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Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 4 – 6

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Part 16: Tryons, and fighters, and bears, oh my!

Wherein old friendships are rekindled and new enemies are made

Race, culture and tribal identity have been major talking – as well as flash – points thus far in season four. Hardly surprising, given that Outlander began its first season with indigenous peoples being subjugated by an aggressive neighbouring nation, and now finds itself relocated to a country where the indigenous peoples are in the process of being displaced and decimated by white European settlers (not to mention the infrastructure of this brave new world being erected upon the backs of countless thousands of African slaves).

Literature from the early days of white colonisation, and of course books and movies from our own recent past, could avoid tackling the more uncomfortable and unpalatable aspects of America’s birth and ascendance, but Outlander and its contemporaries cannot, and should not (and Outlander certainly doesn’t). We can no longer ignore history’s competing perspectives, and the winners, losers, villains and victims left in its wake.

In the opening moments of episode four, then, we revisit the racial tensions of Outlander’s first three seasons. It seems churlish to describe an incidence of racial tension as ‘classic’, but I suppose it is within the context of the series so far. Real venom simmers between Jamie and governor Tryon; a partial re-kindling of the conflict that reached its apex with the battle of Culloden.

Ostensibly, Jamie and the governor are discussing a land deal, one that will see Jamie becoming a laird-of-sorts once more, and the closest thing this new world has to a nobleman. The conversation between them is cordial on the surface, but unfolds in a very mafia-like way, everything they say to each other carefully guarded behind a fortress of plausible deniability (lest ye olde wire-taps be listening). They bury their threats and insults behind smiles, which flex across their faces like muscles. The governor keeps making disapproving remarks about the Highlanders, even going so far as to call them savages. Jamie won’t take the bait, but he won’t back down either.

Jamie’s new status as a landowner, for all its excitement and opportunity, is at times an uncomfortable burden for him to bear. He’s used to being the rebel, the fighter, the righteous man. Now he’s one of ‘them’. Not just a nobleman but, in the eyes of the Cherokee, an invader; a stealer of ancestral land to which he has no legitimate claim.

The Cherokee don’t waste time in showing up for a couple of grizzly stand-offs on the Frasers’ new turf. They behave menacingly, shout indecipherable threats, and hurl chibs and knives around. If nothing else, I’m sure it cures Jamie’s homesickness somewhat. Throw in some whiskey and bagpipes, and the Laird of Lallybroch could’ve made a proper night of it.

I don’t know if it’s culturally insensitive to say this – which, if I have to ask, probably means that it is – but the Cherokee look more like Chinese drag queens than bona fide Native Americans. I guess that’s what happens to your world-view and perspective on other peoples when you get all your lessons on aboriginal North American cultures from the Hollywood westerns you used to watch with your grandpa as a child.

I’d like to balance out any offence I may have caused to readers with Cherokee ancestry by pointing out that my own ancestral people did, and still do: a) wear itchy skirts, b) eat deep-fried chocolate for breakfast, washed down with a cup of hot lard, c) drink so much alcohol that our livers have the consistency of vinegarised paper, d) exalt a musical instrument that when played properly sounds like a dying cat trapped inside of a Whoopee cushion, and e) have to take language courses in order to understand even other Scottish people the next town over.

Oh, and f) we all have vast ginger beards. Even the women.

There. An eye for an eye… makes the whole world laugh. Or else it should.

So how did Jamie manage to avoid hostilities with the Cherokee? Well, in the usual, boring, predictable way, of course: by hunting down and killing a mentally-ill old warrior who, in response to being banished from the Cherokee settlement, had taken to masquerading as a bear, stalking the forests and killing anything that crossed his path. Oh come on, Outlander. I think we’re all getting a bit tired of that old chestnut.

How satisfying it is to see an incidence of sexual assault being suitably and swiftly punished for a change. How laudably sage and just of the 18th century Cherokee to have banished Bear-man-to-be for the crime of raping his wife, when sexual assault in our own time seldom attracts the punishment it deserves. That being said, though, they really should invent social workers and probation officers, in case their next sex-criminal turns into a leopard or something.

Claire and Jamie quickly forge a friendship and an alliance with the Cherokee, but their community outreach program isn’t limited to the natives. Claire also befriends the Muellers, a nearby family of German emigrants, and finds herself assisting in the delivery of the family’s first grandchild. So far, so beatific. Unfortunately, the first meeting between the Muellers and the Cherokee doesn’t exactly hint at a friendly future. When Mueller sees a group of Cherokee drinking some water from the river that runs past his property, he demonstrates an early Teutonic talent for neighbourly love by threatening to shoot them all.

