Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 3, Eps 1 – 3

Posted on January 4, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Part 10: Let me be dead frank with you

Wherein everything everybody does to forget the past only makes things worse

It would perhaps be putting it a smidgeon too mildly to say that Jamie and Claire are a thoroughly unlucky couple. In the tragedy stakes they’re Shakespearian, Sophoclesian, and Soap-opera-vakian all rolled into one. But at least the valleys of their many agonies and sadnesses occasionally find themselves dwarfed by vast peaks of pleasure and purity. There is balance.

Rupert was a thoroughly unlucky man. He lived a life of drunken, violent fecklessness, barely rising above the ranks of toiling buffoon, surrounded wherever he went by death and drudgery. But at least he got to experience love and loyalty through his friendship with Angus, and at least in his final moments he was able to comport himself with bravery and dignity. There is balance.

Frank was a thoroughly unlucky man. He returned from war to be reunited with a woman who had become a stranger to him, only to lose her for another three years, and then have her return a stranger once more, but this time openly hostile to him, and carrying the child of a 200 year-old Scotsman in her belly. But at least he got to be trapped in a loveless marriage for twenty years while raising his wife’s lover’s child, and then get hit by a car and ki…

Oh.

Oh dear.

OK, Frank, you win, son. Despite Rupert’s hastily extracted eye, Jamie’s many lashings and jail-cell abuses, and Claire’s harrowing miscarriage, in the pity-and-misery stakes, Frank is still head and shoulders above them (with those head and shoulders being dismembered, placed into a rocket and fired towards the outer reaches of the galaxy through the unforgiving bleakness of space).

Identity isn’t just important: it’s vital. Its loss or lack can have catastrophic consequences: on a macro scale, it can lead a nation or a band of rebels to war; on a micro scale, it can erode a person’s sense of self to the point where they no longer know who, and why, they are. When Frank allowed Claire to substitute his Frankness (or Frank-nicity, or Frank-naciousness, or whatever invented descriptor you feel most comfortable using) for Not-Jamie-ness, he allowed the void inside of himself to be filled with anger, grief and resentment. He was Not-Jamie. That was his identity. Second-best to a dead man.

There were reminders of Jamie everywhere Frank and Claire looked, and everywhere that they didn’t look, too. Poor Frank was cursed to suffer frequent public assaults on his self-esteem, the first – and possibly worst – of these coming when the mid-wife set eyes on the newly-born Brianna and asked, “How’d she get the red hair?”

Even a seemingly innocuous article from a Boston newspaper managed to smuggle barbed commentary about Frank and Claire’s doomed relationship into their kitchen, and from there straight into Frank’s face. The article, about Ireland declaring itself an independent republic, free from British rule, is obviously intended to draw parallels with the concurrent situation in post-Culloden Scotland, but it’s also a very clear manifestation of Claire’s desire to be free from Frank’s rule.

While Claire’s self-interest and guilt-soaked sense of obligation won’t allow her to consider severing things with Frank – not at that point, anyway – she manages to find less overt, though no less insulting, ways to create distance between them. For instance, while her desire to become a US citizen is partly motivated by pragmatic concerns, it’s also a sure-fire way to cut ties to the England she knows is indivisible with Frank. England: his England.

It’s telling that the things Claire admires most about America – its youth, its eagerness, its passion, the way it’s always looking towards the future – are also the things she admires most about Jamie. Frank, by contrast, embodies in his person and outlook the forces of tradition and conservatism; of staid ceremony and hush-voiced acceptance of one’s station in life.

That difference is quite aptly demonstrated when we’re introduced to Frank’s boss at the university, who is, among other things, an arrogant, sexist bastard, of the type I’m sure was fairly typical during that era. He’s seen here balking at the idea of women being the equal of men in the intelligence and aptitude stakes, which instantly marks him out as a thin-domed dum-dum, though he’ll probably go to his grave unaware of his own shortcomings both as a man and a human being.

