Tag Archives: time travel

Bingeing Outlander: Back to the Bygones

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I’ve resisted the call to watch Outlander for a very long time, mainly, I guess, because I assumed it would be the kind of lovey-dovey, over-enunciated, hammily-acted, costumed codswallop that’s had me almost breaking my thumb off against the buttons on TV remotes since I was a child. Upstairs Downstairs? Neither, thanks. Pride and Prejudice? Well, I take great pride in my prejudice against Jane Austen adaptations, if that’s what you mean. Downton Abbey? I’ll tell you what would make me ‘abbey’: chucking the TV out of the window before this horse-shit starts.

Still, I swithered. And kept swithering. I was intrigued. Yes, I strongly suspected that the greater part of Outlander would be a sickening, will-they-won’t-they, come-on-of-course-they-bloody-will, swash-buckling romance with a heavy emphasis on deep sighs of longing and forlorn staring that would have me rolling my eyes like a faulty fruit-machine, but there was also the promise of time travel, and if there’s any type of movie or TV show for which I’m a sucker it’s a fish-out-of-water time-travel story. That’s the element that wore me down and won me over.

It’s a long list, but my all-time time-travelling favourites are Bill and Ted, the story of two men – I forget their names – who travel through history kidnapping the great, the good and the ghastly to help them pass a high-school history exam; The Time Bandits, the story of a gang of dwarves on the run from God who kidnap a little boy and take him on time-trotting adventures through fissures in the fabric of reality; Doctor Who, the story of a time-travelling alien who, em… kidnaps… a series of men and women from throughout history and takes them on insanely dangerous adventures across time-and-space; and Army of Darkness, the story of Ash Williams, a former S-Mart employee, who is kind-of… well, em… kidnapped, I suppose… (Wait a minute… is it time travelling I love…or kidnapping?? Probably best not to look too deeply into that one) by Deadites, and hurtled through a portal in time that drops him into the magic-and-evil-infested Middle Ages. Hell, if we’re talking time-travelling adventures, I even loved Goodnight Sweetheart, even though in retrospect it was about as funny as having your teeth kicked out by a donkey.

And, of course, the Back to the Future trilogy goes without saying.

But it wasn’t just the time travel that tempted me. There was also the promise of the familiar; the local gone global. I live quite close to most of the locations in which they’ve filmed – and continue to film – significant chunks of the show, and it’s nice to see your part of the country being the centre of attention for a change. The vast majority of the movies and TV shows I’ve watched throughout my life have been filmed in either the US or Canada, two places I’ve never visited, a fact that has denied me the opportunity to turn excitedly to my family half-way through a 90s action movie and say: ‘Ooooh, see that shop they’re fighting outside in that scene? I bought a fanny-pack in there when I was on holiday with your Aunty Jean’. Thanks to the bulk of Outlander being filmed within a fifty-mile-radius of my home, I recognised my chance finally to join in.

I’m not just familiar with many of Outlander’s filming locations; I’m intimately familiar with them. They’re a part of my life and history: Culross Palace and its gardens; Muiravonside Country Park; Callendar Park; Linlithgow Palace – they’ve even filmed scenes in the park in Polmont, just a few minutes’ drive up the road from me, where we still take our sons to run, explore and play.

So screw you, New York, New York, I thought to myself. It was Scotland’s turn: my turn. I looked forward to pointing at the screen and saying things like: ‘Oooh, I stood on some dog-shit there last week, right there, where that man’s having his head chopped off by an axe,’ and ‘Oooooh, I had my first date there, right next to that tree where that man’s being raped.’

I guess – being Scottish myself – that the production’s Scottishness was also a powerful draw. When you learn that an American authoress and an American production company have teamed up to create something they claim is a plausible swords-and-shagging epic set in the murky, murderous past of your own ancestral culture, you want to check up on its quality and authenticity. You want to know if it’s going to be stirring and emotionally affecting, like Braveheart, or full of screamingly ridiculous historical impossibilities and utter bullshit, also like Braveheart.

And you want to make sure that you and your people aren’t being unceremoniously ‘Groundskeeper Willied’. Scottish people have a long history of being portrayed on screen as any number of condescending or insulting stereotypes, from noble savages, to quirky old mystics brimming over with folk-tales and old-wifey-wisdom, to drunks, druggies, madmen and wash-women. It’s heart-breaking that some of the most authentically Scottish characters ever committed to the big screen are in Trainspotting. Was Outlander going to do us Scots proud, or was it going to offer up yet another round of tartan-box kitsch, craven historical inaccuracies or poverty-porn pish?

Well, folks, it’s time to find out for myself.

Over the next few weeks – up until the soon-to-be-aired fourth season’s mid-season finale on December the 9th – I’m going to be bingeing my way through the series to date, and giving my thoughts on the drama as it unfolds, in little easy-to-digest 3-5 episode chunks. Who knows? Some of these thoughts might even be insightful and provocative, but I wouldn’t hold out too much hope for that.

