Tag Archives: Claire

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

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Part 14: Return of the Aye-eeee

Wherein some people are nuts, and some people talk to nuts, and they’re the less nutty ones

These days, it seems there aren’t any American actors in lead roles on US TV. Even the characters that are supposed to be American are played by British or Australian actors.

Before Idris Elba hit stratospheric levels of fame, he teamed up with Dominic West to fool The Wire-watching world into believing both were natives of the Baltimorean landscapes over which they battled and hustled; Hugh Laurie expertly masked his middle-Englishness to play the embittered, brilliant, ebullient and quintessentially American Gregory House MD; and two Australians, Aden Young and Adelaide Clemens, convinced absolutely as a pair of tragic, star-crossed souls from the deep-south in Showtime’s exquisite crime-and-redemption series Rectify. These actors and actresses are all exemplars of the craft of transatlantic (or transpacific) tongue twisting.

There is, however, an ever-growing roster of Brits and Antipodeans who’ve less than impressed the great American public with their efforts: Rick in The Walking Dead (especially in the first season, where he sounded like Forrest Gump’s even dippier cousin); Ewan McGregor in the third season of Fargo; Charlie Hunnam in Sons of Anarchy; and Gerard Butler in… well, in just about anything in which he isn’t supposed to be Scottish.

Except in the most heinous of cases, my untrained ears can’t seem to discriminate between good and bad attempts at the various dialects of the US. It got me wondering if people outside of the UK accept on the same unconditional terms the attempts of non-British actors to mimic our native accents. Did people in Rhode Island detect anything amiss in Dick van Dyke’s famously shite attempt at Cockney? Did the people of Florida notice that the Northern Irish accents in season 3 of Sons of Anarchy were so bad they almost constituted a war crime? And what do the people of New York, Nevada and Hawaii think of the Scottish accent issuing from the mouth of Outlander’s resident death-defying witch, Geillis Duncan?

I’ve no way of knowing. I can, however, tell you what the people of Thisguy, Scotland think of it. How can I put this? Hmmmm. Well, em… Lotte Verbeek has a good stab at the Scottish accent. The trouble is that she doesn’t stop stabbing. She stabs it again and again and again and again. Until it’s dead.

That may sound uncharitable of me, and that’s because it is, but in my defence it’s impossible not to feel a little combative considering that the character of Geillis contributes to how my kin and culture are conveyed to the world. Outlander is, after all, one of the most widely popular Celto-centric TV series of all time.

Don’t get me wrong, Verbek is a good actress, and she makes a commendable attempt at a Scottish accent considering that she hails from mainland Europe, but Geillis’s dulcet tones are so off-centre that, as a Scot, it takes me out of the performance entirely. It’s like listening to a symphony being played off-key on un-tuned instruments by a drunk orchestra.

Of dogs.

There’s one way you can judge the quality of a Scottish accent, and it’s this: the more syllables an actor adds to the one-syllable word ‘Aye’, and the longer those syllables are drawn out, the worse the attempt. Case in point: if Geillis’ ‘ayes’ were elongated any further they’d basically be the death throes of a Japanese Anime character.

Anyway, we’ll return to Geillis later in the run-down. For now, let’s kick things off with a ship-wrecked Claire, who wakes up shaken and stirred on a strange island; singular in her purpose, alone in her terror. The island Claire finds herself on is a mish-mash of Biblical tropes: it’s Eden after the fall; it’s the wilderness through which Jesus wandered for forty days and forty nights, warding off the temptations of the Devil himself. There are indeed snakes here with Claire, but they aren’t much interested in tempting or talking: just in throttling and biting.

For the first 16 minutes of Uncharted, Claire is on her own. There are no people in this strange environment, only hunger, and a landscape littered with prickly plants and biting ants. Basically, she’s Mowgli, but without the singing animals.

