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

Part 12: Publish and be damned

Wherein Jamie and Claire’s reunion is interrupted by the usual broth of death and nonsense

We change a lot over the course of our lives.

The early 20s version of me wouldn’t recognise the late 30s version of me. Well, he would recognise him… he’d just think he was a terminal bore; an old sell-out; a mythical beast that’s half-man, half-box-set.

My twenties were a riot of burning bridges (metaphorically, not literally – I wasn’t quite that bad), broken promises, drunken debauchery, bizarre experimentation, lost jobs, failed relationships, panic attacks, doom, despair, suicidal ideation and abject misery. In short, they were fucking brilliant.

By contrast, my mid-to-late 30s have been something of a peaceful triumvirate of book reading, trips to the park and early nights. I’ve long since quit smoking, and I’m essentially tee-total. Some of that’s down to becoming a dad; some of it’s down to the steady venting of testosterone as I get ready to run the final half-lap to death. (I say run…)

And do you know what?

My two bonnie boys – Jamie

My thirties have been brilliant, too. Settling down, becoming a dad. Awesome. While I can’t deny that life occasionally makes me want to reach for the vodka and the anxiety meds, I wouldn’t change any of it. You grow into the different stages of your life. Your wants, needs, aims and body all change, and you change to accommodate them, most of the time without even realising it.

Of course it always helps to have a fair wind at your back. Luck’s a big part of life, quite possibly the biggest. For instance, if you happen to be a rebellious hero with a big mouth who’s born into a land-owning family in a Scotland that’s under English ‘occupation’, you’re probably not going to have an easy time of it. And that’s before you factor in the possibility of falling in love with a woman not fated to be born until at least a hundred years after your death.

Even still, time changes people. And no-one knows that better than Jamie and Claire.

When we first caught sight of 20-years-older Jamie at the end of the previous episode he appeared to have grown old gracefully: forsaken the fighting, warring, drinking, boiling passions and general tumult of youth in favour of a safe and steady life in a safe and steady profession. His days seemed to be spent patiently poring over paper and ink, a dinky wee pair of professorial spectacles perched upon his nose. No quarrels. No rebellions. No trouble. Just routine: dull, faithful routine. As one Jamie to another: welcome to the club, brother.

But Jamie Fraser hasn’t calmed down one iota. If anything he’s veered top speed into the stereotype of the male mid-life crisis. Even in the cosy, middle-class world of the Edinburgh print scene, he can’t seem to resist wedding himself to dirt and danger. Though he sports the look of some kindly Geppetto-style character, he’s a bad boy, through and through: a printer and distributor of seditious pamphlets; a booze smuggler in thrall to a corrupt customs officer; and to top it all off he’s living in a brothel. Jesus Christ, Fraser, all that’s missing is the Ferrari and the ear-ring.

One thing 20-years-older Jamie doesn’t look is… well, 20-years-older. ‘I don’t look like an old man?’ he asks Claire, once he’s picked himself up off the floor. Em, no. No, you don’t. In fact you literally don’t look a single day older. All that’s changed is that you’re now wearing glasses. And glasses don’t magically transform a 24 year-old’s face into a middle-aged man’s face. If only it did then Lois Lane wouldn’t have reason to feel quite so stupid around Superman and Clark Kent.

Claire doesn’t look any older, either, beyond the odd fleck of grey in her hair. This was something of a red rag to my partner’s bullish conceptions about the relationship between the passage of time and the advancement of female physiology (especially post-partum). Or as she put it, rather more expressively: ‘Twenty years and two pregnancies and her tits haven’t even moved a fucking centimetre!’

Quite.

That got me thinking. How important is Jamie and Claire’s physical attractiveness to the narrative and indeed the whole conceit of the show? I’m guessing ‘very’, else they wouldn’t have cast good-looking people like Sam and Caitriona, and they wouldn’t have shied away from showing the ravages of time upon their bodies as the years whizzed by. Are we that shallow? Is love itself that shallow? Do we only buy into Outlander’s romantic fantasy because the principal leads are both young and aesthetically pleasing? What would have happened if Claire had gone back in time to find Jamie a fat, wheezing lump of a man with a goutish limp, one eye missing and a huge scar down his cheek? We would’ve seen the true measure of the purity of Claire’s love, that’s for sure.

