Jamie Andrew With Hands

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

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 4 – 5

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 6 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 11 – 13

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 1 – 3

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

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

Posted on May 2, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

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 18^th 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

READ THE REST – Click below

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

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 4 – 5

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 6 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 11 – 13

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 1 – 3

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 7 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 8 – 10

Posted on February 14, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Part 13: Claire’s going on holiday. Jamaica? Yeah, I kidnapped her

Wherein Jamie’s out to sea, even before he sets foot on a boat.

Sometimes mid-life crises hit husbands gently, with a force equivalent to a child throwing a Syrian dwarf hamster at your stomach. Maybe the husband will buy a second-hand leather jacket and start calling women ‘babe’, or join the gym only to a) go six times before giving it up, or b) die of a massive heart attack on the cross-trainer.

Sometimes mid-life crises hit a little harder – at approximately the force of a Labrador careening into your legs in a tight corridor because he thinks there’s a plate of sausages behind you. In cases like this the husband might splash out on a new sports car he can ill-afford, or start an affair with a woman from his office who will almost certainly be called Shelley.

And sometimes, just sometimes, mid-life crises hit with such prolific and destructive force that they make the Richter scale look like a tool for measuring farts. To help you gauge and visualise the impact, imagine a Shetland pony running into a nuclear reactor with fifty landmines strapped to its back.

Or forget the animals altogether and simply imagine Jamie Fraser: the man whose mid-life crisis downgrades most regular crises to the severity of a child stubbing their toe against a bouncy castle.

Jamie certainly knows how to make himself at home ‘over the hill’ by throwing caution to the wind: printing and slinging seditious pamphlets, living in a brothel, selling illicit booze, covering up murders. Still, Claire loves a bad boy, so most of that stuff, though borderline, is definitely excusable. What elevates Jamie’s mid-life crisis to the nuclear league and puts him on Claire’s shit-list quite possibly forever is his rather dubious decision not only to stick his love caber into the porridge pot of the woman who once tried to have the love of his life burned alive at the stake, but also to marry her. Marrying Captain Black Jack would’ve been less controversial.

Jamie proceeds to add insult to injury by falling back on a most unholy trilogy of flimsy justifications for marrying Laoghaire: “Oh, but I thought you were dead”; “Well, you’re the one who told me to be kind to the lass”; and “you left me”. Oh, Jamie, Jamie, Jamie. You’ve survived so much. Whippings, wars, duels, disease. Why would you choose to commit suicide now? Men have an awful habit of resorting to deflection, projection and scapegoatery when they should be retreating and scurrying with the urgency of Bonnie Prince Charlie excusing himself from a pub brawl.

Claire and Jamie’s argument over Laoghaire is raw, uncertain, vicious and illogical, which is to say that it’s absolutely pitch-perfect. Their fight contains a lot of shouting, panting, pulling, grabbing, hitting, pushing and kissing. It’s a battle that quickly transforms into a sex scene, something you don’t see that much of anymore in this #metoo age. Perhaps in recognition of the changed times in which we now live, Claire ends their little tussle in a dominant position, perched astride Jamie’s hips.

Just as they’re about to burn off all that rising tension with a well-timed angry fuck, they’re interrupted by Jenny, who enters stage left with a cold jug of water (it’s a case of jugus interruptus, you might say), the sort of treatment usually reserved for horny alley-cats wailing outside bed-room windows.

Most of Jamie and Claire’s stay at Lallybroch is awkward as hell. Jenny doesn’t trust anything that Claire says, or has ever said. It’s fair to say that Claire has an impossible task ahead of her if she wants to assauge Jenny’s feelings over her disappearance, absence and ‘resurrection’. How would you even start?

“Hi, Jenny. You know how you have no concept of conventional flight, the combustion engine, radio waves or even life outwith the confines of the land upon which you were born? Well I just wanted to tell you that I’m a time traveller, and we’ve got these things called televisions and space rockets and condoms, and I walked through some magical stones back to the future where I had your brother’s baby two hundred years after you were dead. See, I knew you would understand.”

‘You look well,’ Claire tells Jenny. Jenny’s response is frosty. Hell, my response was frosty, too. She looks well, Claire? WELL? She looks exactly the bloody same, Claire. At least they gave Jamie a pair of glasses to suggest the passage of time.

Jamie doesn’t have any smoother a time of it, ancestral home or no ancestral home. Both his sister and his brother-in-law blame him for leading young Ian astray, and are angry at him for lying to them about the lad’s whereabouts. I think it must be Jamie’s destiny forever to be thrown shade by a guy with a limp. Or maybe something else is going on here. Are deliberate parallels being drawn between Colum and Dougal, and Ian and Jamie? After all, Jamie is the heir apparent to Dougal’s fire, fury and passion, even if he’s never shared his vanity and moral flexibility.