I’m a sucker for the Robin Crusoe narrative, especially when it’s riven with religious symbolism. I love to see snapshots of our primal past and renderings of our post-apocalyptic future: the isolation; the struggle. HBO’s The Leftovers delivered this brilliantly, twice: once, when it showed the plight of an early human female navigating a deadly, antediluvian landscape with her newborn child, all the while surrounded by threats and augurs, and again when it showed us Kevin Garvey Snr wandering the Australian outback in the third season episode Crazy Whitefella Thinking. Even the Discovery Channel’s Game-of-Thrones-But-A-Wee-Bit-True series Vikings got in on the game when Floki first discovered the empty, roaring majesty of pre-colonisation Iceland, a rugged landscape he first mistook for Valhalla.

Scott Glenn as Kevin Garvey Snr in season 3 of The Leftovers

Silence, and paucity of speech, if used sparingly, can lift and liberate a piece of television. Silence has a great transformative power; it can sharpen our senses; open our minds; direct our focus to all that’s profound and terrible at the heart of the human condition.

Outlander couldn’t get Claire to stop talking long enough to give that a try.

I know Claire’s narration is a device that creates a bridge between the book and the TV series, but in this case… to whom is she narrating? And what does her narration add in way of shade or nuance to what we can already see and intuit with our own brains and senses? Surely one of the main benefits of Claire having no-one to talk to is that we don’t have to hear her moan or state the obvious for a while. But no. We’re shoved inside her head, like it or not.

“I was hungry. That means I needed food. I needed to find some food. So what else could I do? I decided to find some food. I had to try. But it wasn’t easy. The longer I went without food, the hungrier I got, and the harder it was to find the food. And the more I missed Jamie. Ow, an ant just bit me. That was sore. Still, at least it took my mind off how hungry I was for a moment there. I really need a shit now. I wonder if I can risk wiping my arse with any of these strange leaves? Goodness, I’m hungry. Did I mention that?”

Next we meet Father Fogden, the foppish Englishman of aristocratic stock who has a close, personal relationship with a coconut we pray isn’t sexual. He’s eccentric, he’s adorable, he’s sinister (the man, that is, not the coconut): he’s a Richard Curtis character who’s been inexplicably written into The Shining; he’s the newest owner of the Caribbean Bates Motel, but instead of his mother being dead, she’s an angry fat Cuban lady, who isn’t really his mother, but his almost-mother-in-law. Imagine losing your wife and being trapped forever with your mother-in-law. No wonder he’s on the yupa.

Mamacita – the mother of Father Fogden’s lost love Ermenegilda – wastes no time in cursing Claire to Hell and back, switching it up between English and Spanish so as to inject a bit of variety into her scorn. It becomes clear why Father Fodgen is so fond of fraternising with coconuts (although the hallucinogens might have something to do with that as well). As Claire heals, Mamacita cooks for her, serving up stank with a side-plate of sass for every meal.

Thankfully, Mr Willoughby’s goat-killing proficiency alerts Claire to the presence of Jamie’s ship. Claire’s dash through the jungle to catch Jamie’s ship before it ups anchor and sails away is commendably tense. Thanks to Outlander’s historic cruelty towards its central lovers I really wasn’t expecting a happy re-union. As the action cut between Claire’s panic and Jamie’s preparations, I prepared myself for the old time-delay trick (making it look like Claire was about to catch the boat with seconds to spare, when in reality she’s missed it by a whole day) or the different-place trick (they’re in the same time-frame, but on completely different islands).

Claire is a lot of things – stubborn, haughty, sometimes dangerously myopic – but she’s no damsel in distress. She’s brave, cunning and, above all, resourceful, the latter quality proving the difference between Claire being marooned with Lord Coconut and Mama Sass for all eternity, or sailing off into the sunset with Jamie once more. All it took was a wee waggle of a mirror through a sunbeam, and Jamie was rousing the troops to rescue her.

‘MacDuhb’s wife turns up in the most unlikely of places, does she no?’ says this season’s Angus to this season’s Rupert. Outlander knows fine well that we know that they know that we know how delightfully preposterous the show can be sometimes.