JAMIE: Claire! Claire, my love! After all of these years, lassie!

CLAIRE: (stares blankly at Jamie)

JAMIE: Claire? It’s me Sassenach, it’s your darling Jamie.

CLAIRE: (stares a little longer) Me no speaka de English mista.

JAMIE: Claire? CLAIRE?

CLAIRE: (already half-way down the street, shouting “TAXI!”)

It’s not just Claire who might run a mile. I’ve seen too many memes of a half-naked Sam Heughan being shared by Outlander’s legions of female fans (often with an accompanying caption like ‘YE CAN THATCH MA COTTAGE ANY TIME, LADDIE’) for the writers to have dared taking Jamie on the average Scotsman’s typical journey from adolescence into middle-age. Sex sells. And Sam Heughan’s a one-man sexual stock-exchange as far as his many admirers are concerned (check out the Facebook group Heughan’s Heughligans if you don’t believe me). It’s hard to imagine hearts-a-beating and hips-a-snaking on quite the same scale if they’d cast James Corden or Piers Morgan instead of Sam Heughan – although it would have made Jamie’s whipping a hell of a lot more fun to watch.

Claire and Jamie’s eventual and inevitable sexual reunion was incredibly powerful, saying and suggesting much more beyond the purely physical; beyond the twenty years of pent-up desire and longing that was begging for release from their quivering, love-sick bodies. The lovers carefully removed each other’s scarves with the delicate gratitude of two people loosening the ribbon on two decades’ worth of Christmas presents. There were darker undertones, too. The director lingered on their necks and scarves long enough to suggest a connection with the couple’s treasonous past, reminding us of just how easily the hangman’s noose might have slipped around their necks had things turned out differently. Given Jamie’s new vocation, there are plenty of opportunities for the noose to come swinging back into play.

As the scarves came off, the weight that Claire and Jamie had carried around their necks and upon their shoulders started to loosen, lessen and ease. In a neat turn, the pace and fluidity of their encounter is interrupted by Claire’s zipper, a note of awkwardness that adds a welcome touch of realism to their cinematic heavings. The zipper also reminds us of the very different times they hail from, and how their two worlds – although the gap between them is ever-present – can always be re-joined through flesh.

Jamie’s new status as the Tony McSoprano of Edinburgh appears to have corrupted both his surrogate son Fergus and his nephew Ian. Nevertheless, they seem to be quite enjoying their status as smugglers and men about town, even if Ian is a little wet behind the ears compared to his friend, the fabulous fornicating Frenchman. You’ve got to love Fergus’s winsome, woman-themed wisdom: Tell them they’re beautiful, buy them a drink, and repeat one and two until it works. It’s reassuring to see just how little alcohol-fuelled adolescence has changed in the last two hundred years.

It isn’t long before the dark fingers flexing at the edges of Jamie’s new life reach out to grasp Claire. A boorish exciseman comes to rifle through Jamie’s brothel HQ and instead of finding the room empty finds a frightened Claire. Assuming her to be a cheap harlot – and being something of a sexual psychopath – he decides to buy her silence by taking her body and her life.

I suppose the numerous incidents of rape and attempted rape in the show lend it an air of historical verisimilitude. Hell, given what we know about the behaviour of men in modern times, particularly in Hollywood and the high seats of power, it isn’t a habit we’ve grown out of as a species. That being said, I sometimes picture Diana Gaboldon sitting at her writing desk, stuck in a narrative rut, a pen clenched between her teeth, scratching her head and staring out the window, before letting her eyes fall on a framed piece of paper on her desk that simply reads ‘RAPE?’ After which she smiles, nods and starts scribbling away furiously.

Definitely scribbling. For some reason I have a hard time imagining Diana Gabaldon using a computer, a modern word processor, or even a type-writer. In my imagination, she always writes with a quill, and invariably wears a bonnet.