In any case, I hope you’ll join me on my binge. Whether I end up loving or loathing Outlander, you can be sure of one thing: we’re going to have fun together.

I hope we will anyway…

Maybe.

Binge Diary 1 coming on Wednesday the 24th.

BEGIN THE BINGE HERE

Jackson’s Brain on Insane Child Sex Rampage

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jackoDozens of LA police strike teams were mobilised yesterday in a bid to neutralise Michael Jackson’s reanimated brain, which had escaped captivity and gone on a horrifying 12-hour child sex-attack marathon.

Police were first alerted to the atrocity by kindergarten teacher Jizzia Johnston, 36, who was teaching her class when Jackson’s brain struck.

‘I heard thumps on the class window, and all of the kids screamed,’ said Johnston. ‘I looked round, and saw why they were screaming. There was a chimp banging a brain on the pane. And the brain was going crazy, sucking on the glass like one of those facehuggers from the Alien films. The chimp was whacking off. ‘

Scientists had been conducting tests on Jackson’s brain at a secure facility in the north of LA, in a two-prong bid to ‘resurrect’ the drug-addled child-abuser and to isolate and remove those parts of his brain responsible for his deeply naughty behaviour, before finding him a new host body and sending him back through time in order to stop himself from abusing.

Big-shot scientist that thinks he’s better than the rest of us, Tony Cawziecowolski, explained: ‘Re-animation of a dead junky’s brain?: easy. Engineering his brain so that it had the power of independent movement?: piece of piss. The hard part was stopping Jackson from shagging DVD box-sets of Home Alone.’

Cawziecowolski believes that Jackson called on Bubbles the Chimp to help rescue him from captivity.

‘I wish I’d recognised the signs,’ he continued. ‘Jackson would sit on my desk and pulsate manically for hours on end. I just assumed he was engaging in some sort of ingenious ‘brain wank’. In reality he was harnessing his evil in order to telepathically summon his pet monkey to break him out of jail. But hindsight’s 20/20.’

Bubbles breached lab security at approximately 0645, and incapacitated 17 members of staff during the mission to liberate his former master. ‘It was like something out of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but obviously with a heavier plot emphasis on the theft of a famous paedophile’s brain.’

Bubbles’ last stand.

There was a stand-off with armed police in the playground of the kindergarten school, which culminated in Bubbles being gunned down by rapid assault fire just as he was at the point of masturbatory climax. One of the armed officers who participated in the take-down, Gerry Mazterphucker, was visibly shaken by events.

‘I dunno, man,’ he said, tears snaking down his face. ‘What can I say, I just shot a monkey. Every time I think about that glistening monkey jizz, like morning dew, hardening to crust on its dead little paw, I start to cry. Game over, man. Game over.’

Another officer, ‘Crazy’ Charlie Ramirez, said: ‘Holy shit, son, last month I was on traffic, and this month I get to shoot motherfucking monkeys? This is the kind of shit I signed up for. Fuck you, monkeys, fuck you! Next time I want to beat a tapir to death! WOOHOO! America rules ass, son!’

During the gun-fight, Jackson managed to squidge off into the undergrowth. All that was left of his horrifying attack were the words ‘MMM CHIDREN’ scrawled on the windowpane with brain goo. Pretty good spelling for a disembodied brain.

Over the course of the afternoon Jackson’s brain was spotted moonwalking provocatively past a child’s picnic, gazing menacingly at a school bus, and in one terrifying instance was caught on CCTV palpating the face of a sleeping child. But, for horror, nothing tops the moment at 1615 when Jackson leapt past a line of kids at a road crossing and slapped each and every one of them in the face with his throbbing cerebellum.

Police strategists managed to lure Jackson to Macaulay Culkin’s house, within which Culkin had set up a series of ingenious traps, like swinging paint cans and doorbells with makeshift flame throwers in them and that. Jackson was only – and finally – apprehended after he was startled by the sounds of what he believed to be machine gun fire coming from the living room, and slipped on a pile of bouncy balls. Jackson’s brain was returned to the scientists.

“It’s the kids, Marty. Something has got to be done about the kids.”

‘Actually, we kind of fucked up,’ admitted Cawziec… Caws… Cocacol… the scientist, ‘As soon as we got Jackson back, we were so keen to make lemonade from these lemons that we maybe acted a bit hastily. We immediately fitted his brain into a new host body and sent him back to his own past. The trouble was, we sent him back a bit too far. And, unfortunately, instead of acting to alter the course of his tragic life for the better, Jackson decided to sexually molest his own boyhood self. thereby causing all of this shit in the first place. Still, Beat It‘s a great song, right?’

‘Whoops,’ he added.

Undeterred, the same team will be sending Rolf Harris into space in 2015: dead or alive.

‘There’s no scientific benefit this time,’ the scientist admits. ‘It’ll just be for a laugh.’

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