Although Frank does say something to counter the worst excesses of his employer’s misogynistic pronouncements, it’s a very soft and carefully measured something, more placatory in spirit than gallant. Frank effectively forces Claire to compromise and bite her tongue in the interests of maintaining the status quo. We, the audience, are left thinking to ourselves, ‘If Jamie was here, that guy would be hanging out the window with a mortar board shoved up his arse sideways.’ In many ways, Claire was freer to be who she was, and who she wanted to be, in 18^th Century Scotland, than she is here in 20^th Century America.

Later on, we meet one of Claire’s lecturers, yet another scoffing fuckwit of a man. The misogyny he displays – and its bunk-mate, racism – is, like that practised by Frank’s boss, of the sleekit, withering and wry variety, springing more from a sense of dusty entitlement than from any feeling of raw hatred, which somehow makes it much, much worse. I guess it’s because a man’s hatred might be cured, but a man’s sense of superiority over those he considers his inferiors probably can’t be. ‘A woman and a negro,’ he remarks flatly. ‘How very modern of us’. Universities don’t always attract the very best and brightest of us. Sometimes they only serve to amplify or institutionalise society’s existing divisions, or create whole new ones, breathing life into the very worst breed of entitled, conceited little wankstains.

Claire and Frank attempt to return a physical dimension to their relationship, but Jamie’s ghost haunts every corner of their lives. When Claire whispers to Frank, ‘I miss my husband,’ we know whose touch it is she really mourns. This isn’t an earnest display of affection to Frank, but a hushed apology to Jamie.

Claire and Frank embrace before the open fire, the light from the flickering flames dancing over their bodies, but there’s no heat there; no passion. Their clothes remain on. It’s a distorted mirror-image of many such scenes she’s shared with Jamie in the happy past. We know her eyes are closed because she’s imagining that past while she’s with Frank. And Frank knows it, too.

[Back in the past, Jamie has an encounter in a cave with Lallybroch’s housekeeper. He can’t look her in the eyes either; his eyes are nothing more than vessels for tears. It seems that everywhere Jamie and Claire go in these episodes they’re tormented by memories and visions of each other.]

Claire never asked for any of the things that happened to her following that fateful honeymoon in Inverness (it’s hard to anticipate a rock that hurtles you through time). She was as much a victim of those unusual circumstances as Frank. Furthermore, out of the two of them, it was Frank who displayed the most agency by fighting to keep them together, a move that arguably invited twenty years of pain and despair. He was in many ways the architect of his own destruction. Despite all that, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for Claire – especially when she seems genuinely hurt by the idea that Frank might wish to seek out alternative sources of sex and affection after fifteen years of being cuckolded by a dead guy.

The worst thing about bearing witness to Claire and Frank’s many arguments about their loveless marriage is Claire’s voice, which tends to become more and more of an aural abomination the more upset she gets. It’s like nails down a chalk-board, expect your brain is the chalk-board, and the nails are actually samurai swords. The second worst thing about their contretemps is Claire’s face, which threatens to rip itself apart while it tries to convey seemingly every possible emotion at once. I half-expected her face to start twitching, and then slide and fold open like Arnie’s mask in Total Recall, with cries of ‘Two weeks, two weeks’ filling the air.

“I did love you,” Claire’s now mercifully steady face tells Frank’s corpse in the morgue. “Very much. You were my first love.”

How very hollow and perfunctory.

Bye, Frank.

And a big bye-bye, too, to Frank’s famous Randall namesake and great-great-great-grand-uncle (or whatever he was) – culled at Culloden just as fate intended. Black Jack gets a shorter, but somehow more resonant and emotional, send-off than Frank, which is odd considering that Black Jack is a murderous rapist. Christ, this show really fucking hates Frank.

As Culloden begins, the landscape is pregnant with sorrow; dark and grimy and dimly lit, even the daytime scenes. It remains so right up until Black Jack and Jamie lock eyes across the battlefield, at which moment the screen erupts in fire and colour. This is their destiny, the culmination of all the strange, dark feelings that have passed between these two men for a long many years. Theirs is a grudge-match, but their battle also carries a macabre and violent echo of romance. They repulse each other, each is set on the other’s destruction, and yet in some warped and wispy way they complete each other, like Joker and Batman.

