 19th-century nurse surely would have known better than to doff her daisy at a wrangler’s dangler like that.

Sex is a funny little devil, though, isn’t it? It’s not just love, lust and longing that joins our sweating bodies together like sexual Tetris pieces. Death, despair, anguish, fear, and anger – and alcohol, too, on its own or in conjunction with one or more of the aforementioned – can make us rub our bits in places and at times and with people we might not otherwise have considered to be sensible choices.

Even though poor haunted, hunted, homesick Claire had at that point been six weeks without a ride (Hi Americans – I’m using the crude Scottish vernacular to describe a bodily act again) I’m still not fully convinced by how quickly she abandoned her scruples and plunged into a carnival of carnal abandon with Jamie.

I was expecting, and hoping for, a bit more in the way of moral posturing and feminist fury, given how headstrong Claire had been up until then. I was, however, pleased that their wedded union was brought about in an interesting and unexpected way, in a bid to frustrate, through legal means, Black Jack Randall’s move to imprison and interrogate Claire. The flashback-framed farce that told the story of the hoops the Mackenzie men had to jump through in order to facilitate the couple’s wedding at record speed was undeniably fun and funny in equal measure.

Still, can’t really grumble about the romance element kicking into gear. It’s pretty much stitched into the show’s DNA. It’d be like watching Sherlock and moaning because he kept solving crimes. At least Outlander embraces blood and brutality to balance out the Mills and Boone-esque schmaltz. The world around Claire and Jamie, with its corruption, thieving, lying and killing, does a fine job of disabusing any notions of Scotland’s romantic past that even the most swooning of viewers may have brought to the show with them. In almost every episode someone is left with a big bleeding, spurting gash cut into their body, absent an ear or an arm, or almost raped. It’s a lot like present-day Airdrie.

Ned’s great, isn’t he? It was nice to see Claire interacting with someone who was her intellectual equal, someone a bit more ‘1945’ than the rest of the rabble; a man who had loftier ambitions than to spend his days farting and fucking. And I bloody love Bill Paterson, the actor who plays him. The last time I saw Bill Paterson in something about time travel (excluding Doctor Who) he ended up bludgeoned to death by cavemen, so maybe things don’t augur too well for old Ned.

Change was the over-riding constant across these four episodes. Most of the major players went through significant changes, both in the way they saw each other, and in the way they saw themselves. The Mackenzie men moved from regarding Claire as a potential traitor or a bothersome sassenach to someone they’d happily fight, lie and die for. Claire, in turn, finally seemed to be finding a place for herself among the Mackenzies, and didn’t seem to view her time with them merely as a prelude to her next daring escape attempt. She also demonstrated that she could mulch piss with the best of them.

Ever since Claire was rescued from Randall’s rapey clutches at the end of episode one she’d viewed Dougal very much as a scary, starey, glarey bruiser of a man (good job she hasn’t seen him in AMC’s Preacher); an image he’d done little to soften by his habit of continually scowling, drinking, and talking about tits and dicks all the time. Her road-trip around the Highlands with the men as they collected rent from their tenants – coins here, a goat there – really seemed to open Claire’s eyes, both to the wider world and to Dougal’s true nature.

At first, though, she believed Dougal was even worse than she’d first imagined. She thought that he was supplementing his private income through skullduggery; using Jamie’s tale of harsh treatment and disfigurement at the hands of the English as a way to extort extra gold from the village-folks – to line his own pockets. Claire being Claire, she wasn’t content simply to think of Dougal as the 18th-century Highland equivalent of Negan from The Walking Dead, she pretty much accuses him of being a knave, an usurper and a rustler, right to his big hairy face, a move that struck me as either evidence of Claire’s skewed sense of privilege and entitlement, or an incidence of iffy writing. Given how much almost every single one of the men barring Jamie hated and mistrusted her at that point, it was nothing short of lunacy for her to take an angry, spiteful stand against Dougal.