The Lallybroch-centric episode is very, very funny, and Sam Heughan gets most of the best lines, which he delivers with impeccable comic timing. I’m thinking about the moment when Claire accuses Jamie of having fathered Laoghaire’s children, and he responds haughtily: “There are other redheaded men in Scotland, Claire.” Or when he’s being nursed by Claire after being peppered with buckshot by a vengeful Laoghaire, and he says to Claire, with understandable confusion: “Can you please explain how jabbing needles in my arse is going to help my arm?”

Divorced from his illegal income stream, and perhaps about to become divorced from Laoghaire, Jamie is in dire need of fresh income. He remembers the treasure box he discovered on Silkie Island when he was on the run from Ardsmuir prison, and takes Claire and young Ian with him to retrieve it. Almost as soon as poor, tragic, dutiful Ian swims out to the island he’s captured by pirates, or press-ganged by soldiers, bundled into a boat and whisked away.

If he though things were awkward at Lallybroch before, just wait until he has to explain to Ian’s mum and dad that he’s cast their son in a live-action adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’. Perhaps realising how awful this would be, Jamie decides instead to exploit his nautical connections to find out where Ian’s vessel is headed, and secure passage on a ship that’s going the same way.

Onboard their ship is a horseshoe that the sailors believe they all must touch at the start of their voyage to ensure good fortune. Jamie and Claire are living proof that some luck is so powerfully bad that no blessed artefact or amulet has the power to counteract it. I’m surprised it didn’t blow up when they rubbed it.

Because life doesn’t like to stop teasing and tormenting the cursed couple for more than a second, Fergus and his new wife-to-be, Marsali – daughter of the dreaded Laoghaire – have also insinuated themselves onboard.

Marsali definitely has her mother’s obdurate, obnoxious, semi-psychopathic, spiteful nature, which begs the question: what does the passionate, romance-soaked Fergus see in such a woman? I can only suppose that the fires of her fury, when channelled through her heart and, erm… various other organs, must make for an all-consuming and volcanic coupling that’s impossible to resist. I fear, though, that Fergus – cad though he is – may be the moth to Marsali’s flame (that was undoubtedly the genesis of Jamie’s attraction to Laoghaire, too).

In any case, it’s a mark of how good an actress Lauren Lyle is that she manages to conjure a plethora of bitchy facial expressions that would invite a five-knuckled caress from even the gentle fingers of a hunger-weakened Gandhi.

While Fergus may well be hurtling towards spiritual and sexual doom, it’s nevertheless nice that after all of the hardship he’s experienced or witnessed in his life – the loss, the separation, the rape, the battles, the fires – and despite his own sexually carnivorous nature, the thing that he clings to, the main lesson he’s learned from everything that’s happened to him and the people around him, is that love conquers all. Fergus cites Jamie and Claire’s love story as the inspiration for his own…

…I have absolutely no idea why.

The longer Jamie and Claire’s love saga goes on, the less inspirational and the more nightmarish it becomes. For every night of sweat-soaked passion they’ve shared, they’ve had to spend six weeks trying to break each other out of jail, and for every mini-break they’ve enjoyed they’ve had to spend twenty years apart raising children with other people. Still, filtered through the prism of youth, I suppose almost everything can start to seem romantic, even the song the rowdy sailors like to sing below decks about a woman leaping around with a lobster on her cunt, which is destined to become a top ten hit.

The sea is a cruel mistress. You could say that Jamie takes to it like a duck to water, but only if the duck you’re talking about is drunk, has no legs, only one wing and half a beak. Jamie spends most of his time chucking up his gruel, or complaining that he’s about to. Thank goodness good old Mr Willoughby is on hand to cure his sea-sickness by turning him into a human pin-cushion. An effective technique, but hardly a convenient or portable one.

It’s easy to see why life at sea might make Jamie feel a little delicate. A combination of the show’s noticeably bigger budget and the skill of its behind-the-scenes team really helps bring to life every creak, swell and sway of life on-board ship. You need your sea-legs just to watch it. The sea-bound segments are impressive and convincing, whether the ship’s being beaten by waves, or sitting dead in the water, a lonely boat perched on an unwavering sea of glass.