Father Fogden – my very favourite Caribbean-crack-smoking, coconut-nattering nincompoop – again gets to a shine when he presides over the union of Fergus and Marsali. I love Fogden, and I sincerely hope two things: a) that he returns next season, and b) that he’s free to officiate my real-life wedding later on this year. What a unique occasion it would be. I don’t know many people who have been joined in holy matrimony by a man who’s off his tits on gin and yupa.

I laughed heartily when Father Fogden tried to marry Marsali to a different guy on account of Fergus’s missing hand, and then laughed again when, his mistake having been corrected, he shrugged and said, ‘Not as though he’s lost his cock… you haven’t, have you?’

While I saw it coming – and it was a long time coming – it was still hellishly sweet when Jamie asserted kinship over Fergus by handing him the Fraser name.

Uncharted, then, was like the Fall of Eden in reverse: beginning with a silent, lonely journey through deadly and inhospitable terrain, haunted by the specter of a serpent, and ending with two characters joined together in hope, innocence and love, but also – you know, haunted by the specter of a serpent… if you know what I mean (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

The state of Eden is a distant memory for the poor Africans caged and enslaved in the sweltering heat of the Jamaican sun. The very best life they can hope for, at least for the next few centuries, is one serving drinks to snooty, cruel or indifferent aristocrats. It goes without saying that slavery is a repulsive practice. That human beings treated other human beings like that is disgusting, that it happened not so long ago in human history is chilling. For once, Claire’s inability to tolerate any act of injustice irrespective of the times and irregardless of the consequences is worth championing – even if it will almost certainly draw unwelcome attention to Jamie’s visibility and presence on the island.

Deliciously, though, history might think differently. In order to free a slave called Temeraire, Claire had to buy him, which means there’s a physical record of the vehemently anti-slavery, time-travelling firebrand buying a slave and therefore, on the surface of it, actually contributing to slavery.

So, Geillis then. She was never a particularly nuanced character to begin with – Lady Macbeth with a touch of murderous New Age Earth Mother – but in her latest (and last) incarnation as a blood-bathing black widow and purveyor of black magic, she’s positively ridiculous. When she isn’t chasing after the shiny MacGuffin fastened to John Grey’s coat, she’s waving her hand in the air in a dismissive manner and storming through a crowd of party-goers in her big flouncy dress to a chorus of giggles and gasps, like some cartoonishly wicked pantomime dame.

Let’s talk John Grey here. Until now we’ve seen him as a noble but dopey, love-sick little puppy, holding a candle (or indeed a sapphire) for Jamie across time and across continents. The moment where Claire works this out is incredibly sweet.

But the man also has a steely side, shown here when he delivers a rousing, stinging, brutal dressing down to the status-hungry Captain Leonard, saving Jamie’s skin into the bargain. I was almost out of my seat cheering.

Once Geillis’s three-stage-plan to immolate Ian, infiltrate the future and bump off Brianna was foiled, I half-expected her to turn to the Frasers and snarl, ‘And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you pesky kids!’ But she was far too busy being decapitated for any of that malarkey.

Well, almost decapitated. In the books I gather Claire sees the job through with the business-end of a blunted axe, but in the TV show she only manages a partial chop. That’s not a criticism. I know how hard it is to cut a cantaloupe under ideal conditions, so kudos to TV Claire for trying. There are thin religious parallels here that are probably more explicit in the book on account of Claire’s more successful stab at decapitation.

In the Bible, John the Baptist – who as his name suggested loved a good baptism – prophesies the coming of the Messiah; a great ruler of legend for whom he is the fore-runner. A little later, he’s beheaded. In Outlander, Geillis – who performs baptisms of sorts upon herself, and always in goat’s blood – prophesies the coming of a great ruler. A little later, she’s beheaded. Did I mention the parallels were thin?