Still, if she’d kept schtum she would never have worked out that Dougal was actually a secret freedom-fighter, raising funds to mobilise a Jacobite army to send the English homewards to think again, and to put the ‘rightful King’ back on the throne.

The following episode, ‘The Garrison Commander’, was a great episode of Outlander, but an absoutely peerless episode of ‘Come Dine With Me’. Jesus, that was tense. I think the dinner party at the end of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was possibly a little less fraught.

I wonder if the English gentry and middle-classes ever get tired of being portrayed on screen as the world’s biggest fops and arseholes. Claire flies the flag well for England, but every other English character we meet – or have met thus far – is a blustering, vain, arrogant, unscrupulous little toad. It makes me glad to be on Team Itchy-Skirt. The world loves us, man, even if they can’t always understand us (and even if we don’t always deserve it). I liked how Dougal got a little taste of what it was to be an outlander, a stranger in a strange land, as he stood at the foot of that English dinner-table being cursed and condescended to. He took it well, for his pride’s sake, and for Claire’s.

I’d like to talk directly to Claire now. Claire? I’ve got some good news and some bad news, sweetheart. The good news is, Dougal’s now your protector and chaperone; your very own little Greyfriars Bobby. The bad news? He wants to give you his little grey bobby. (Hi Americans, I’ll pause this sentence to give you time to get back from the Urban Dictionary). This surely won’t end well.

Black Jack Randall, of course, was a surprise – and deeply unwelcome – addition to the dinner party. He too showed that he was capable of change: capable of changing into something even more monstrous than our first impressions had allowed for.

Tension and terror flood from Tobias Menzies whenever he appears on-screen as the reprehensible redcoat. He plays it just the right side of cartoonishly evil, yet still somehow manages to make Black Jack feel feel blood-curdingly authentic. It’s a pitch-perfect study in cruelty and madness. The scene where Claire sits tear-stricken at the dinner table as she listens with mounting horror to Jack’s tale of how much he enjoyed brutalising Jamie is deliciously uncomfortable to watch. I, like Claire, allowed myself to believe, just for a fleeting second, that Jack was reaching out to her in his turmoil, that he was redeemable. Like all psychopaths, though, Jack mined hope as a means to further and better torture his victims, reveling in the quiet savagery of his deception. All the more agonising and impactful when he rips the mask from his face a second time. What a fucking bastard he is.

I’m glad he’s in the show.

And poor, poor Frank (Black Jack’s great-great-great-great-erm-great-don’t-know-how-many-greats-I-should-have-here-grandson), marooned and alone back in the 1945 version of Inverness. The mid-season finale taught Frank that time, anger and desperation can send even the most civilised of men running head-long into superstition and violence. Grief, and the shadows of his ancestral self, threatened to turn him into a monster, a theme I’m sure the writers will pick up again should he ever return to the story – which of course he must. He must, right?

I’m convinced that some sort of evil twin/sci-fi swapsie scenario is going to unfold, with Black Jack escaping to 1946 Inverness and becoming a serial-killer, or Frank accidentally landing in the past and having to convince any would-be murderers that he isn’t the infamous Captain Randall.

Anyway, because it’s the mid-season finale, something suitably seismic had to happen. And thus, Claire finally reaches the stones in 1743, at the same time as Frank does in 1945. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending upon your viewpoint) instead of running into her (first) husband’s arms, she runs straight into Black Jack’s clutches.

One minor quibble. Did the closing moments of the mid-season finale really have to lean into the cliché of the damsel in distress being saved from death and indignity at the last possible moment by her muckle, gun-toting man? Ach, that’s such a 2018 thing to say. It was exciting, ye ken?

I’m all in now.

Here’s to the next four episodes. Bring on the nakedness, Outlander. Just as long as you bathe it in blood from time to time.

MISSED ANY INSTALLMENTS? CLICK BELOW

Why I wanted to binge-watch Outlander

Part 1: Season 1, Eps 1 -4

Part 3: Season 1, Eps 9 – 12