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

Part 5: The Ooh-La-Last Days of Sodom

Wherein Claire trots the globe, and the French King longs for the trots

Season two finds Claire and Jamie living a life of opulence and luxury in18th century Paris. Captain Randall is far behind them, at least geographically, but he’s still very much inside Jamie’s head. There’s no need to worry about the lack of a proper antagonist, though, because Claire and Jamie can’t seem to go anywhere without attracting the ire of at least one angry prick in a wig.

With that in mind, step forward the man who I presume is this season’s big bad (or Le Grande Mechant, if you please), The Comte St Germain. He’s arrogant, unscrupulous, petty, vengeful and hateful; in other words, a complete and total Comte. In the first four episodes alone he almost lets his avarice unleash an outbreak of smallpox on the unsuspecting Parisian populace; tries to poison Claire and her unborn baby; and is almost certainly the shadowy figure behind a street attack that leaves Murtagh unconscious, Claire shaken, and Mary Hawkins – Claire’s new friend – violently raped.

But somehow, strangely, even with all of that to his ‘credit’, the Comte still can’t hold a candle to Captain Black Jack Randall, one of the most unconscionably evil characters ever to have appeared on screen (with the possible exception of Janice from Friends).

My general impression of the second season so far is that it’s much funnier than the first. The presence of the young thief Fergus alone ramps up the chuckle quotient by around six hundred per cent (or should I say Claudel – which they agreed wisnae very manly). From laughsome lines like “You have beautiful breasts, madame” to “That’s ma snake, ye wee bastard!”, I’m pretty glad the pint-sized Parisian pick-pocket’s here to inspire so much mirth.

The ghastly aristocrats in their garish clothes, flouncing around the outlandish and ostentatious landscape of 18th century Paris, provide more than enough snickers on their own terms, but the contrast of their behaviour with the no-nonsense, almost austere wordly outlook of Clan Fraser multiplies the laughs ten-fold. Murtagh, in particular, is a man far out of time, despite still standing firmly in his own. There’s such a gulf between his taciturnity and gruff humbleness on the one hand, and the corrupt and foppish indulgence of the French upper-classes on the other that he might as well hail from hundreds of years in the past (or future, given how frequently Murtagh’s incredulity and horror seems to mirror our own).

If season one doesn’t exactly display the English at their best – and it’s probably fair to say that, with the exception of Claire, all of the English characters in the maiden season were either plotters, rotters, cowards, cuckolds, brigands, bell-ends, knaves or nincompoops – then the English can at least take some consolation from the fact that in season two it’s the turn of the French to be roasted. And, boy, what a roasting.

It’s almost as though the French heard the global audience saying to itself, “Wow. The English sure seem to be the most objectionable race on the entire planet,” and haughtily replied, “Huh! Hold my drink!”

Paris is awash with decadent dandies, randy rooters and potion-mixing miscreants. Would-be Kings hold their historic meetings in kinky cabaret rooms, and actual Kings take noisy, nasty shits in full view of their esteemed guests (or, as Murtagh more pleasingly puts it: “Only in France does a King need an audience to shite.”). Most of the French nobility appear to believe that rape and sexual assault are positively charming character quirks; minister of finance Duverney in particular proving that 18th Century France was in dire need of a #moi-aussi movement. After Duverney corners Claire and treats her like a cuttlefish at a budgie party, Jamie sends him toppling and splashing into the water. They later become friends, mostly for reasons of convenience, but what a strange bedrock indeed for a lasting friendship. Maybe they’ll all look back and laugh on that horrendous sexual assault in the years to come, possibly even as they’re escorting Duverney on a ship to America to take up his new position on the US Supreme Court.

Sex is everywhere so far this season. At one point I thought Carrie Bradshaw was going to start narrating. Murtagh romps with the maid; Bonnie Prince Charlie romps with Claire’s new sophisticated French friend, Louise; and Louise defies the crotch-based French stereotype by waxing her woo-woo, and offering the same treatment to Claire’s eclair. [On a side-note, I’ve never heard a lady’s bits being called a honey-pot before. That must be where the term ‘honey-trap’ comes from. One thing’s for sure: I’ll never look at Winnie the Pooh the same way again. DIRTY bear.] Elsewhere in Paris, bold female pioneers hold what looks very much like the world’s first Anne Summers’ party, cleaving dildos through the air like broadswords.