Jamie’s out of town trying to round up prospective tenants, so it’s down to Claire to mediate peace between the opposing groups. Maybe she would’ve managed it, too, were it not for the heady mixture of illness, misfortune, superstition and mistrust swirling around the Mueller home.

When Herr Mueller’s daughter and new grand-child are killed by an outbreak of measles, his racism, grief, and ignorance of all things epidemiological combine to make him a crazed savage. He attacks the Cherokee in the dead of night, believing them to have cursed the river-water. He scalps their healer – a gentle woman, who had become Claire’s mentor and friend – proclaiming her a witch, and the architect of the curse.

Instead of turfing Mueller out into the wilderness dressed as a buffalo, or something equally absurd, the Cherokee decide to burn down the Mueller house with flaming arrows, and kill both husband and wife. As the flames lick at the bones of the house, and the flesh of its inhabitants, a little girl’s doll sits in the foreground, silently watching as the family to which she almost belonged is purged from the earth. I remember thinking to myself at that point, with a mixture of sympathy and sadness: at least that’s one less trip on the Christmas-card run for the Frasers this year.

There’s a moment just before the fire where we’re tricked into thinking that Claire might be the Cherokee’s target. We’re ready to embrace that possibility because of an earlier scene in which Roger learns that Claire and Jamie died in a fire at Fraser’s Ridge at some point during the 1770s.

The discovery of the newspaper article that announces the Frasers’ fiery demise (which Roger and Brianna come across independently of each other) propels Roger and Brianna back to the stones: Brianna first; Roger hot on her heels. It’s going to be interesting once Brianna finds out that Roger tried to keep her parents’ immolation a secret from her. It’s not really something you could credibly claim to have slipped your mind, is it?

“There was something I had to tell you… em… nope, it’s gone.”

“Was it about dinner tonight?”

“Nope.”

“Em, did you make plans to go out somewhere, with your friends or something?”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

[silence]

“That’s really going to bug me.”

“Don’t worry about it. It can’t have been that important.”

“That’s it! [smiles and snaps fingers] That’s it, I’ve got it… Your mother burned to death!… I knew it would come back to me.”

[stony silence]

“What do you fancy for dessert?”

Roger and Brianna’s reunion is one for the future (or the past, I suppose), but there are quite enough reunions in this trio of episodes to be getting on with.

Jamie is in the nearby town trying to drum up support for his big land giveaway among a clutch of ex-pat Scottish farmers and emigres. It seems like a generous deal indeed, but the fish ‘aint biting. Maybe Jamie needs his own advert on public access TV, and one of those big wibbly things that dances outside used-car lots.

“I’m Crazy Jamie Fraser, and I’m so crazy I’m about to give away 100 acres of land, THAT’S RIGHT, you heard me, 100 acres of land, to YOU, with no rent to pay! That’s right, NO rent to pay! Didn’t I tell you I was crazy? They don’t call me Only Mildly Mentally-Compromised Jamie Fraser, by God! You’ll pay NO rent, that’s zero pounds, until God himself serves up the first good harvest. Boy, if I was any crazier, I’d be disembowelling people in the forest whilst dressed as a fucking bear.”

No-one will take any land, though, because they see governor Tryon, to whom they will ultimately be in thrall, as yet another in a long line of English oppressors, taxing the farmers and their land to oblivion while growing fat and decadent on the ill-apportioned proceeds. Another rebellion is brewing, and this time Jamie won’t find himself on the side of people like Bryan from Banfshire, or Murtagh… Wait a minute, IT’S MURTAGH!!!

HOORAY!

Old grumpy-pants is alive and well, and living in Carolina as a blacksmith. He looks a lot older, like a Medicine Man-era Sean Connery, but he hasn’t lost any of his grit and fire. Murtagh’s the leader of the regulators, now: a tax-rebel; a righteous Robin Hood, still socking it to the man. Jamie won’t join Murtagh’s uprising against the unscrupulous tax collectors – he’s establishment now, after all. But neither will he stand in the way of the regulators’ efforts, because he’s still James bloody Fraser, ye ken.

I found Jamie and Murtagh’s reunion to be a lot more affecting than Jamie and Claire’s the previous season. Even Murtagh and Claire’s reunion was at least on a par. It’s all very lovely, which makes me worried, because if something’s lovely on Outlander that usually means that death, or rape – or someone being raped to death – is just around the corner.

Anyway, we’ll see. Back to happy. Before long, the whole gang’s kicking back in Fraser’s Ridge: Claire, Jamie, young Ian, Murtagh, John Grey, and Willie – Jamie’s little bastard (in more ways than one). John Grey has been raising Willie as his own, as he promised Jamie he would, the noble son-of-a-bitch.

