Tag Archives: Lallybroch

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

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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 18th Century Scotland, than she is here in 20th 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 8 – 10

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Part 6: Bad dads and sad lads

Wherein war tastes bitter no matter the outcome

As Outlander whisks us from the Frasers’ return to Scotland through to the bloody climax of the battle of Prestonpans we’re left in little doubt that the laughs, luxury and light-touch of the French court (miscarriage and murder notwithstanding) are far behind us. Team Clamie’s last, desperate attempts to kick causality up the backside, and deliver the highlanders from the clutches of death – both cultural and literal – don’t generate that much in the way of guffaws. It’s almost as if war isn’t funny (Catch 22 and Blackadder Goes Forth notwithstanding).

Over the course of these three episodes Jamie gets to test his mettle as leader, and pit his wits against an unholy trinity of father figures (grandpa, uncle and spiritual father of the rebellion, respectively). Meanwhile, Claire endures a traumatic period of re-adjustment to the world of war, something she probably never expected to have to do again, given that she’d just lived through the ‘war to end all wars’. Pesky time-travel.

Her first world war, the world’s second, but the first in which she’d nursed, was bad enough, but this war, her second, which isn’t a world war but came first, before the first or the second, which were world wars, comes first in the worst stakes, principally because this time she’s cursed to be versed in how things will unfurl in the world into which she’s been hurled.

And try saying that after a night on the piss with Murtagh.

Because the Jacobite Uprising appears to have been a war in desperate want of soldiers, Jamie’s first stop along the road to rebellion is at the house of his grandfather, Lord Lovat, whom he needs to convince to send men to fight under his banner. Fergus comes, too, on donkey-back no less; Jamie’s very own Sancho Panza there to accompany him as he roams the Scottish countryside tilting at windmills.

The biggest problem facing the Frasers in the domain of Grandpa Greystoke, Lord of the Rapes, is Lord Lovat himself. It’s hard enough to get the guy to make you a cup of tea, much less donate troops. It quickly becomes clear that what Jamie’s grandpa wants most of all is Lallybroch. He might not have managed to get his grubby paws on it this time, but I’m sure this won’t be his final attempt.

While Lord Lovat looks positively humanitarian next to the series’ alpha-villain Black Jack Randall, that’s not to mistake him for a nice guy. Far from it. He’s actually a pretty bloody horrible guy. It’s like when Kim Jong Un calls Donald Trump ‘crazy’. Yes, Mr Un, you’re technically correct; your opposite number across the ocean with the equally unfortunate hair-do does indeed possess an abundance of undiagnosed psychological disorders, but you’re not exactly a stranger to the DSM-5 yourself, you vainglorious, reality-raping basket-case.

When Lovat isn’t tossing around sexual threats (seriously, the 18th century is such a relentlessly grim and rapey place it’s practically the BBC in the 1970s), he likes to spend his free time being cruel, cynical, covetous, mercurial, brutal, boorish and rude – and I’ll bet he leaves the lid off the toothpaste, too. This all makes him rather a hard man to negotiate with. Harder still when the curmudgeonly Colum is at his table, too, lobbying hard against Jamie. I’ve missed Colum. Not very much. At all. Especially. That stilted. Way of. Speaking he has. That makes it sound as though his words. Are running round an obstacle course. Strewn with full-stops.

Laoghaire’s back, too, principally to atone for her part in almost getting Claire killed in season one, but also to show us that the fires of her devotion to Jamie still burn fierce and bright– even if she no longer desires to burn Claire to death in their hot flames. The last time Claire was in Colum and Laoghaire’s company, being seen as a witch was something of a bad career move (death does little to enhance your job prospects). Here, as in Paris, the White Witch persona proves to be an asset. This time, Jamie employs the supernatural ruse to dissuade his Grandpa from sexually assaulting his wife. That’s a spectacularly depressing sentence to write. There’s an episode of Jeremy Kyle in there somewhere (substitute ‘Jerry Springer’ if you’re from across the pond).