I suppose it makes sense that there’s so much carnality in the show. There probably wasn’t that much to do before the advent of television except rutting, reading and killing, and there can’t have been that many good books around.

If the show is funnier, flashier and brighter so far this season, then it’s also bleaker and darker, at least in terms of Jamie and Claire’s relationship, and the things they have to do to keep it alive. If season one was the honeymoon, then it’s clear that the honeymoon is now well and truly over. Claire and Jamie bicker and quarrel, rant and rage, doubtless wondering how it all ever came to this: so far from home; so far off the beaten-track of their lives. After all, falling in love is easy: it’s the next bit that’s hard.

The price of Jamie’s love for Claire is to be cast in the role of traitor to his country, and silent assassin to his country-men’s cause. On the surface, at least. Though the reason that Claire and Jamie seek to thwart the restoration of the Stuart blood-line is to save the denizens of Castle Leoch from slaughter (and Scotland from ruin), the mission weighs hell-of-a-heavy upon Jamie’s soul, going as it does against the grain of everything in which he’s ever believed.

Claire, too, is having something of a frustrating time. She’s bored. Unfulfilled. She craves purpose, and an outlet for her considerable intellect and imagination. She’s not happy slipping into the role of Real Housewife of Paris, sitting at home like her honey-pot-plucking friend, Louise, sewing doilies and talking about vol-au-vents (both of which are probably euphemisms for vaginas, anyway), while the men go out talking, drinking, thinking and fighting, with the emphasis on everything there except ‘thinking’. What a waste of a tenacious woman who was once – or who will one day be, if you want to get all time-travelly about it – a nurse in a twentieth-century combat zone.

To stave off her ennui she sets to work wowing Mother Hildegarde at the L’Hopital des Anges with her medical knowledge, quickly earning a spot (or a Bouton, if you like) in her volunteer force. Jamie expresses anger over this development, accusing Claire of being out indulging herself ‘with poultices and potions’. I don’t know how many spa-days Jamie’s been on, but very few of them involve tasting piss and watching people die, even through Groupon. Jamie might simply be expressing the prevailing patriarchal, nay misogynist attitudes of his time in relation to women and work, and perhaps that’s exactly what he’s doing, but I can’t help but feel that somewhere in his psyche there’s a lot of unexpressed anger about his being made to betray the Jacobite cause, not to mention his lingering PTSD.

In any case, the mission, their comfortable life-style, the cunning Comte and Jamie’s fraught mental state all seem to be conspiring to squeeze the tenderness and vitality out of Claire’s and Jamie’s relationship. Their maid, and Murtagh’s mistress, though, traces the entirety of the couple’s tension to just one element: not enough fucking.

Are we really so shallow and venal as a species that our greatest hardships and stresses can be soothed away and rubbed from existence by the simple recourse to rutting? As a Dad of two young boys, and the almost-husband of the buxom lady who helped me spawn them, I can confidently say: ‘Yes. Yes we are.’ Sex isn’t perhaps the be-all and end-all, but you certainly realise just how important it is once you’re prevented from doing it. In this Jamie’s case (me, your humble binge-guide) it’s because every time I even brush against my partner’s arm a child pops up to form a human barrier between us. At all other times we’re either too tired, or want to kill each other too much. In the other Jamie’s case, it’s because every time he becomes intimate with Claire, Black Jack Randall’s ugly mug protrudes through the cracks in his damaged psyche and stops him in his tracks.

Black Jack’s still alive! He’s still alive, dammit! I knew it, I’m sure I called it, but nonetheless, I still felt a frisson of excitement as the news was delivered by his younger brother, Alex, who is currently in the employ of none other than the Duke of Sandringham, another welcome villainous return. The baddies are back! Hooray! I can hate what they do while still loving that they do it, right? Right?