There’s something quite tender and sweet about Black Jack limping alongside Jamie, and dying in his arms. Certainly there’s no trace of glee or hatred in Jamie’s eyes. On the dark and silent battlefield of Culloden, strewn with the twisted, snow-covered bodies of untold thousands, Captain Randall and Jamie lie together as they once did in a prison cell long, long ago. Both of them are at peace: one dead, the other ready to die.

But not quite.

Jamie has miles and miles to go before he sleeps.

Jamie’s decision not to kill John Grey, the young English scout who snuck up on his camp prior to the battle of Prestonpans, turns out to have been a very, very good one; not only morally sound, but literally life-saving. When a band of redcoats apprehend Jamie and a squad of other low-laying Jacobites, poor old Rupert included, Jamie’s the only one of them to miss an appointment with the firing squad, on account of the officer in charge being John Grey’s brother. The Grey family owes ‘Red’ Jamie a debt, and it’s repaid through the act of letting Jamie run for the hills, instead of turning him into a human collinder.

When next we meet Jamie he’s a fugitive living the life of a rural outlaw in a cave near Lallybroch; a man fading into song and legend even as the redcoats track and hunt him. Like Frank, Jamie is a man without identity, but where Frank surrendered his, Jamie’s has been taken. Everything has been taken from Jamie: he’s no longer a husband or a father; he can’t be a brother or an uncle or a Laird as long as he’s a wanted man, which he will be in perpetuity; he’s not a soldier, or a general, or a loyal subject, or even a rebel. He’s the Dunbonnet – nothing more – a walking myth that’s half-Robin Hood, half-Oliver Queen (“Sheriff of Nottingham, you have failed this city”); another in a long line of identities that have been foisted upon him by external forces.

Ultimately, life on the lam is too much of a hardship on the people he loves at Lallybroch, who will never be left alone by the redcoats as long as he walks free. So Jamie arranges for his sister to ‘turn him in’ to the authorities, freeing them from oppression and scrutiny, and sending him to prison for six years.

During that time, Jamie asserted himself as the prison’s top dog, which is hardly surprising given his ferocious spirit. It was interesting to see him through the eyes of other characters, far from the pull of Claire’s orbit. As Jamie growled his way around the prison, hooded in darkness and fixing the guards and warden alike with a piercing stare, I could understand why people feared him.

The Grey connection again proves handy. The mouthy little teen whose life he once saved, and who indirectly saved his in return, is now his warden. “Thank you for coming,” he says to Jamie, as Jamie is huckled into his private room in chains, a fine example of the English gentry’s fondness for politeness whatever the situation.

Their burgeoning friendship – characterised by dinner, drams, fireside chats and games of chess – is incredibly sweet, even if at one point John’s attentions led me to shout, ‘Oh, not another fucking rape. Give Jamie a break.’ Thankfully, John has developed into a fine and noble young man, one who clearly loves and admires Jamie too much to subject him to ill-treatment or force him to do something against his will.

I loved this exchange in particular. Jamie has just described John as having been ‘a worthy opponent.’

“If you found a 16 year-old shitting himself with fear a worthy opponent, Mr Fraser, it is little wonder the Highland army was defeated.”

“A 16 year old boy who disnae shit himself with a knife held to his throat has either no bowels or no brains. Ye wouldnae speak to save yer own life, but ye would to save the honour of a lady. I admire that.”

And so, Jamie’s historic good nature and John’s benevolence ends up saving Murtagh from a potentially fatal dose of the sniffles, and puts a post-prison Jamie in the service of an artistocratic family instead of on a galley-ship to America.

Jamie appears to have spent a long many years hopping between prisons of varying degrees of harshness. Claire has spent the same length of time in the prison of a loveless marriage. How long now before they both break free – through hurt, through time – and once again find solace in each other’s arms?

I’ve got a feeling I’ll find out very soon.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

Unless Claire and Jamie encounter Uncle Tex Randall when they head off to America in season four (“Yee haw, boy, yoo shoo got a purdy mouth, an ah aint had me a stiff Scotch since fo-eva, so git yo Highland heiny ova here!”) I think that’s probably the last we’ve seen of Tobias Menzies – barring flashbacks.
Bonnie Prince Charlie looks horrified that war could prove to be so nasty. What were you expecting, you wig-wearing dandy? A big tickle fight? The two biggest guys meeting in the middle of the battlefield to settle it all with an arm wrestle? A black-tie reception and drinks afterward?
I loved Jamie and Murtagh’s little moment of levity on the battlefield, where the two friends bonded over battering a man to death with a clod of earth. It’s the little moments you treasure, isn’t it?
Jamie may be skilled at a great many things, but disguise isn’t one of them. You can’t really hide your trademark red hair with a hat when your hair is long and you wear it down. With a green hat, to boot, which only serves to accentuate the red hair. In many ways, he should have just cut it.
The sequence where Jamie had to hide from the Redcoats inside Lallybroch, with his sister’s baby in his arms, was real edge-of-the-seat stuff.
Fergus has lost his adorable, Lord of the Rings vibe. He’s awkward and lanky now. He reminds me of Patrice from The Inbetweeners – ‘I… had a nice tug, em, sinking about your muzzer.’
I don’t know what was more painful: watching a suddenly 85-year-old Fergus having his hand chopped off by a self-hating Scottish redcoat, or enduring the acting skills of the aforementioned gentleman. Woof. He made panto look like Pinter.
In episode two, Jamie is grimy, hairy, doesn’t speak much, and shoots things with his bow and arrow – if he isn’t quite Robin Hood or Oliver Queen, then he’s definitely Daryl from The Walking Dead. That’s not the sole similarity with AMC’s flag-ship zombie show. Fergus even fires a gun and attracts a herd of walkers… I mean redcoats (wankers, I guess you could say). And, as happens so often in The Walking Dead, Fergus gets his hand chopped off, something that happened to innumerable freshly-bitten characters on the TV show, and Rick Grimes himself in the original comic.
I liked how Jamie, as part of a primitive early-release program, was sent to decipher cryptic messages from the guy who used to run towards the camera at the start of every Monty Python episode – a madman havering about gold in English, Gaelic and French.

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 2, Eps 11 – 12

Posted on December 8, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

Part 7: Death Becomes Them

Wherein we say, ‘Adios, Dukey’, and consider the twin titans of love and death

I still encounter people, mostly men, who sniffily dismiss Outlander as a sort-of slightly more risque Downton Abbey: all frilly collars, bloodless duels, breathless embraces, passionate kisses, romantic outpourings and impenetrable ye olde speak. I can’t blame them. I counted myself among their number until very recently. Perhaps they’ll take the plunge, as I did, and find to their surprise and delight that Outlander is a fast-paced, funny, well-written, visceral and occasionally very, very gory show; a rollicking roller-coaster of pure entertainment that’s got more in common with Vikings than it does Howard’s End.

Help is at hand. Well… head. Every time I find myself slipping back into old habits and buying into the lie that Outlander is first-and-foremost a piece of soppy romantic fiction, I’m going to remember Murtagh hacking off the Duke of Sandringham’s head and kicking it across the kitchen floor like some horrifying football with eyes. It doesn’t get much less bosoms and bodices than that.

When the camera panned to Murtagh’s bloodied face I was a little disappointed not to hear him issue a classic action-movie quip, something along the lines of: “I guess he finally stuck his neck oot for someone,” or “This isnae the time tae be losin’ yer heid, duke.” Some things are better left unsaid, I suppose, and I’m sure I would’ve been disappointed had Outlander suddenly and inexplicably turned into an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. I did thoroughly enjoy Mary Hawkins’ parting line, though, which must surely qualify as one the greatest understatements of the century (indeed, of two centuries), not to mention one of the most blindingly obvious: “I think we’d better go.”

Yes, Mary. I think you might just better had. Mind how you go. Watch you don’t trip over all those bears shitting in the woods, and Catholic popes.