Today’s episode: YOU SAY YOUR WIFE ISN’T A WITCH. THEN WHY HAVE MY BALLS BEEN BLASTED LIKE A FROST-BITTEN APPLE?

You may recall seeing the actor who plays Lovat, Clive Russell, in the death-n-dragons epic Game of Thrones. Clive played Brynden Tully, the member of the Stark entourage who very narrowly avoided becoming something red, then something blue at the infamous Red Wedding on account of having to step outside for a piss.

But it’s poo that Clive’s more closely associated with in the minds of several generations of Scots thanks to his memorable performance as a guest star in Still Game, BBC Scotland’s incredibly funny sitcom about Glaswegian pensioners growing old disgracefully. In Still Game he played Big Innes, a taciturn mountain of a man who returned to his inner-city roots from his new home in the remote Highlands to help his old friends deal with a band of unruly youths.

Innes is a vast, human Hagrid of a man, taken to bouts of superhuman strength – especially when he gets his hands on Midori – and with an appetite to match. And when appetites are big, so too are their consequences. Near the end of the episode Innes lays a log in his friend Isa’s loo that’s large enough to upset the sun’s gravitational pull on the earth, certainly large enough to have earned him execution at the hands of a certain jealous and desperately constipated French King earlier this season.

It’s a shite to behold.

If you hail from outside these lands and Outlander has caused you to fall in love with Scotland, I entreat you to check out Still Game. Scotland isn’t all about breath-taking vistas, kilted pretty-boys and tribal honour: we’re also big fans of excrement and violence. Plus, you’ll find quite a roster of big-league guest stars in this little show, from a pre-Hagrid Robbie Coltrane, to a post-Doctor Who but pre-Hobbit Sylvester McCoy, to late-night US talk-show king Craig Ferguson.

Anyway, once Lord Lovat’s double-dealing, smoke-and-mirrors, arse-saving gymnastics result in Jamie netting some soldiers, it’s off with them to Jacobite Boot Camp. The men there are in fine fettle, gloriously unburdened as they are by the knowledge of their deadly destiny. They’re fuelled by optimism and adrenalin, both of which they’ll need in droves with Murtagh – aka Full Tartan Jacket – as their drill sergeant, yelling in their faces like a psychopath for three weeks, no doubt in the process spraying them with enough flakes of porridge to feed an entire regiment.

Dougal (He’s back! Erm… hooray?) doesn’t share the men’s joviality. Sure, he’s stoked for battle, and excited at the prospect of ripping out a few rib-cages to use as CD racks, but he’s not terribly impressed with having to play second fiddle to Jamie. Since their last encounter, the pupil has become the master. Not that Jamie was ever that studious a pupil to begin with, and not that Dougal really had that much to teach Jamie, beyond Dougal’s favourite quasi-commandment, ‘Love thyself as… erm… thyself.’

I thought Dougal was uncharacteristically and jarringly meek in the face of the new command structure, and especially in the face of Claire’s face, which was telling him to fuck himself (beautiful and richly-deserved moment, incidentally). I didn’t expect him to let his accusers and abusers off the hook with nothing more than a withering look, but I guess he’s smart enough to know when the odds are stacked against him. And perhaps, serpent that he undoubtedly is, he’s simply biding his time to strike.

I’m not sure I agree with Claire’s assessment of Dougal as a narcissist. He’s an egoist, certainly, and a blaggard, a bully and an arrogant old sod to boot, but clinically narcissistic? I’m not convinced. When he said he loved his country, and would die for it, I was inclined to believe him. Anyway, though Claire and I mightn’t agree on the finer points, I’m sure we’re on the same page when it comes to the chapter that’s sub-headed ‘Dougal is an arsehole’.

While the baldy, bearded one may have been forced to toe the line, he still found various indirect ways to challenge Jamie’s authority without openly defying him. Some of them were quite subtle. Like when Jamie was giving a rousing speech to his troops about the horrors of war and why it’s essential that they conduct themselves in a disciplined and orderly manner, and Dougal chose that exact moment to come running down the hill screaming like a fucking mad-man, his face daubed in dirt and his hairy man-tits shaking in the cold highland air.