I guess it’s easy to see God-shaped shadows everywhere in a season that’s been so awash with Biblical imagery, from Jamie’s hellish print-shop fire to goats to prophecy.

Outlander is usually pretty good at making its sex scenes tell a story, but here – in their last bout of bump n’ grind before their boat is engulfed by waves; the ‘clam before the storm’, if you like – it felt gratuitous. Yes, I know I can’t grudge them some tenderness after all the many hardships they’ve just endured, but it didn’t feel like their passion was informed or fuelled by the cocktail of emotions that undoubtedly would have been swirling around in their hearts and bellies, particularly since Claire had just killed a woman. Oh, and FYI, the use of the word ‘breeks’ is never sexy. Never. In Scotland you’ll most often hear it in this sentence: ‘Whit’s wrang, have ye shat yer breeks?’

That storm was breath-takingly realised, though. It looked and felt dangerous, deadly and horrifying. I got a real sense of the dizzying, frenetic, claustrophobic terror the crew must have felt. Really made me feel on edge: the raging power of the waves, the hopelessness and helplessness, the shrill whistling of the wind, a deadly world drained of colour, and alive with life-smothering danger. Bravo. Spectacularly well done.

Oh, hi, cliched-kiss-of-life-under-the-water, we’ve been expecting you!  And then, later, on the shore, Jamie manages to bring Claire back from the brink again with his very own patented brand of CPR – a very gentle kiss on the cheek.

At least Outlander has kept its two lovers together this time, first at the eye of the storm, and then in bewildered exile, where they always seem to find themselves. Where are Fergus and Ian? What are they going to do? Is Jamie safe from the King’s men?

God Bless America.

See you soon for season four.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

  • I mentioned the TV show Rectify way back at the start of this article. Please, please watch it, I beg you. It’s haunting, raw, poetic, visceral, and agonisingly beautiful; in this scribe’s humble opinion one of the best TV series of all time (if that isn’t too blasphemous a thing to say out here in Outlander-land).
  • I could tell pretty early on that Mark Hadfield wasn’t Scottish (the actor who played Mr Campbell, Margaret the seer’s brother) but never-the-less Mark does a very good job, never letting the accent drift into the realms of parody or exaggerated stereotype. English fans: is Claire’s accent good? It sounds pretty spot on to this set of Scottish lugs, but let me know in the comments below or on Facebook.
  • The bit where Jamie has to deliver penicillin to a poisoned Claire is nicely done. His reluctance to pierce Claire’s skin with the needle coupled with his baffled astonishment at the whole realm of modern medicine I’m sure made the Outlander-watching world erupt in a sonic-boom of ‘Awwwwws’.
  • On the subject of Geillis: if I can just let my carnality shine through for a moment, I found it particularly pleasant when she rose naked from her pool dripping with blood like some sexy mash-up of Hellraiser 2 and Cleopatra. I wasn’t a big fan of her feet, though. Not a foot man in general, I’m afraid. The moment Geillis started stretching and rubbing those veiny numbers in Ian’s face, allegedly in a bid to seduce him, I began hurling pairs of socks at the TV screen.
  • “Your nipples staring me in the eye, the size of cherries…” Em, smooth line there, Jamie. You should somehow try to work the word ‘breeks’ into there. It’s a good job you’re handsome, son, because your patter is awful.
  • I keep forgetting about Jamie’s disfigurement at the hands of the horrible Black Jack. Every time Jamie and Claire bonk it must cost the make-up department a small fortune. “Hey, we’ve got a big sea-battle coming up… maybe Jamie could keep his dressing gown on for this fuck?”
  • “Where did you find him? I must know, is he genuine?” – the look on Mr Willoughby’s face here was charming and funny.
  • I liked the closed circle of discovering that Claire had already investigated the murder she’d just committed.
  • Margaret tells Mr Willoughby: ‘You’re a rare soul’, which makes him smile. Be careful though, Wlloughby. You’re still not adept at decoding the Scottish accent. She might have just called you ‘an airsehole’.I hope Willoughby and Margaret are very happy together. In years to come I’m sure they’ll delight in telling their kids all about that time Daddy murdered their uncle.
  • I’m not sure about WIlloughby’s or Margaret’s arcs. Seems like it was all a bit too convenient. Ultimately, I don’t think either of them, separately or together, were handled particularly well.
  • When Margaret goes into full prophecy mode, I always burst out laughing.