Claire fights back, as she always does. A scuffle ensues, at the climax of which the exciseman falls and smashes his skull against the hard stone floor, a knife implanted in his body to boot. Stubborn and ethical to a fault, Claire vows to keep him alive by any means necessary, even if it means her own arrest, and Jamie’s certain doom. That… makes sense? Claire seems incredibly haughty and bitchy in this episode, but then I guess if you’d been looking forward to reuniting with your lover across time, space and reality after twenty-years-apart, and he almost got you raped and killed in a brothel because of his criminal activity, you’d probably be a bit pissed off, too.

Anyway, the exciseman dies (Murtagh didn’t have to pop up to solve their problems with the business end of a dagger this time), and the now very suspicious customs officer Sir Percival sends another of his dodgy lieutenants to carry out additional surveillance on Jamie and his crew. This time it’s the turn of Harry Tompkins (played by Eastenders’ very own Tricky Dicky), who with his rasping voice, cloudy white eye, and slight hunch is only a single bolt of lightning away from loping down the street with a surgical saw shouting ‘BRAINS, BRAINS!’.

Tomkins scopes out the print-shop, and discovers Jamie’s sedition. Ian, who has turned the printing shop into his own private knocking shop for the purposes of losing his virginity, discovers Tomkins and tries to shoo him away. A tussle ensues, then a fire breaks out, which Ian tries to vanquish by bravely tap-dancing on top of it. The fruits of Jamie’s sedition and smuggling only make the fire burn hotter and fiercer.

Jamie has been living in a brothel, selling booze and lying to his family. Now it’s time for him to taste the fires of Hell, which burn away his livelihood and threaten to engulf his own flesh and blood. As Claire remarked of Jamie’s predicament earlier in the episode, ‘God has nothing to do with this.’ The wages of sin, after all, is death.

Jamie quickly proves himself fit for redemption. He may have been responsible for leading Ian to sin, but he’s also the man who risks his life to save him from Hell.

What’s going to burn next? 

A few final, disjointed thoughts

  • “What an awful name for a wee lass…” Jamie’s reaction to his child’s life in the future was very funny. Especially when he was introduced to the swingin’ sixties through the photo of Bree in a bikini.
  • I didn’t realise that the character of Yi Tien Cho had courted such controversy. I’ve never read the books, so I’ve no idea if the criticisms levelled against Diana G for her handling of the character are justified. I can say, though, that I enjoyed Yi Tien Cho/Mr Willoughby on screen, and hope he’s allowed to blossom into a deep and interesting secondary character.
  • I’ve scoured the internet trying to find the rude Gaelic phrase that sounds a little like a mispronunciation of Yi Tien Cho, but to no avail. Any help?
  • See, this is what I mean about Claire being a bad mum. Wouldn’t she have at least tried to take advantage of Jamie’s printing press to leave a note for Brianna somewhere in history to let her know she’d made it back to the past safely? You know, like Doc did for Marty at the end of Back to the Future 2?
  • I used to watch an Australian soap opera called Neighbours. One of the characters, Karl Kennedy, is a doctor. For reasons of plot (and keeping the cast manageable), he’s required to be a doctor of everything: GP, ophthalmologist, psychiatrist, brain-surgeon. I sometimes feel the same way about Claire. ‘Bizarre eighteenth century equipment to drill holes in people’s skulls and ancient herbs? No fucking problem, I’ve got this.’
  • Crème de Menth is a drink that’s beloved of posh old ladies, and men with £2000 designed spectacle frames and a tea-cup Chihuahua called Phillip. It’s a bizarre drink to risk being hanged over.
  • When the mentally-ill/seerish sister of Mr Campbell was chanting ‘Abandawe, Abandawe, Abandawe’ I was willing Claire to start singing ‘Oooooooo, oooooh ooooh ooooh ooooo, oooo, ah, ooo weem-a-way.’ Although that might have been a bit insensitive.

READ THE REST – Click below

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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

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