And, so, another baddie bites the dust. Farewell, then, Duke of S, you slippery, slithering, sociopathic little socialite. I’ll miss you – although in the hours leading up to your death your villainy lost a little of the nuance that had made me love it, and you, so much. I preferred you with your mask half-on, when your charm was the loudest instrument in that cross between an orchestra and an arsenal you always kept holstered in that sallow old soul of yours.

The Duke and Randall were certainly well-matched companions as they marched together along the merry road to complete-and-total bastardom, both wearing their narcissism on their sleeves, but with the Duke’s cold anger resting a little deeper beneath the surface than Black Jack’s. There was something cartoonish about the Duke’s savageness when he finally unleashed it, but I suppose as he entered his final gambit he had little need of charm or pretence, preferring instead to cast them aside and growl out the details of his fiendish scheme like some low-tier Scooby Doo villain. “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for that pesky, propulsive, all-consuming love between Jamie and Claire!” You silly man. Never bet against Jamie and Claire’s love. NEVER.

While the show doesn’t always have the outward appearance or traditional structure of romantic fiction, that molten kernel of Anglo-Scottish passion and devotion that sits at its core is hard as a thousand diamonds, and turns the very world of Outlander around it. Claire and Jamie are like a reverse Romeo and Juliet, whose tragedy is radiated on to the people around them, causing them to die instead.

Ultimately, the very thing that made the Duke’s plan ‘work’ – Jamie’s love for Claire – was also the very thing that guaranteed its failure. But we’ll let the Duke off the hook for that, because the poor love had no idea he was a character in a TV show.

While Sandringham’s mask was off (before his very head was off, too) he revealed to Claire his fiendish plot to hand over Jamie and her, his traitorous wife, to the King, so as to remove all suspicion from the Royal Court that he was, or ever had been, a Jacobite sympathiser. Which of course he was/had been, whenever it seemed to suit him. He seemed to be perpetually hedging his bets like some covetous, duplicitous cross between a Ferengi and a Vorta (dropping in some hard-core Deep Space Nine references, y’all). There were innumerable signals throughout the series that old Dukey Boy wasn’t exactly the world’s most committed Jacobite, but even if you didn’t know his history of self-serving treachery, his line to Claire “Gaelic – do you speak that barbarous tongue?” gives the game away somewhat. Claire has always had his number in any case.

Duke: “You know in my heart I’ve always been a Jacobite.”

Claire: “I’m reasonably sure you don’t have a heart.”

Hey, guys! Black Jack Randall’s back in town, too! But more on him later… The Duke also revealed that it was he who had hired the rape gang back in Paris, of which Claire had been the intended target, with poor Mary becoming the worst kind of collateral damage. It was for this heinous crime in particular that Mary Hawkins and Murtagh had vowed bloody revenge on the Duke (though they hadn’t known he was the guilty party when they’d made their vow), and it was revenge – foul and bloody – that they got. In the kitchens of Callendar House, no less. Callendar Park and House is situated across the road from my old high school. And my two kids were running around like possessed Tasmanian devils in that very kitchen during an open day last year. As much as I’d like to see their flash of recognition, I think I’ll wait until they’re at least… five before showing them that scene. I don’t want them to be scarred.

It was a nice touch to see the Duke desperately trying to re-fasten his mask of civility when Jamie burst into the kitchen; even nicer to see the vain old sod clamouring to put his wig back on. Even when facing certain death, appearances were still the most important thing to the Duke.

While appearances are certainly important, they’re never that important, and they can be incredibly deceptive. Take Dougal, for instance. He’s a son of a bitch, to be sure, but yet he keeps committing genuinely selfless acts that confound my impression of him: like testing how far the English soldiers’ bullets can reach across a battlefield by proffering his bald head to the enemy, or daringly dashing to Rupert’s rescue after he’s been shot by a band of Redcoats.

Let’s talk Rupert. I’d like to submit old Rupes into the running for the ‘Unluckiest Man in the Universe’ award. First, he almost dies in battle; then his best (perhaps only) friend in the world dies violently in a froth of his own blood having risked his life to save him; then he gets his eye shot out; then he gets captured … I’m sensing a pattern emerging. What next? A giant piano crashing down on his head? An anvil? A massive stick of ACME dynamite? Rupert’s recent hardships bring to mind Chef’s ludicrously drawn-out death sequence in South Park. Worse still, even if poor Rupert recovers, the only future open to him is an unspeakably violent death on the battlefield at Culloden, which he’ll meet while wearing an eye-patch that I hope earns him the nickname ‘Nick McFury’. Maybe in another life Rupert will come back as a lucky white heather salesman.

Death is everywhere in these two episodes. It’s so ever-present it’s almost a character. Claire, especially, is submerged in it, giving palliative care to her greatest enemy’s kin, and euthanising her old boss cum gaoler. Everyone has come to Culloden to die, it seems: the soldiers; Colum; Alex Randall; Black Jack Randall (although he doesn’t yet know it). It’s the bloody Switzerland of the north.

Death has the power to transform, to soften, to redeem, and that’s as true in Outlander as it is in life. Death is both transformative in a literal sense and transformative in a retrospective, metaphorical sense. Literally, because… well. You’re dead. It doesn’t really get much more transformative than that; even a caterpillar would have to agree. And retrospectively, because at the very moment when someone’s light is extinguished we tend to remember the light of their life shining brighter than perhaps it ever really did. We remember the departed as being better and bolder; cooler and kinder. Our love and mercy are amplified.

Much of our wistfulness springs from our own feelings about death: we fear it almost as much as we revere it, so we tend to become awestruck in its presence. We sit and we ponder, and we think to ourselves, ‘One human being fewer in the great infinite canvas of the cosmos, and yet what an incalculable loss to the universe,’ and perhaps – depending upon who we’ve lost – we cry, our grief temporarily blinding us to the world.

This whole, sad process can sometimes make it easy to forget that the person we mourn was – if you’ll allow me to fall back on reasonably esoteric philosophical language for a moment – an absolute fucking dickhead.

Death’s looming spectre is the only thing that makes half of the characters in this show palatable. Not only did I almost shed a tear for the immensely irritating Angus during my last binge-watch, but this time I found myself bubbling up as crotchety old Colum breathed his last.

I never really liked Colum – the character, not the actor – and I’m positive I wasn’t supposed to, but the combination of Dougal’s goodbye, and the revelation of just how pragmatic, insightful, forward-thinking and measured a leader Colum could be (and undoubtedly was, though I was perhaps too blinded by distaste to see it) made me realise that I’d miss him. Although I won’t miss his dress-style. In many ways he deserved his death simply for turning up wearing that brown fur coat, looking more like a horse-racing pundit, or a 1st-division football manager from the 1970s, than a laird.

To be fair, Graham McTavish absolutely knocks it out of the park during Colum’s death scene, no doubt reveling in the opportunity to show some of the nuance behind the gruff and growling Dougal. It’s all there in the complex carousel of emotions swirling and spinning on McTavish’s face: the haughtiness, the hatred, the love, the guilt, the spite, the remorse. Despite all that’s passed between them, love prevails. That’s what stays with Dougal, and that’s what stays with us. Christ, it was moving. When Dougal hugged Colum and blubbed, ‘All this cause you couldnae stay on a bloody horse,’ I absolutely lost it. I’m not allowed to say I cried like a big girl anymore in 2018, so I suppose I should say that I cried like a big man, and that’s okay, because men can cry too. BUT ONLY AT TV AND FOOTBALL.

Black Jack was in town, too, so it was time for us to dust off the DSM and have another game of ‘Psycho Bingo’. Except, initially at least, this was a different Black Jack. A more rounded, human version; one who seemed to show tenderness and compassion. He was in town to tend to his brother, Alex Randall, who was succumbing to the illness that had plagued him since Paris. Turns out old Black Jack had also been paying the bills for both his brother and his newly pregnant wife, Mary Hawkins. What a… nice… thing to do. It is nice, isn’t it? Is this still earth? Am I still me? Is up still ‘up’? Why is Captain Randall being nice?!

When Black Jack encounters Claire at his brother’s bedside he begs – begs?! – her to nurse him back to health, or out of suffering, but she refuses unless Black Jack agrees to reveal the location of the British troops.