I don’t understand the weight of suspicion and hostility that Claire directs at John Grey. Or why the show paints John, first and foremost, as some sort of love-sick stalker, ready to risk his adopted son’s happiness and sense of self for another shot at capturing Jamie’s affections. It devalues the character, and generates conflict where none exists. Sure, John obviously loves and admires Jamie, but can’t the writers simply let that be a facet of John Grey’s feelings and character, rather than the thing that dictates and defines them both? His motivations are surely a lot more complex than: ‘I wonder if this’ll be the thing to get my cock in Jamie’s gob.’

There’s hostility, too, between Murtagh and John as they tussle over the subject of the regulators, although John has no idea that the man he’s dining and debating with is the leader of the agitators. Jamie, as a new member of the landing gentry, finds his loyalties divided along lines of class, status and friendship. Murtagh wants him to use his influence with John Grey to get useful information from about Governor Tryon, but Jamie doesn’t want to betray his friend, especially in light of John’s role as father to his young son. Between John and Claire, and Jamie and Claire, and John, Jamie and Murtagh, it’s all a big chess game, and HEY, THEY’RE PLAYING ACTUAL CHESS, WHAT A GREAT METAPHOR!

Jamie gets a chance to bond with his son when John’s struck down with the measles. He takes Willie out into the forest to participate in stereotypically male pursuits like suffocating fish and shooting defenceless animals through the heart. Jamie systematically strips away William’s rank and privilege by forcing him to get his hands dirty by doing things like gutting and dressing the deer. It’s a very paternal urge, to reach out, to teach, to instill a little of himself in the boy’s character.

Jamie needn’t have concerned himself too much. There’s already plenty of him in there. When William sneaks off by himself to snag a fish he incurs the wrath of the Cherokee, who demand his blood as penance for the theft (that river’s a dangerous bloody thing – stay away from it in future!) William is only saved by a combination of Jamie blurting out the truth of the boy’s paternity, and his own honour and fortitude. Instead of walking away from the incident with his throat slit from ear to ear, he leaves with nothing more than a cut hand, a symbolic warning.

This traumatic event jogs William’s memories of his childhood, and Helwater. When William asks why Jamie didn’t look back at him when he was shouting and running after him on the day he left Helwater, Jamie says it was because he didn’t want to give false hope that they’d ever see each other again. It’s nice, then, that the episode ends with William leaving with John Grey, and turning to look straight into his father’s eyes.

That represents hope.

Which means you’re dead, William. Dead, dead, dead.

Sorry, mate. You’re in Outlander, not Downton Abbey.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

  • I was a little disappointed in Myers, the forest’s resident wilderness expert, during the bear saga. His knowledge of the natives, local wildlife and survival techniques didn’t count for much when he was dripping with blood and trying to squeeze his innards back into his ample belly. You failed, Fake News Bear Grylls, so move aside and make way for the real survivalist hero, Jamie Fraser: the mighty Bear-Batterer of Lallybroch.
  • Ah, you Americans and your famous ‘delicacies’. ‘Jerked meat’ means something a lot different in modern-day Scotland. As does ‘meat shed’. I think it’s a gay bar on Byres Road.
  • They made rifles bigger in the olden days, didn’t they? Mighty me, they were like bloody javelins.
  • I laughed when the subtitles popped up on screen when Murtagh was talking. He said, ‘Haud yer wheesht!’, and the subtitles said, (speaking in Gaelic). That’s not Gaelic, you silly sausage of a subtitler. That’s just slang. Póg mo thóin… now THAT’S Gaelic.
  • When Graham McNeil’s wife answered the door to Jamie in town, she gave him a look that suggested she was hankering after his little Greyfriar’s Boaby. I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of her.
  • Young William, with his long hair and half-confused pout, looks like Boaby, the man who works behind the bar of The Clansman in the Scottish comedy series ‘Still Game’. As a Scotsman, it gives me immeasurable pleasure to say that Willy looks like Boaby.
  • Jamie and Claire’s bawdy banter in the bath at the close of episode six was excruciating. Is it my imagination, or is there no longer any chemistry or passion between the two leads? It all seems so rote, so forced. Maybe that’s just a realistic portrayal of a marriage, I don’t know. What I do know is that young William looking back should’ve been the image to end that episode.
  • I’m looking forward to Brianna and Roger’s escapades in the past, which I’m sure must be coming in the next episode.

If you’ve got kids, grandkids or little people in your lives, read them this funny little story I wrote, Roy, Boy of Earth, and consider making a small donation to charity.

Follow me on Twitter @nottheclimber

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

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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 18th 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.

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Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 5 – 8

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

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

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Ep 13

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

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

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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.

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Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 5 – 8

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

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

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland