Tag Archives: Fergus

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 6 – 7

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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.

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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

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

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

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Part 6: Sometimes… they come back

Wherein of course he comes back.

Episode seven brings to a close the first phase of the Fraser’s failed time-travel experiment, a project I’m content to call ‘Cullodegeddon’. Despite Claire’s and Jamie’s best and most unscrupulous efforts, history is still drawing them inexorably towards the doomed battle. We know how this story ends, not just because history demands that it ends this way, but because we’ve already seen a distraught and defeated Claire lament her fate – and all their fates – in post-disappearance Inverness.

Now, however, having failed to stop the Jacobite rebellion by cutting off its funding, Claire and Jamie intend to defeat the curse of Culloden by winning the bloody thing – or at least trying their damnedest.

I’m watching the show along with my partner now, having caught up with her at the fifth episode of this season. Long-term relationships are amazing things, aren’t they? A good union never loses the capacity to surprise you. For instance, after all these years of near Olympic-level arguing, this week Outlander allowed us to add ‘the mechanics of time travel’ to the long list of things we’ve almost killed each other over.

“Don’t they realise that time is a closed loop and any effort to change the future is essentially futile?” I asked, though perhaps not as eloquently as I’m phrasing it now.

“Are you stupid?” raged my partner. “The future – i.e. 1940s Inverness – is already in Claire’s past, so whatever they do in their current present can’t change it, although that’s not to say that they won’t create an entirely different future.”

“You mean an alternate time-line, like in Back to the Future 2 when Biff stole the Almanac as an old man and gave it to his younger self in 1955, who used it to get super rich and transform himself into a somehow slightly-less unpalatable version of Donald Trump?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Preposterous.”

“Is not!”

“Is!”

“Is not!”

“Star Trek rules apply.”

“DO NOT!”

“DO TOO!”

“DON’T!”

“DO!”

“YOU’RE JUST LIKE YOUR MOTHER!”

“…YOU BLOODY WELL TAKE THAT BACK!”

Ronald D Moore

Although Outlander is based upon the books of Diana Gabaldon, conversations like this one remind me that sci-fi supremo Ronald D Moore is the man in the captain’s chair. Having cut his teeth on Star Treks The Next Generation and Deep Space 9, and the modern-day reboot of Battlestar Galactica, he’s the perfect choice to helm a show as otherworldly and ceaselessly peripatetic as Outlander.

Ron’s resume speaks for itself. He’s spent a career exploring the ins and outs of time travel; juggling large casts; telling grounded stories in fantastical settings; chronicling the sagas of weary protagonists who just want to go home (or find a new home), and pinging, plucking and unpicking the intricately inter-woven web of science and spirituality. He’s dealt with the perils of power and command, the interlocking of politics and religiosity, factional in-fighting, uprisings, rebellions, stretched loyalties, and infinitely more shades of grey than fifty.

Deep Space 9

Tonally, Outlander shares Deep Space Nine’s sense of humour, its belief in the strength and sanctity of the family unit (especially those families we construct from the friends and misfits around us) and a cautious optimism about the future. With Battlestar Galactica, it shares a grim and weary aura of danger and foreboding, a nihilistic streak a mile wide, and a sense that one must surrender to the journey, the chase, the pilgrimage, even if the destination isn’t always known (and sometimes especially when it is). With both shows it shares a sense of paranoia. Whom can we trust? Are the people around us who they say they are? Are we who we say we are? And, most strikingly, it shares a sense of prophecy and Godhood.

(Plus, is it just me who thinks of Klingons every time somebody says Lady Broch Tuarach? I keep expecting Claire to violently head-butt everyone to whom she’s introduced.)

In Deep Space Nine, Captain Benjamin Sisko was occasionally forced to lean into his (unasked for and unwanted) role as prophet/Emissary of the Bajoran people. He’d don the spiritual guise for utilitarian reasons or to dodge danger, and only when he felt there was no other option open to him. In a similar fashion, Claire occasionally throws on the invisible outer-wear of the white witch, mostly to save her life or the lives of those around her, but sometimes just to put the shits up someone for a laugh.

The scene in which the King of France compels Claire to embrace her role as La Dame Blanche and preside over the fates of diminutive dispenser Monsieur Raymond and wig-wearing bad-boy the Comte (or Diet Randall, as I like to call him) is tense and thrilling to watch. Catriona does sterling work here, in what comes over like a successful audition for Game of Thrones (hey, they’re casting the prequel soon: you never know).