In fairness, sometimes the ‘AAARRRRGGGHHHHHHHH!’ approach works better. Sometimes what’s required to successfully resolve an armed stand-off is to take bravery and push it that extra furlong over the line into insanity. You can see this in action when Dougal tests the firing range of a line of English soldiers by riding his horse as close to them as possible over boggy ground, and gets his hat shot off.

“And now, I’m aff to change ma breeks – because the hero of the hour has shat his pants.”

They must all have shat their pants as they later charged into battle, not only without armour, but into a thick pocket of mist and without even bothering to button up their shirts. Whoever was in charge of health and safety in that unit should’ve been sacked.

Claire naturally sees harrowing parallels between the war about to come, and the ‘future’ war just ended, made all the worse by her unique vantage point. Is it worse knowing or not knowing? Is it better to think that you might, if you’re lucky, die in your sleep at some point during your seventh or eighth decade on earth, or know without doubt that you’re going to be struck by a fast-moving train on the 18th of October 2026 at precisely 10:53? Is it better to bring yourself to believe that you might just bash the bosh and be back in Blighty by Christmas, or resign yourself to the incontrovertible, inescapable fact that you’re hurtling inexorably towards the fatal date of 16th of April 1746?

Claire’s and Jamie’s belief in their ability to unstick that fixed point in time is in many ways more fantastical than any faith that their 18th Century kinsfolk ever placed in white witches, baby-gathering faeries or good genital hygiene. No wonder Claire’s reeling from re-triggered PTSD. Even brief periods of camaraderie and jocularity among the men remind her of the brutal juxtaposition that’s surely just around the corner: the broken, bloody bodies; the reek of death. (Are Claire’s memories flash-forwards or flash-backs? They’re both, really, aren’t they?) I think the flashes work really well, chock-full of augury for Culloden, and allowing Caitriona to do some fine character work.

One man who seems to have no love of war or fighting is the man actually leading the rebellion, Scrawny Mince Charlie. I really like the portrayal of the character. The temptation must have been strong to make this romantic historical figure hopelessly noble, brave and true, but I’m glad they leaned into his whiny sense of entitlement and typical aristocratic disconnect from the common man he claims to serve. BPC is like a rich kid on a gap year looking to immerse himself in the full ‘ethnic’ Scottish experience – and what better way than by watching thousands of big hairy men fighting and swearing at each other before dying tragically young?

“The British are our enemies now but they may be our friends again.”

I don’t think that’s the galvanising cry the Jacobites expected to hear, Charlie.

War can also take its toll on the ears, with choice phrases like “You bushy-faced whoreson!” and “I’ll ram it up your arse until you taste it!” ringing in the air. I can relate to the raucous and bawdy banter of the troops. I don’t know if it’s a Scottish thing, a man thing, or a class thing, but it’s very rare for two Scottish males to express their affection and admiration for each other with anything other than vile insults and obscenities. Men have long been encouraged to equate love and tenderness with weakness and vulnerability.

If you’re walking down the street, and a bus goes by containing your best friend – and I mean this guy is your best friend, the guy you grew up with, the guy who’s always had your back, the guy you’d lay down and die for – if this bus goes by and you see your best friend’s face pressed up against the window pane, even before you know what’s happening your hand has curled into the near-universal sign for self-abuse, and you’re jumping up and down on the pavement gesticulating at your friend like an angry tramp doused in PCP.

Even if you’re visiting your best friend on his death-bed you still have to greet him by saying something like, ‘Looking a bit pasty there, you stinking, arse-faced donkey-fucker.’ (or “Ah’ll no allow that fat bawbag to die on me.”) With these parameters in place it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between extreme love and extreme hate. A little tip, though: stabbing is rarely a sign of treasured kinship.