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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

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

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

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Part 13: Claire’s going on holiday. Jamaica? Yeah, I kidnapped her

Wherein Jamie’s out to sea, even before he sets foot on a boat.

Sometimes mid-life crises hit husbands gently, with a force equivalent to a child throwing a Syrian dwarf hamster at your stomach. Maybe the husband will buy a second-hand leather jacket and start calling women ‘babe’, or join the gym only to a) go six times before giving it up, or b) die of a massive heart attack on the cross-trainer.

Sometimes mid-life crises hit a little harder – at approximately the force of a Labrador careening into your legs in a tight corridor because he thinks there’s a plate of sausages behind you. In cases like this the husband might splash out on a new sports car he can ill-afford, or start an affair with a woman from his office who will almost certainly be called Shelley.

And sometimes, just sometimes, mid-life crises hit with such prolific and destructive force that they make the Richter scale look like a tool for measuring farts. To help you gauge and visualise the impact, imagine a Shetland pony running into a nuclear reactor with fifty landmines strapped to its back.

Or forget the animals altogether and simply imagine Jamie Fraser: the man whose mid-life crisis downgrades most regular crises to the severity of a child stubbing their toe against a bouncy castle.

Jamie certainly knows how to make himself at home ‘over the hill’ by throwing caution to the wind: printing and slinging seditious pamphlets, living in a brothel, selling illicit booze, covering up murders. Still, Claire loves a bad boy, so most of that stuff, though borderline, is definitely excusable. What elevates Jamie’s mid-life crisis to the nuclear league and puts him on Claire’s shit-list quite possibly forever is his rather dubious decision not only to stick his love caber into the porridge pot of the woman who once tried to have the love of his life burned alive at the stake, but also to marry her. Marrying Captain Black Jack would’ve been less controversial.

Jamie proceeds to add insult to injury by falling back on a most unholy trilogy of flimsy justifications for marrying Laoghaire: “Oh, but I thought you were dead”; “Well, you’re the one who told me to be kind to the lass”; and “you left me”. Oh, Jamie, Jamie, Jamie. You’ve survived so much. Whippings, wars, duels, disease. Why would you choose to commit suicide now? Men have an awful habit of resorting to deflection, projection and scapegoatery when they should be retreating and scurrying with the urgency of Bonnie Prince Charlie excusing himself from a pub brawl.

Claire and Jamie’s argument over Laoghaire is raw, uncertain, vicious and illogical, which is to say that it’s absolutely pitch-perfect. Their fight contains a lot of shouting, panting, pulling, grabbing, hitting, pushing and kissing. It’s a battle that quickly transforms into a sex scene, something you don’t see that much of anymore in this #metoo age. Perhaps in recognition of the changed times in which we now live, Claire ends their little tussle in a dominant position, perched astride Jamie’s hips.

Just as they’re about to burn off all that rising tension with a well-timed angry fuck, they’re interrupted by Jenny, who enters stage left with a cold jug of water (it’s a case of jugus interruptus, you might say), the sort of treatment usually reserved for horny alley-cats wailing outside bed-room windows.

Most of Jamie and Claire’s stay at Lallybroch is awkward as hell. Jenny doesn’t trust anything that Claire says, or has ever said. It’s fair to say that Claire has an impossible task ahead of her if she wants to assauge Jenny’s feelings over her disappearance, absence and ‘resurrection’. How would you even start?

“Hi, Jenny. You know how you have no concept of conventional flight, the combustion engine, radio waves or even life outwith the confines of the land upon which you were born? Well I just wanted to tell you that I’m a time traveller, and we’ve got these things called televisions and space rockets and condoms, and I walked through some magical stones back to the future where I had your brother’s baby two hundred years after you were dead. See, I knew you would understand.”

‘You look well,’ Claire tells Jenny. Jenny’s response is frosty. Hell, my response was frosty, too. She looks well, Claire? WELL? She looks exactly the bloody same, Claire. At least they gave Jamie a pair of glasses to suggest the passage of time.

Jamie doesn’t have any smoother a time of it, ancestral home or no ancestral home. Both his sister and his brother-in-law blame him for leading young Ian astray, and are angry at him for lying to them about the lad’s whereabouts. I think it must be Jamie’s destiny forever to be thrown shade by a guy with a limp. Or maybe something else is going on here. Are deliberate parallels being drawn between Colum and Dougal, and Ian and Jamie? After all, Jamie is the heir apparent to Dougal’s fire, fury and passion, even if he’s never shared his vanity and moral flexibility.

The Lallybroch-centric episode is very, very funny, and Sam Heughan gets most of the best lines, which he delivers with impeccable comic timing. I’m thinking about the moment when Claire accuses Jamie of having fathered Laoghaire’s children, and he responds haughtily: “There are other redheaded men in Scotland, Claire.” Or when he’s being nursed by Claire after being peppered with buckshot by a vengeful Laoghaire, and he says to Claire, with understandable confusion: “Can you please explain how jabbing needles in my arse is going to help my arm?”

Divorced from his illegal income stream, and perhaps about to become divorced from Laoghaire, Jamie is in dire need of fresh income. He remembers the treasure box he discovered on Silkie Island when he was on the run from Ardsmuir prison, and takes Claire and young Ian with him to retrieve it. Almost as soon as poor, tragic, dutiful Ian swims out to the island he’s captured by pirates, or press-ganged by soldiers, bundled into a boat and whisked away.

If he though things were awkward at Lallybroch before, just wait until he has to explain to Ian’s mum and dad that he’s cast their son in a live-action adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’. Perhaps realising how awful this would be, Jamie decides instead to exploit his nautical connections to find out where Ian’s vessel is headed, and secure passage on a ship that’s going the same way.

Onboard their ship is a horseshoe that the sailors believe they all must touch at the start of their voyage to ensure good fortune. Jamie and Claire are living proof that some luck is so powerfully bad that no blessed artefact or amulet has the power to counteract it. I’m surprised it didn’t blow up when they rubbed it.

Because life doesn’t like to stop teasing and tormenting the cursed couple for more than a second, Fergus and his new wife-to-be, Marsali – daughter of the dreaded Laoghaire – have also insinuated themselves onboard.

Marsali definitely has her mother’s obdurate, obnoxious, semi-psychopathic, spiteful nature, which begs the question: what does the passionate, romance-soaked Fergus see in such a woman? I can only suppose that the fires of her fury, when channelled through her heart and, erm… various other organs, must make for an all-consuming and volcanic coupling that’s impossible to resist. I fear, though, that Fergus – cad though he is – may be the moth to Marsali’s flame (that was undoubtedly the genesis of Jamie’s attraction to Laoghaire, too).

In any case, it’s a mark of how good an actress Lauren Lyle is that she manages to conjure a plethora of bitchy facial expressions that would invite a five-knuckled caress from even the gentle fingers of a hunger-weakened Gandhi.

While Fergus may well be hurtling towards spiritual and sexual doom, it’s nevertheless nice that after all of the hardship he’s experienced or witnessed in his life – the loss, the separation, the rape, the battles, the fires – and despite his own sexually carnivorous nature, the thing that he clings to, the main lesson he’s learned from everything that’s happened to him and the people around him, is that love conquers all. Fergus cites Jamie and Claire’s love story as the inspiration for his own…

…I have absolutely no idea why.

The longer Jamie and Claire’s love saga goes on, the less inspirational and the more nightmarish it becomes. For every night of sweat-soaked passion they’ve shared, they’ve had to spend six weeks trying to break each other out of jail, and for every mini-break they’ve enjoyed they’ve had to spend twenty years apart raising children with other people. Still, filtered through the prism of youth, I suppose almost everything can start to seem romantic, even the song the rowdy sailors like to sing below decks about a woman leaping around with a lobster on her cunt, which is destined to become a top ten hit.

The sea is a cruel mistress. You could say that Jamie takes to it like a duck to water, but only if the duck you’re talking about is drunk, has no legs, only one wing and half a beak. Jamie spends most of his time chucking up his gruel, or complaining that he’s about to. Thank goodness good old Mr Willoughby is on hand to cure his sea-sickness by turning him into a human pin-cushion. An effective technique, but hardly a convenient or portable one.

It’s easy to see why life at sea might make Jamie feel a little delicate. A combination of the show’s noticeably bigger budget and the skill of its behind-the-scenes team really helps bring to life every creak, swell and sway of life on-board ship. You need your sea-legs just to watch it. The sea-bound segments are impressive and convincing, whether the ship’s being beaten by waves, or sitting dead in the water, a lonely boat perched on an unwavering sea of glass.

When the drinking water runs low and the wind ceases to blow, Willoughby’s called upon to treat a much greater malaise than Jamie’s occasional habit of hurling his breakfast overboard; a spiritual sickness; a supernatural sickness that’s spread across the entire ship, driving the men to attribute blame for their litany of misfortunes to Hayes, the poor wretch who may have forgotten to rub the lucky horseshoe at the start of the voyage. The men want to sacrifice him to the sea; drown their scapegoat deep within Davey Jones’ locker. It’s the sort of malevolent, ritualised behaviour that appears to be the default setting for powerless, baying mobs. I suppose when it seems like nothing can be done, killing someone sure seems like doing something.

Willoughby distracts the horde from their murderous intent by reading from his unfinished autobiography – a project he earlier revealed he’d started in order to make peace with his demons. Initially, his life’s work appears to comprise page upon page of prunus pornography, all apricot-tits and warm peach mounds, but Willoughby’s story quickly takes on a sad, dark shape that’s closer in tone to a suicide note than a love letter. Back in China as a younger man, Willoughby refused to give up his manhood and become a eunuch. For this cultural outrage he was banished, disgraced, and exiled. In a cruel twist of fate, he was made a eunuch after all by the palpable, almost solid disgust of his new host country’s native women.

Willoughby – or perhaps we should more accurately and respectfully call him Yi Tien Cho – thought that the best way to let go of his pain would be to write it all down, but it turns out that the best way to let it all go was to, well, let it all go. Literally. He drops the pages off the side of the boat, only for them to be picked up by the wind, signalling to the angry sailors that luck was back on their side.

All that talk of fruit must have made Claire and Jamie horny, because they went off to fuck on some guy ropes. Shortly afterwards, Claire gets kidnapped. See what I mean?? Still, Outlander has obviously learned the lessons of Moonlighting, Friends and Frasier: unite your star-crossed lovers at your peril. Finding ways to drive them apart is the key to a more satisfying and dynamic narrative, the only trouble being that if you separate your leads once too often it all begins to feel a little preposterous. Outlander may be on the cusp of this, but, for now, it works.

The second on-the-ocean instalment of this unofficial sea-faring trilogy is called Heaven and Earth, something that the characters all try to move in their efforts to rescue each other. Naturally, Jamie is furious at the captain of his ship for agreeing to Claire’s ‘transfer’ (slash kidnapping) to the Navy vessel. She may be there to help contain a typhoid outbreak, but she’s still there against her will. Jamie tries to overpower the captain with the sheer force of his fury, spearheading a shooty-knifey stand-off above decks. He fails, and ends up being slung below decks in a jail cell. Both heaven and earth remain in place.