The King wants Claire to use her witchy powers to divine whether or not the two gentlemen have been dabbling in outlawed black magic, with the guilty party, or parties, doomed to be dragged off by the resident executioner, who is literally standing next to them. I have absolutely no doubt that ITV will turn this into a game show at some point after Brexit.

This is a great test of Claire’s moral character, and it’s fitting that, despite both her occasional impulsivity and entirely warranted hatred of the Comte, she comes up with a plan intended to save all of their lives. Her plan is to make both men sick with a doctored drink, hoping to prove their essential purity and thus innocence, and at the same time satisfy the King’s love of theatrics.

Unfortunately, Claire yet again finds herself deceived by a mystical apothecary with whom she’s struck up a friendship. Monsieur Raymond sneaks some fatal poison into the Comte’s drink (beautiful touch and brilliant call-back with the whole necklace thing there, I’ve got to say) and it’s bye-bye for this season’s big bad. For any of you who do watch Game of Thrones, this won’t be the first time you’ve witnessed a man of noble birth choking to death on a drink that’s been poisoned by an angry little guy.

Sorry, Comte, my fiendish friend. You had to go. You were getting too close to the truth of Jamie’s highway-man high-jinks, and sooner or later – after losing most if not all of your money to yet another small-pox scandal – you were bound to snap and kill the Frasers, and we couldn’t have that. Plus, there’s only room for one irredeemable rogue in this show.

That’s right.

Black Jack’s back, baby.

The last time Claire and Jamie encountered Captain Randall was in a dark, dingy prison cell. This time around they meet him in the vast, immaculately-kept gardens of Versaille, surrounded by opulent explosions of bloom and colour under an endless blue sky. The contrast couldn’t be any starker. Black Jack is here both to convince his old pal the Duke of Sandringham to go easy on his brother (whom I was amazed to discover wasn’t Tobias Menzies’ actual, real-life brother) and to fulfil his destiny as impregnator of Mary Hawkins (though he doesn’t know it yet and, mercifully, neither does she, the poor lamb).

It’s always nice to see the Duke of Sandringham, a sort of Boris Johnson for the 18th Century. On the surface he’s a foppish, bumbling buffoon, full of praise, puffery and pointed remarks, an ideal choice to guest present Have I Got News For You, but there… just below the surface, just behind the mask, stands a cold and calculating figure, more ruthless and cunning than those who dismiss him with a snarky chuckle give him proper credit for. It’s also nice to see Captain Randall, if only because his presence means a whole bag of spanners in the works.

Jamie can’t kill him. Not yet. Not out in the open, in any case, as it’s a capital offence to draw your weapon in the presence of the King (something that probably applies in a euphemistic sense, too). It’s also an offence to duel someone to the death, but that’s exactly the gauntlet that Jamie throws down to Black Jack. He accepts, but Claire certainly doesn’t.

I don’t know why Jamie doesn’t get this basic principle: keeping Black Jack alive long enough to sire a child with Mary Hawkins isn’t just about showing deference to Frank. It’s about preserving the time-line so that Claire will be in Inverness to touch the standing stones of Craigh na Dun in the first place. Quite simply, if there’s no Frank, then there’s no Claire and Jamie.

“For Christ’s sake, Jamie Andrew, Claire has already touched the stones, so the decision to save Frank isn’t predicated upon any regard for their own future or present as a…”

“ARE YOU STILL GOING ON ABOUT THIS?”

“I’LL GO ON ABOUT IT UNTIL IT SINKS IN!”

“WHY DON’T YOU PULL YOUR HAIR OUT OF THE PLUGHOLES?”

“WHY DON’T YOU PUT THE BUTTER BACK IN THE FRIDGE, YOU WASTEFUL IMBECILE?”

“I WAS LYING WHEN I SAID I LIKED THAT DRESS!!”

Just when you think that Black Jack Randall has scraped the very bottom of the barrel, he turns up with the drill machine from some 1960s sci-fi movie, punctures the bottom of the barrel and then proceeds to tunnel his way into the molten core of the earth, through to the other side of the planet, and on, out into the infinite void of space, drilling through suns and planets by the million-load on his merciless voyage through a suddenly helpless universe. Yes, that’s right. This run of episodes reveals that Black Jack has a predilection for raping children.

Tobias Menzies must have opened his scripts for this run of episodes and said, ‘Oh thank you VERY much. What are you going to have me doing in next week’s script? Raping an entire family and then forcing their children to execute the family dog? And then raping it, too?’