Black Jack’s survival presents Claire with a duo of horrific moral dilemmas. She comes to realise that her new friend Mary Hawkins is her husband Frank’s ancestor, and the girl fated to carry Black Jack’s baby. This means that in order to preserve the time-line she’s going to have to turn a blind-eye to the horrendous treatment the poor young girl will almost certainly receive at the hands of one of history’s most accomplished sadists. She also comes to realise that while Jamie got his mojo back immediately upon learning he’d been granted a second chance to end the life of his narcissistic nemesis, she’d have to frustrate his murderous resolve if Frank was ever to stand a chance of existing in the first place [and, you could argue, without Frank, she would never have been in Inverness to touch the stone to travel back in time to meet Jamie].

And so the trickery and double-dealing continues: following the money; trying to stay one step ahead of the Comte; trying to expose Bonnie Prince Charlie as a nugget to the potential investors in his rebellion; another uncomfortable dinner party, riven with adultery and murderous intent, and all the while the clock is ticking until Black Jack surely shows his face once again.

Of course, Captain Randall hasn’t just polluted Jamie’s love; he’s polluted the love in his own lineage. Back in McBlighty, in the premiere episode’s flash forward, Claire now can’t look at Frank’s face without seeing Black Jack’s dead-eyed sneer. How could Claire ever again let Frank touch her; have his face pressed against hers in the throes of passion; feel his hot breath on her neck, or look upon him with anything other than disgust, after what his ancestral face-sake put her through, both directly and indirectly?

It’s not fair that Frank should be punished for the sins of the father – Frank really is the victim here, at least as much of a victim as Claire was when she first pressed her hand against the stones – but on a human level it’s entirely understandable. It doesn’t take much to sour our perceptions. Sometimes we can take a dislike to someone because they share a mere name with someone who wronged us, never mind an entire body and face.

I hope, though, that the fist Frank raised in anger at Claire isn’t a foreshadowing of his eventual transformation into Black Jack’s spiritual successor. I don’t think there was anything deviant or devilish in Frank’s rage and frustration. I felt rather sorry for him, actually. When Claire disappeared – literally vanished into thin air – he was left broken and anguished, but for all the years of strain, sadness and pity he never once stopped clinging to the hope that his wife would one day return to him, and when she did he was willing to accept whatever story she sold him, even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it (in stark contrast to Jamie’s instant acceptance of her time-travelling tale).

I fear this whole sequence is intended to be the origin story of Frank Randall the villain: a Two-Face for his times. That maybe it wasn’t love that kept Frank close at heel to the site of Claire’s vanishing, but an obsession with the mysterious highlander thought to be connected to her disappearance: Jamie, in other words. Black Jack was already broken long before he encountered Jamie, but Jamie may very well form a bridge across the centuries, uniting Frank and Jonathan in hatred, anger and jealousy.

For now, Claire is with Frank, and in America to boot. She may not love him, but her alternative is to brave the attitudes of 1940s Britain to a divorced single-mother carrying another man’s child.

And, yes, I realise that Claire was pregnant at the end of season one, and is still pregnant in Paris in the episodes I’ve just watched, yet she isn’t in the flash-forward… well, she is, but it’s not possible that it could be the same pregnancy. Which means…

Well, it means something horrible is about to happen.

I hate being right sometimes.


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 5 – 7

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

On Holiday in the Past

From when I was a boy up until I was a teenager we used to go on family camping holidays to France. Not the awful kind, where you have to erect and sleep in your own tent that’s the same size and shape as a coffin, eat cold beans, and shit in a bush, but the plush kind: the ‘you’re not staying in a hotel but at least you’re not sleeping directly on the ground with insects crawling over your eyes’ kind of camping holiday.

We always booked into managed campsites and stayed in ready-made tents; none of that free-range, find-a-pitch caper for us. We never hired the caravans or mobile homes because a) my step-dad fancied himself as something of an outdoorsman, and b) we were a family unit of 4 kids and 2 adults, so staying in a caravan would’ve been pretty expensive. Never forgetting c) in actual fact, even if we’d been millionaires we still would’ve stayed in a tent, because my step-dad likes to give away money like Israel likes to give away land.

My step-dad would also risk everything to get his hands on free stuff, even if he had no real use for the free stuff once he got it. Perhaps more accurately, he would ask someone else to risk everything to get his hands on free stuff. We always drove to our campsites: covered the length of the UK, stopped off in Plymouth for the night, boarded a ferry the next morning, and continued down through the French countryside, past fields, forests and vineyards. My step-dad once ordered my older sister into a vineyard to steal grapes. She filled two great big bin-liners full of them as he watched from the car like a mob boss. She came back panting, anxious and etched with scrapes, only for a week or so later to have her sacrifice rendered meaningless when the half-squished, spoiled grapes were simply thrown in the bin.