Jamie, of course, is no stranger to confinement, and won’t let a little thing like being trapped in a tiny, grated box surrounded by wet rats and his own hideous vomit stop him from hatching a plan to take over the ship, Bruce Willis-style. It’s then up to Fergus to move heaven and earth to save Jamie from himself, teaching his mentor a long-overdue lesson in patience and humility in the process – not to mention saving his life.

Claire is trying to move heaven and earth to save a ship-load of sailors who’ve been struck down with typhoid. What a distressing sight. Hundreds of Englishmen huddled together on a boat, projectile vomiting, the whole place smelling of shit and rum. These are scenes not destined to be repeated until the advent of 18-30 booze cruises many hundreds of years hence. Curiously enough, those future cruises will almost certainly have on their passenger manifesto a Dutchman with a fondness for drinking pure alcohol until the point of death, and an English teenager styling himself as Mr Pound.

Claire’s modern approach to medicine is mumbo jumbo to this new gaggle of no-nonsense sailors of the 18th century. Not for the first time Outlander makes us snort and tut at the ignorance of our ancestors, only for a little voice at the back of our minds to go, ‘Pssssst, have you looked on-line recently? Have you spoken with your friends and kinsfolk? We’re pretty mental ourselves.’

The first time it happened was during Claire and Geillis’ witch-trial in season one, when our derision was tempered by the realisation that flat-earthers, creationists, and climate-change deniers all exist in the twenty-first century. This time, no sooner have we cast judgement upon the sailors for their ignorance of – and in some cases violent opposition to – Claire’s efforts to cure the crew, than we remember that the WHO has called the very modern anti-vax movement one of the most serious threats to global health in 2019. If Claire’s parents had been anti-vaxxers, she would’ve been dead ten minutes in to episode ten. Or else she would never have boarded the Navy ship, and all of the people on-board would’ve perished. Even the goats.

Claire also vows to move heaven and earth to save Jamie from the hangman’s noose she discovers is waiting for him in Jamaica. Tompkins – he of the mangled eye – was press-ganged into service aboard the ship, and once he recognised Jamie duly reported him to the captain of the Navy ship as a man wanted for murder and sedition. The captain is largely indifferent to Jamie’s crimes and is especially grateful to Claire for her help, but nonetheless stands to snag a juicy promotion if he turns Jamie in to the authorities.

If it looks too late for Jamie, it’s already too late for poor Mr Pound. What a pleasant, decorous young chap. I was sad to see him go as a character, and really enjoyed the dynamic he shared with Claire. Their scenes together were sweet and touching. I knew his fate was sealed the moment he made Claire his surrogate mother and taught her the fine art of posthumous nose-stitching.

It doesn’t bode well that when Claire plunged overboard the director made a visual connection with the be-shrouded Mr Pound’s final dip into the sea. Let’s hope Claire’s on-going voyage isn’t destined to be quite as vertical as Pound’s. Still, in a trio of episodes where scapegoats feature heavily, it’s nice to see actual goats indirectly helping one of our heroes to escape.

The moral of the story here: always be nice to drunk Dutchmen.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

Instead of belting Ian for his disobedience at Lallybroch, Jamie suggests a different punishment. What exactly are they making Ian do with that manure? Is he making patty-cakes? Cow-pat pancakes? It looks like the most disgusting cookery programme ever made. Gordon Ramsay’s McKitchen Shitemares.

How the hell have I learned how to spell Laoghaire, but still can’t spell diarheoa (sic) without consulting the spell-checker?

Let the English cunt stand up for herself.” It’s nice to see that Laoghaire’s still as charming as ever.

Kebbie-lebbie – I like that phrase. I’m going to use it as often as I can. Plus, ‘A Kebbie-Lebbie with Laoghaire’ sounds like it should be a TV show.

My partner agreed with me that Elias Pound looked like all three Hansen Brothers at the same time. But when Pound was dropped into the ocean, she didn’t agree that it was funny for me to start singing ‘Mmmm Plop.’

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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

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

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

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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