When the drinking water runs low and the wind ceases to blow, Willoughby’s called upon to treat a much greater malaise than Jamie’s occasional habit of hurling his breakfast overboard; a spiritual sickness; a supernatural sickness that’s spread across the entire ship, driving the men to attribute blame for their litany of misfortunes to Hayes, the poor wretch who may have forgotten to rub the lucky horseshoe at the start of the voyage. The men want to sacrifice him to the sea; drown their scapegoat deep within Davey Jones’ locker. It’s the sort of malevolent, ritualised behaviour that appears to be the default setting for powerless, baying mobs. I suppose when it seems like nothing can be done, killing someone sure seems like doing something.

Willoughby distracts the horde from their murderous intent by reading from his unfinished autobiography – a project he earlier revealed he’d started in order to make peace with his demons. Initially, his life’s work appears to comprise page upon page of prunus pornography, all apricot-tits and warm peach mounds, but Willoughby’s story quickly takes on a sad, dark shape that’s closer in tone to a suicide note than a love letter. Back in China as a younger man, Willoughby refused to give up his manhood and become a eunuch. For this cultural outrage he was banished, disgraced, and exiled. In a cruel twist of fate, he was made a eunuch after all by the palpable, almost solid disgust of his new host country’s native women.

Willoughby – or perhaps we should more accurately and respectfully call him Yi Tien Cho – thought that the best way to let go of his pain would be to write it all down, but it turns out that the best way to let it all go was to, well, let it all go. Literally. He drops the pages off the side of the boat, only for them to be picked up by the wind, signalling to the angry sailors that luck was back on their side.

All that talk of fruit must have made Claire and Jamie horny, because they went off to fuck on some guy ropes. Shortly afterwards, Claire gets kidnapped. See what I mean?? Still, Outlander has obviously learned the lessons of Moonlighting, Friends and Frasier: unite your star-crossed lovers at your peril. Finding ways to drive them apart is the key to a more satisfying and dynamic narrative, the only trouble being that if you separate your leads once too often it all begins to feel a little preposterous. Outlander may be on the cusp of this, but, for now, it works.

The second on-the-ocean instalment of this unofficial sea-faring trilogy is called Heaven and Earth, something that the characters all try to move in their efforts to rescue each other. Naturally, Jamie is furious at the captain of his ship for agreeing to Claire’s ‘transfer’ (slash kidnapping) to the Navy vessel. She may be there to help contain a typhoid outbreak, but she’s still there against her will. Jamie tries to overpower the captain with the sheer force of his fury, spearheading a shooty-knifey stand-off above decks. He fails, and ends up being slung below decks in a jail cell. Both heaven and earth remain in place.

Jamie, of course, is no stranger to confinement, and won’t let a little thing like being trapped in a tiny, grated box surrounded by wet rats and his own hideous vomit stop him from hatching a plan to take over the ship, Bruce Willis-style. It’s then up to Fergus to move heaven and earth to save Jamie from himself, teaching his mentor a long-overdue lesson in patience and humility in the process – not to mention saving his life.

Claire is trying to move heaven and earth to save a ship-load of sailors who’ve been struck down with typhoid. What a distressing sight. Hundreds of Englishmen huddled together on a boat, projectile vomiting, the whole place smelling of shit and rum. These are scenes not destined to be repeated until the advent of 18-30 booze cruises many hundreds of years hence. Curiously enough, those future cruises will almost certainly have on their passenger manifesto a Dutchman with a fondness for drinking pure alcohol until the point of death, and an English teenager styling himself as Mr Pound.

Claire’s modern approach to medicine is mumbo jumbo to this new gaggle of no-nonsense sailors of the 18^th century. Not for the first time Outlander makes us snort and tut at the ignorance of our ancestors, only for a little voice at the back of our minds to go, ‘Pssssst, have you looked on-line recently? Have you spoken with your friends and kinsfolk? We’re pretty mental ourselves.’

The first time it happened was during Claire and Geillis’ witch-trial in season one, when our derision was tempered by the realisation that flat-earthers, creationists, and climate-change deniers all exist in the twenty-first century. This time, no sooner have we cast judgement upon the sailors for their ignorance of – and in some cases violent opposition to – Claire’s efforts to cure the crew, than we remember that the WHO has called the very modern anti-vax movement one of the most serious threats to global health in 2019. If Claire’s parents had been anti-vaxxers, she would’ve been dead ten minutes in to episode ten. Or else she would never have boarded the Navy ship, and all of the people on-board would’ve perished. Even the goats.