All this talk of death-beds makes this a particularly apposite time to talk about a certain doomed duo…

When Rupert and Angus re-appeared, a smile spread upon Claire’s face that was one part happiness to two parts, ‘These cheeky little monkeys, what are they like, eh?’ To employ the language of the riverboat for a moment, I’m afraid I couldn’t call or raise Claire’s smile. What I did do was glare at my TV set with a poker face. I did this not because I was trying to hide my true feelings, as is traditional with the poker face, but because my true feelings were best conveyed by pursing my lips tightly together and staring forwards through cold, flat eyes. I hated Angus especially, the bastard off-spring of a tiny wild-west bandit and an angry Chihuahua.

I even jotted down in my notepad these exact words: “Oh great… it’s Rupert and Angus. Boy, I hope they get wiped out, and as violently as possible.”

Careful what you wish for, eh?

The gruesome twosome has always served as the show’s comic relief, the Keystone Cops of Ye Olde Scotland, although in terms of relief I’ve always experienced the greatest share of it whenever they’ve left the screen. The episode ‘Prestonpans’ does a good job of adding flesh to the bones of these two caricatures, turning them into real people with vulnerabilities and inner lives. Turning them into people, to my incredible surprise (especially in Angus’s case), that I actually started to like.

It was obvious that one of them was going to die the second they had a detailed discussion about what they’d like to happen to their possessions post-mortem. But who died, and how, was still a surprise. Not to mention surprisingly harrowing to watch.

Angus’s death sent out a strong signal: if the hitherto one-note comic relief can die choking in horrible agony, then don’t expect any laughs in the conflict to come. But always expect the unexpected.

A few final disjointed thoughts

  • Awwwwwww. Jamie holding a baby!
  • I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the little English boy who infiltrated Jamie’s camp. He’ll definitely be back. He doesn’t know how lucky he was to be captured by Jamie Fraser and not Shane from the Walking Dead, else he’d have had his neck snapped before his vow of vengeance had a chance to form on his lips.
  • I once talked about the sanitary considerations of cunnilingus in the olden days – but, Claire, I just watched you French-kiss a guy who had the arterial blood of sixty dead English men rubbed around his lips. IT’S LIKE YOU ALL WANT TO DIE?!
  • Dougal bayoneting that injured English soldier made him seem brutal, but then he is, and so is war. Still yukky though.
  • I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed an actual, literal pissing contest before. Thanks, Outlander.
  • Jamie does Dougal a great service by speaking up for him to Bonnie Prince Charlie. But, knowing history as he does – his faith in changing the outcome of events notwithstanding – he’s also technically handing Dougal a confirmed death sentence. Kudos.

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

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 1, Eps 9 – 12

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Part 3: Burn, baby burn

Wherein things get a bit too hot for Geillis to handle, and Jamie gets addicted to smack

Non-Scottish Outlander fans: “It must be great being Scottish and watching Outlander. It must enrich the story for you, knowing the history inside-out, especially all the stuff that happened with the Jacobites.”

Me: “Och, aye. Teach a class in the bloody Jacobites, I could. I know more about the Jacobites than Bonny Prince Charlie and, erm… that other guy, eh… what’s his name… Jack… Jack O’ Bite?…” [nods]

[opens Google and frantically types in ‘Was Jack O’Bite an Irish King?’]

My friends, I know absolutely nothing about the Jacobites, save for the broadstrokes. And when I say broad, I mean broad. If I were painting my knowledge of the Jacobites instead of writing it down, I’d be using the Jolly Green Giant’s sweeping brush to paint a portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie onto the head of an atom.

My knowledge of the subject largely stems from these two things:

  1. When I was eight, my primary school class did a project on the Jacobites. I can distinctly remember drawing some wee ginger people in kilts. I can’t remember anything else.
  2. Scottish comedian Ricky Fulton once played Bonnie Prince Charlie in a comedy sketch on TV at New Year’s, circa 1988. I didn’t think that it was very funny.

And that’s it. Class dismissed.

Of course I know that my ancestors were beaten and bowed by the English state, and eventually decided to kick back against it, only to get their arses kicked, but the political and dynastic intricacies of the era escape me. Well, maybe ‘escape’ is the wrong word, because that would imply that I ever had the facts imprisoned in my skull to begin with.

Most of us here in Scotland are at the mercy of whatever liberties American writers and film-makers wish to take with our history. I was 14 when Braveheart hit cinemas. The Australian Mel Gibson and the American Randall Wallace (no relation) became, in effect, my history teachers. It was only in retrospect that I learned about the glaring historical inaccuracies present in the movie. Really, though, Gibson and Wallace had enormous power: they could’ve shown me the Scottish front-line propelling towards the English archers on unicycles as they juggled carrots, while William Wallace led the rest of his army in a rousing rendition of Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, and my teenage brain would’ve entered those ‘facts’ into the permanent record, no questions asked.

I sometimes hear people say things like, ‘Who cares about the historical accuracy if it’s an exciting story?’ It’s mostly American people who say things like that, but I’d like to see their reaction to a movie about the Civil War that featured Robert E Lee charging down the battlefield on the back of a rhino as Ulysses S. Grant prepared to take him out with a rocket launcher.

I know more about the American Revolution, The American Civil War, the French Revolution and medieval Europe than I do about Scotland’s past. Outlander, then, is teaching me bits and pieces about Scottish history as its story bobs and weaves and cuts and thrusts along, which is something I really shouldn’t be relying upon it to do. I should be immersing myself in books and educational films about my nation’s fraught and fascinating history, but I can’t. Not yet. Because, get this: I don’t want any spoilers. Not even from history itself.

That’s pretty messed up.

Anyway, a poor student of history I may very well be, but I’m reasonably confident that Scottish soldiers didn’t make a habit of carrying out daring raids on English forts to rescue kidnapped ‘princesses’. And if they ever did, they probably didn’t find themselves leaping from incredibly tall towers into the freezing water below as massive explosions rocked the fort behind them. It must be pretty hard to keep trumpeting historical realism when your 18th Century Scottish swash-buckler suddenly turns into a cross between Robin Hood Prince of Thieves and The A-Team.

“This is Mr McT. He’s absolutely terrified of horses.”

“I ‘aint getting’ on no mane, fool.”

Do you know what, though? To paraphrase that mish-mash of Americans I’ve encountered over the years, I didn’t really care about the improbability of it all, because it was pretty damn exciting. After all, this is a show about a woman who travelled through time by touching a rock, so let’s not cleave too hard to history, here.

If Claire’s rescue from a thoroughly rapey Black Jack seemed just a little too improbable for my tastes, then I was happier to embrace the realism – or what I supposed was realism – of the event’s aftershocks, namely the consequences to Claire of ‘running off and getting herself kidnapped’.

Now, I know very little about the specifics of gender relations in the 18th century, beyond the supposition that they must have been fraught and unfairly weighted in the penis-weilding sex’s favour, but a husband feeling entitled to spank his wife for ‘stepping out of line’ seems to fit with my impressions of the era. I guess it would’ve been unrealistic for Jamie always to have acted like an enlightened 20th century man, immune to the influence of the culture and country around him, especially since most of his pals are sweary brutes who always act like they’re on a stag do in Malaga.

As the show worked up to its possible spanking I stared at the screen in disbelief. ‘If Jamie puts Claire over his knee and belts her bum like she’s some naughty schoolgirl,’ I thought to myself, ‘then that’s him finished as fuel for female fantasies the world over. I know some like it rough, some like a dominant man, but not Claire, and not like this; never like this. This is domestic abuse, 18th century or no 18th century, and that sort of thing’s only sexy if you’re a fucking mental case. What’s this show turned into now, 50 Shades of Tartan?’

But he did it. Christ, he did it. I have to give the show credit for that, and extra credit for conveying Jamie’s change of heart, mounting guilt and eventual redemption in a plausible and relatable way. That’s no easy feat. Jamie realised that if he could pledge peace, respect and fealty to a miserable, duplicitous old bastard like Colum, then he should be able to pledge those same things a billion times over to the woman he proclaims to love above all else.

We can now safely file Jamie’s transgression under ‘I’ for [put on your best Basil Fawlty voice here] ‘I’m terribly sorry, he’s from 18th Century Scotland.’ [and now prepare to put on your best Manuel voice] ‘Ken?’