How cruel of Outlander to introduce a quirky, cheeky, winsome little character like Fergus, an adorable slice of comic relief, and then within the space of four episodes subject him to life-long psycho-sexual trauma. What is this, Eastenders? A Mike Leigh film?

In any case, Fergus could never be as unlucky as our time-crossed lovers. The pairings of Romeo and Juliet, Heloise and Abelard, and Laurel and Hardy combined have got nothing on Claire and Jamie in the disaster-stakes. Rape, murder, peril, pursuit, miscarriage, death, loss, and that’s only within the first fragile year of their union.

I suppose, though, that a life lived without incident is a privilege that’s always been extended to the richer and more powerful among us, whatever the era. The heartache and misery at the core of Jamie’s and Claire’s relationship is perhaps something of a daily occurrence for people in poverty the world over, even now in 2018. Outlander, then, is at root a story about what happens when two relatively privileged people – one a well-to-do lady of good breeding, the other an estate-owning Lord – are forced through cruel circumstance to live the lives of fugitives, peasants and vagabonds.

To be fair, the bulk of their misfortunes spring directly from the evil agency of Black Jack Randall, whose rape of young Fergus in this clutch of episodes leads Jamie to break his vow to Claire, duel with Black Jack (he stabs him in the cock! What hope for Frank now?), and land himself in prison. And, of course, Black Jack’s behaviour indirectly brings about the loss of the couple’s unborn child.

Whatever your station in life, losing a baby is among the most wretched and harrowing things you can experience as a human being, magnified a million-fold for the mother who’s carried that incipient life in her belly: felt it wriggle and tickle and grow. If Sam Heughan deserved plaudits for his brave and visceral performance in the previous year’s ‘To Ransom a Man’s Soul’ then Caitriona Balfe deserves equal credit here for her unflinching, haunting, honest and heart-breaking evocation of a woman locked in the grief, anguish and turmoil of miscarriage. I welled up when Claire was cradling her still-born child. And, irreligious though I am, Mother Hildegarde’s defiance of protocol to baptise Claire’s baby so the little one could have a proper burial, was incredibly touching. The aftermath: her discovery of Jamie’s real reasons for breaking his vow, how she deals with Fergus’s guilt and shame, and how she expresses the full gamut of her feelings to Jamie, including her hatred, is all deliciously (if uncomfortably) rich, and earnest, and raw.

Though the ordeal clearly destroyed pieces of Claire’s soul, some of which might never grow back, she’s too strong a woman to be felled by even this most unspeakable of tragedies. She allows herself to submit to the King’s sexual advances in order to secure Jamie’s freedom from the Bastille. The King’s performance might very well be what we Scots would term ‘two pumps and a squirt’, but it’s a horrible liberty for any man to take, regardless of how big his wig or his wallet is. I think, though, that after losing Faith (they probably shouldn’t call their next kid ‘Hope’), Claire was numb to the King’s fumbles. Her body was a husk, an empty vessel. What more damage could one lousy little prick possibly inflict on the site of such sorrow and horror?

Kudos for the ‘lie back and think of England’ line.

And so it’s farewell France, toodle-pip Paris, au revoir you randy raconteurs and rapacious rapists, but dinnae fash, cause we’re awa’ back tay the faitherland, ken? Back to Bonnie Scotland and its limping lairds, sleekit soldiers and bekilted cu… cu… stodians… of… honour. Alliteration can sure be dangerous sometimes.

I shall miss the pomp and ceremony of the French court, and the many flouncing ponces of Paris. I’ll miss how all the tough guys talk like Niles Crane from Frasier. I’ll miss seeing Claire dressed like a cross between Mary Poppins and Missy from Doctor Who, with big, poofed out dresses that look like they were designed to smuggle dwarves across enemy lines. And I’ll miss Jamie’s trademark Wee Wullie Winkie dressing gown.

Look out, heelands, here we come.

A few final disjointed thoughts:

  • I think the Duke of Sandringham speaks for us all when he sums him up Bonnie Prince Charlie thusly: “He’s an utter arse.” Also, I’ve finally worked out who BPC sounds like: the aliens from Galaxy Quest.
  • I really enjoyed how Murtagh responded to learning the full truth of Claire’s origins: by punching Jamie in the face. Not because he didn’t believe the story, because he did, but because Jamie hadn’t trusted him or loved him enough to be honest with him from the start. How classically masculine. No festering grudges, no enduring rancour, just THWACK. Now, let’s go get breakfast.
  • Future-child, eh? Interesting.

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

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