The tents we stayed in on the campsites were large enough that you could comfortably stand up in them, maybe even do a few vigorous bunny hops without grazing your scalp. They were essentially tiny canvas cottages, with three separate bedroom compartments – each with a raised camp-bed – and a communal living area featuring a stove, a fridge, and table and chairs. Shower and toilet blocks were dotted all around the campsite, meaning that comfort – or something very loosely approximating it – was never far away. I say ‘loosely approximating’ because most of the available toilets were just big holes in the ground that you had to squat over and shit in like you were in Auchswitz or something. Thanks, the French.

We usually chose campsites that were close to the beach. This allowed us to treat continental Europe to our own unique version of trooping the colours: we’d stand in the sand and become walking, talking, biological British flags as our Scottish skins burned in the sun, turning from blue to white to deep red.

Unbeknownst to my mum – or so she says, anyway – one time we found ourselves on a nudist beach: a big sand-box filled with wrinkled, withered ball-bags, big wrecking-ball bosoms and sun-ripened gunts. They’re never sexy places, are they?

I was a young lad of five or so, at an age where the words ‘socks’ and ‘bums’ could make me laugh until I puked, so my mum was mightily impressed that I didn’t seem bothered by the explosion of nakedness around me. I scarcely seemed to notice it at all, even when I was standing at the ice-cream kiosk handing over my francs with a big French willy dangling at either side of my head like a pair of droopy ear-rings.

The realisation that there was a garden of flesh surrounding me seemed to slap me in the face all of a sudden and out of nowhere, although thankfully nothing literally slapped me in the face. I must’ve been like the cop working out who Kaiser Soze was at the end of The Usual Suspects.

Boobies!” I boomed out at the top of my little voice as my eyes jumped around the beach, “BOOBIES! BOOBIES EVERYWHERE!”

My mum said she had to clamp a hand across my mouth and carry me across the beach like a kidnap victim.

MMOOOMIIES” I shouted into the palm of her hand.

Speaking of kidnapping… another time we were all sitting on a beach munching chocolate-filled croissants when a little waif of a kid, all tan and sinew, crept over to us and muttered a few plaintive words in French.

What?” my Mum asked him. Without waiting for a response, she threw her hands out as if to shoo all of us back, even though we were sitting quietly in a circle and only moving our mouths. “Let him through, everyone, let him through, come on, son, come on, come over here and sit down.”

She beckoned him over with frantically flapping hands and then patted the sand next to her. He sat down, but slowly, uncertainly, reluctantly, like he wasn’t sure if there were snipers camped in the long grass. He looked around at us as if to say, ‘So you’re my new family now, huh? Jesus Christ…’

He would’ve been even more terrified had he known my mum’s reputation as an ever-so-slightly more benign version of the Child Snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She’s always had a thing for unofficially adopting children, writing the contracts with her eyes and signing them with her heart. A child only has to look at her, and within five seconds she’ll have said something like, ‘Poor wee guy. I’ll bet he wishes I was his mum.’

The wee French boy said something again. My mum picked up a croissant and shoved it in his hand. “Poor wee bugger’s starving, look at him, he’s famished. EAT IT SON,” she commanded. He stared at it for a second. She jabbed a finger from him to the croissant and back again. “YOU. EAT?”

He didn’t really have a choice, so he started to eat.

There, that’s good, isn’t it, son?” said my mum.

Like most people in the UK, my mum was sure that she could overcome any language barrier by loudly infantilising whomever she was talking to in pigeon-English, most of the time speaking to them as if they were a deaf pensioner. “Is that yummy? Yu-mmee? I… SAID… IS… THAT YU-MEEE, SON? (rubs tummy) Mmmmmmmm. YUMMY FOOD.”

The boy sat, taking tiny bites from the end of the croissant, never taking his eyes off of us for a second. A look of cowed reluctance settled over his face, suggestive of a naughty dog at the dinner table. Each time he swallowed, my mum’s face lit up like she’d just been told she was a grandmother.