So rest easy, my adoring Heughanites (or are you Heughanistas?). Jamie was pretty much back to being an ardent feminist again by the end of the episode, so you can now safely resume the heaving of your bosoms. You must be relieved to discover that you aren’t in thrall to an ancestor of Trevor from Eastenders [Hi North Americans – Eastenders is an English soap-opera, where nobody has ever smiled, and everybody dies. Trevor was an evil Scottish character who mercilessly beat his wife – it’s nice that our neighbours across the border don’t like to stereotype us].

Aptly enough, all that was missing from the closing moments of episode 9 was Eastender’s trademark dirge; that quickening drum-beat to signify that a cliffhanger was in progress: dum dum dum DUM DUM du du du du. And what was Outlander’s shocking cliffhanger that would’ve lent itself so well to this particular drum-beat?

Had the English stormed Castle Leoch? Had Dougal barged into their room with his cock in one hand and his sword in the other to challenge Jamie to a duel to the death? Erm… no. No, Eh… Claire and Jamie… had found…they’d found… you see they’d found some flowers under their bed.

But they were nasty flowers, right? A wee girl had put them there. She was jealous of Claire.

I scoffed as the credits rolled, and probably said something like, ‘Ooooh, shit’s about to go down,’ in a really sarcastic tone of voice, possibly while pulling a face. But lo and behold, a couple of episodes later, shit did go down. Bad shit. Sorry for laughing, cliffhanger. I should never have questioned your cliff-hanging prowess.

Episode ten began with some slo-mo writhing and ye olde cunnilingus (Jamie got a tongue-lashing in the previous episode, so it’s only fair that he starts the next episode administering one), which was mercifully interrupted by Murtagh banging on the door with news of the Duke of Sandringham’s impending arrival. A lot happens in episode 10: Dougal’s wife dies; Dougal and Geillis are revealed to be lovers; Geillis is revealed to be pregnant with Dougal’s baby; Geillis’s big, farty husband dies; said big, farty husband is revealed to have been murdered by Geillis (and oh my God, it’s John Sessions – I didn’t recognise him when he first appeared earlier in the season); Colum sends Dougal and Jamie into temporary exile, and somebody puts a dead baby in a tree. Just another day at Castle Leoch. But it’s a testament to Simon Callow’s absolutely note-perfect performance as the Duke that he’s by far the most memorable element of the episode.

I love his vanity, his pomposity, his casual but polite disregard for everything but his own sense of aesthetics. He’d stab your back or cut your heart out, but he’d do it with a shrug, and send you on your way dripping with his false, honeyed charm. The Duke promised Jamie he’d deliver his letter concerning Captain Randall’s scurrilous behaviour to the appropriate persons in the King’s court in order to secure him a pardon, which of course means that he won’t, and Jamie is, in fact, doomed. Villains are always the most fun to watch (and I’m sure to play), even more so when they’re handled by someone with Callow’s range and skill.

Jamie’s legal problems take something of a back seat to Claire’s when she and Geillis find themselves arrested for witch-craft. This is the point at which young Laoghaire reveals that the bundle of flowers she left under Jamie’s marital bed augured much more than mean thoughts.

The subsequent trial is gripping and engaging. I love the big bag of quips Ned brings with him to the courtroom, and of course the return of Father Bain, who at first presents himself as a broken and contrite figure weeping in Claire’s defence, but swiftly – and slyly – reveals himself to be the final nail in her coffin, the twisted, cunning old rat.

I sat there throughout most of that episode, shaking my head and thinking, ‘How could those poor, daft, ignorant peasants have believed in such outlandish horse-droppings? I’m glad we’ve moved past all that nonsense.’ At that exact moment my brain smiled a smug little smile, said to me, ‘You’d better take a seat, son’ and then pressed play on the cinema screen inside my mind. On that screen I saw slack-jawed men with side-burns and side-arms wearing MAGA hats and shouting about locking people up; people flopping and gyrating on the floors of evangelical mega-churches like they’d just been strapped to invisible pneumatic drills; Flat Earth shops opening the length and breadth of the country, with angry little people walking out of them, handing out pamphlets proclaiming that Gallileo, Copernicus and NASA had just been having a bit of a laugh these past 600 years; and I saw people enjoying Mrs Brown’s Boys. ‘OK,’ I said to my brain. ‘Point taken. We’re all still mental. We’re just mental about different things.’

Most people back then probably didn’t believe in witches anyway. Not really. Not in their heart of hearts. I’ll wager that the biggest barrier to people embracing the truth about witches was the ease with which the powerless populace could use the bat-shit crazy belief system to settle scores with those they hated (the flip-side of that was the state being able to use it against you for whatever spurious reasons best suited their agenda).

Can you imagine if that belief system made a come-back today? Half of the population of our housing estates would be wiped out. People would look out of their windows, see their neighbours coming home with a new car or a 50-inch TV, and snatch up their phones in a jealous rage:

‘Hello, is that the WitchBusters Confidential Hot-Line? Yeah, I just saw my neighbour doing some spooky shit with the Provident Loan guy, I swear she had him levitating six feet above her doorstep. How soon can you get here? Great news. See you soon. Oh, and she stole my 50-inch TV, so I’ll be needing that back.’

Even though I never really found myself taking to Geillis as a character, she got to shine in this episode. Her sacrifice was brave and poignant, and of course the revelation that she was a fellow stone-touching time-traveller, from 1968 no-less, was an unexpected and very welcome surprise. I wonder who else is from the future? What if they’re ALL from the future?

“Dougal, you’re from this period of time, right?”

Dougal shakes his head. “I’m a bank manager from 1988.”

“Colum??”

“I played Trevor in Eastenders.”

“Are you kidding me? Murtagh? Murtagh, come on, you’re definitely from this era, right?”

Murtagh bows his head in shame, and mutters: “Space pilot.”

“For fuck sake, is there anybody here from 18th century Scotland? Anybody? Raise your hands! …. Jesus Christ!”

Any show that features a main character who exists out of time must inevitably deal with the moment when they’re either discovered or choose to explain their origins. Claire’s explanation was always going to be a tricky one. Without any evidence to back up her claims – no VE-Day edition of the Inverness Courier sealed inside a Tupperware tub and tucked inside a leather jacket with ‘I Love 1945’ stitched into the lapel, for instance – and lacking any detailed historical knowledge of any specific events set to befall her friends and patrons (barring the broad-strokes of the Jacobites’ slaughter at Culloden), she risked sounding like the sort of person who in later years would be wrapping their head in tinfoil and having a bath in jelly while screaming about aliens.

In the end, faith was on her side. Or at least its bedfellow, love. Jamie believed the message because he trusted its source. Implicitly. Aw, that’s lovely, isn’t it? Mind you, he does live in a village where everyone believes in fairies and witches, so admittedly getting on-board with a story about a nurse who uses rocks to travel through time isn’t that much of a stretch. Nicely done, though. And as much as every fibre of my being tries to resist and fight against Outlander’s romantic side, the scene where Claire forsook the journey home in favour of her Scottish husband left a little lump in my throat, predictable as it was. Claire now belongs in Scotland, and at Jamie’s side. That’s sure to end well.

Jamie and Claire, then, go on to assume the mantles of Laird and Lady of Lallybroch, an interesting new direction and dynamic. I thought the way in which Jamie and his sister worked through their guilt about their father’s death, and their feelings towards each other, was satisfying, earnest and emotionally resonant. One thing’s for sure: there’s no way Jack Randall can survive beyond the end of this season. The story’s building towards too neat a conclusion. His presence beyond the end of the inevitable final confrontation between Jamie and Jack would be superfluous, and risk tipping over into cliche-ridden moo-hah-hah territory.

On the other hand, Jack’s such a good villain, how can they kill him? I guess I’m going to find out. But only once Claire and Jamie manage to extricate themselves from The Watch. Oooh, that’s a good cliff-hanger.

Dum Dum Dum DUM DUM du du du du.

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 13 – 16