“You would barter over an innocent man’s suffering?” he asks her.

This was delicious: the indignant nature of the sociopath, railing against injustice with zero sense of perspective or irony. It brought to mind Tony Soprano scolding his psychiatrist for ‘acting unethically’, or Ted Bundy complaining that it was inhumane not to have access to his prison library.

But Tony Soprano and Ted Bundy both, in their own way, helped people, too. Tony was capable of great generosity and gregariousness, and Ted Bundy volunteered at a crisis hot-line, often talking people out of self-harm and suicide. In both fiction and real-life there are plenty of examples of sociopaths doing good deeds, even if they could never be described as good people.

Black Jack ends up doing something else ‘nice’ for his brother: agreeing to marry Mary Hawkins so that she and her baby will have his protection. I must admit, Mary’s pregnancy brought me great relief. I’d feared that she was going to have to suffer savage treatment at Black Jack’s hands in order for the integrity of the time-line to be preserved, but this was a nice swap-out, and one that means two wonderful things: Frank isn’t directly descended from his evil doppelganger, and Mary Hawkins will only have to be joined to this monster for a couple of days before death officiates their divorce.

The road to Black Jack’s agreement to this union was an interesting if deeply uncomfortable one. At first, it seemed like Randall was using his discussion with Claire to indulge his sadism – revisiting his crimes upon Jamie just so that he could watch the pain and anger on Claire’s face – but he was essentially, in some weird and deeply warped way, trying to save his brother’s wife from his darker nature. Was that… noble? I’ve no idea.

Then Black Jack watches his brother pass, and the contrast between him and Dougal couldn’t be more stark. Claire once called Dougal a narcissist, and I disagreed. This episode carried the proof. Dougal is a complex, vain, bottled-up, angry muddle of a man, but there’s nothing pathological about him. He grieves, he feels, he loves.

Black Jack, on the other hand, rather re-affirms his narcissistic status here when he explodes in rage at the point of his brother’s death and starts punching his newly dead brother in the face. I laughed, very loudly, mostly at the shock and surprise of it.

When it comes down to it, there’s no changing Captain Jonathan Randall.

And there’s no changing Culloden.

See you for the finale.

A few final disjointed thoughts

Let’s have one final nugget of appreciation for Simon Callow’s turn as The Duke. What a character: so deliberate, so poised, so deliciously wicked. “The last thing I’d do would be to blurt.”
In episode 11, we see Claire extracting a woman’s tooth – now THAT’s a rational fear of the dentist. Us lilly-livered, pink-drink-drinking sissies don’t know we’re born.
Pity poor Rupert as he sits lamenting the death of his friend, Angus, through the re-telling of bawdy stories about the hairy-faced little rat. Drunk and dead-eyed, Rupert turns to a young lad who’s waiting in line (understandably very reluctantly) for some 18^th century dentistry, and adds to his trauma with the story of the time Angus swallowed some teeth. “Said he didnae shite for a week for fear of being bitten.” That made me laugh.
I wonder how they made that horrible squishy-cracky sound when Claire retrieved the musket bullet from Rupert’s eye? That was appropriately revolting.
The awful spectre of rape hangs over just about every episode of this show. Remember when Claire offered herself up to the English soldiers, claiming to be a hostage, to ensure the freedom of Jamie and Dougal et al? No sooner had I written in my notepad ‘I do hope she isn’t threatened with rape again’ than a sleazy English soldier cocked a leg and said, ‘You look like you need warming up.’ Talk about #McMeToo
Jamie tried to convince the Bonnie Prince that the men were weary, and should be allowed to rest, replenish and regroup, to which the daring dandy replied: “I am not some frightened hare to be chased down by a pack of English dogs. I am a man. I am a soldier. And I shall comport myself as one.” At which point I offered an incisive critique of his tactics by shouting at the TV, “Fuck off, you wee wank.”
Murtagh on Frank Randall: “Hasn’t enough suffering been had in the name of saving that mythical prick?” Murtagh, I bloody love you.