She prompted us to give him more encouragement, which resulted in us giving him a big cheer whenever he ingested a particularly large piece of pastry. He welcomed the first cheer into his synapses like it was a gun-shot at close quarters, almost chucking the croissant into the sand with fright.

YOU JUST KEEP EATING, SON, THAT’S IT.”

A lady appeared behind my mum’s shoulder and said in English with a heavy French accent: ‘Em, excuse me.’

We looked up at her. She said something else in French to the boy who instantly scrambled to her side, a look of boundless relief and gratitude painted over his eyes. My mum scrutinised the French woman, demanding answers with her eyes.

He, eh,” said the French lady, “He just want to know ze time.”

We all laughed, but I could tell that the French boy was one step away from full-blown PTSD. My mum looked miffed. I imagined her as a Bond villain, angrily slamming her fist down on the control-room table. “Curses! One more minute and the boy would have been mine!”

It makes me very sad that I’ll never go on one of these holidays again – at least not with the same cast – but I’m pretty sure the French must be breathing a mighty, collective sigh of relief.

THE END.

CLARIFICATIONS

My parents enjoyed reading this article, but in talking with them about it and reminiscing about our holidays in general I discovered that I had mis-remembered some of the finer details. Some of this is probably down to the passage of time and how young I was when most of this happened, some of it is probably due to my writer’s brain deciding that my version of events made for a slightly better story, but in any case my parents (whose version isn’t necessarily any more reliable) offered these corrections:

  • We weren’t eating chocolate croissants on the beach. They were pastry things filled with custard.
  • We all tried to get the wee French boy to eat our pastries, not just my mum
  • At the nudist beach – when I had penises at either side of my head – I was waiting in line for chips, not ice-cream
  • I shouted ‘BARE NAKED LADIES EVERYWHERE!’ on the nudist beach, not ‘BOOBIES’.
  • We actually did stay in a caravan the first couple of times we went on holiday to France, but I must’ve been too young to remember

Where there was absolutely no disagreement, however, was on the subject of my step-dad being a tight bastard. Even my step-dad readily agreed.

Young Jamie: Portrait of a Serial Douchebag (Part 6)

What a tough child I was. Watching Jaws 2, and then going swimming. Fear came knocking, I answered, and I kicked its ass. Up yours, sharks! Kiss my armbands, you finned motherfuckers! Technically, though, I wasn’t really going swimming. I was going ‘swinging the baths’, whatever the fuck that means. From looking at the corresponding picture, it seems that ‘swinging the baths’ involves recreating ‘The Ascent of Man’ in a frightfully multi-coloured way. Apparently black is the least evolved colour, or so said my disgustingly racist little brain. But, hey, never mind that: softball! Fucking softball! Awesome! Em… is that softball? Really? Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s a Frenchman defending the Arc de Triomphe against a blue-haired caveman on a very sunny day using only a giant spoon… which DID happen on one of our family holidays… Anyway, through analysing my pictures it‘s clear that watching Jaws 2 caused rigor mortis, and watching Doctor Who caused me to transform into a wooden chair, which in turn sat upon an even less realistic chair.

What a tough child I was. Watching Jaws 2, and then going swimming. Fear came knocking, I answered, and I kicked its ass. Up yours, sharks! Kiss my armbands, you finned motherfuckers! Technically, though, I wasn’t really going swimming. I was going ‘swinging the baths’, whatever the fuck that means. From looking at the corresponding picture, it seems that ‘swinging the baths’ involves recreating ‘The Ascent of Man’ in a frightfully multi-coloured way. Apparently black is the least evolved colour, or so said my disgustingly racist little brain. But, hey, never mind that: softball! Fucking softball! Awesome! Em… is that softball? Really? Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s a Frenchman defending the Arc de Triomphe against a blue-haired caveman on a very sunny day using only a giant spoon… which DID happen on one of our family holidays… Anyway, through analysing my pictures it‘s clear that watching Jaws 2 caused rigor mortis, and watching Doctor Who caused me to transform into a wooden chair, and then sit my chairy ass upon an even less realistic chair.

 

Illustrated diary entries from my Primary 2 school jotters.