Claire also vows to move heaven and earth to save Jamie from the hangman’s noose she discovers is waiting for him in Jamaica. Tompkins – he of the mangled eye – was press-ganged into service aboard the ship, and once he recognised Jamie duly reported him to the captain of the Navy ship as a man wanted for murder and sedition. The captain is largely indifferent to Jamie’s crimes and is especially grateful to Claire for her help, but nonetheless stands to snag a juicy promotion if he turns Jamie in to the authorities.

If it looks too late for Jamie, it’s already too late for poor Mr Pound. What a pleasant, decorous young chap. I was sad to see him go as a character, and really enjoyed the dynamic he shared with Claire. Their scenes together were sweet and touching. I knew his fate was sealed the moment he made Claire his surrogate mother and taught her the fine art of posthumous nose-stitching.

It doesn’t bode well that when Claire plunged overboard the director made a visual connection with the be-shrouded Mr Pound’s final dip into the sea. Let’s hope Claire’s on-going voyage isn’t destined to be quite as vertical as Pound’s. Still, in a trio of episodes where scapegoats feature heavily, it’s nice to see actual goats indirectly helping one of our heroes to escape.

The moral of the story here: always be nice to drunk Dutchmen.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

Instead of belting Ian for his disobedience at Lallybroch, Jamie suggests a different punishment. What exactly are they making Ian do with that manure? Is he making patty-cakes? Cow-pat pancakes? It looks like the most disgusting cookery programme ever made. Gordon Ramsay’s McKitchen Shitemares.

How the hell have I learned how to spell Laoghaire, but still can’t spell diarheoa (sic) without consulting the spell-checker?

Let the English cunt stand up for herself.” It’s nice to see that Laoghaire’s still as charming as ever.

Kebbie-lebbie – I like that phrase. I’m going to use it as often as I can. Plus, ‘A Kebbie-Lebbie with Laoghaire’ sounds like it should be a TV show.

My partner agreed with me that Elias Pound looked like all three Hansen Brothers at the same time. But when Pound was dropped into the ocean, she didn’t agree that it was funny for me to start singing ‘Mmmm Plop.’

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

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 4 – 5

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 6 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 3, Eps 4 – 5

Posted on January 22, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Part 11: Come Hell or Helwater

Wherein romance relegates the Fraser children to obscurity

(When I write these binge-watch diary entries I normally tackle three or four episodes at a time, but in this installment, and the next, I’m going to cover smaller blocks of two episodes. After watching episodes four to seven it struck me that a 2/2 split was narratively and thematically tidier. If you think that means I’ll be writing less, then, hi, you must be new to my work.)

I’m thankful for having been born in a place as beautiful and benign as Scotland, in a time relatively free from turmoil. Every era has its own particular battles and hardships, of course, and while we have Brexit, global warming and the looming threat of the Spice Girls reunion, at least I’m not: a) dying from cholera on my sixth birthday, b) being chased through the glens by an angry redcoat with a rusty musket, or c) playing ‘Mind that bomb’ in the trenches of Ypres.

I love Scotland and being Scottish – I love our proud history, heritage and humour; our rich culture; the way we’re regarded with such fondness by the rest of the world – but I’m by no means some short-bread-tin thumping, sword-dancing, past-harkening Celtophile who views the world through a tartan filter. I may be a Scottish nationalist – and have been known to carry the odd romantic notion around with me – but I’m a civic nationalist at heart. I feel no enmity towards the English; I love many of them as brothers (and sisters, especially my own actual sister, who was born in Essex, and so is technically English). People are people, and should always be judged on their own merits.

That being said, for all that the pursuit of pan-global solidarity is laudable, we Scots are different from the rest of the world, and certainly different from the rest of the UK. We have our own laws, our own courts, our own unique cultures and languages, our own shared stories, history and experiences, our own parliament, our own institutions, our own aims and values; and a trend-setting, progressive outlook on the world. We’re different enough to desire and deserve a country of our own. And, let’s not forget, ‘our’ country would still have been ‘ours’ if history had played out just a little bit differently. Claire and Jamie: I blame you.

So just to summarise: Scottish, Nationalist, peaceful, peace-loving, love the English.

Except…

The Earth’s skin is a thin veneer, beneath which earthquakes and volcanoes ready themselves to burst, and, I guess, so too is the nationalist psyche. All it takes is five minutes of Braveheart or a reminder of the existence of Margaret Thatcher to transform the average Scot into a flesh-and-blood incarnation of Groundskeeper Wullie, ready to tear their shirt open, grab a claymore and run towards York shouting ‘FREEEEEEEEEDDDOOOOOOOMMMMMM!’

I experienced a little taste of that feeling during the opening minutes of the Jamie-centric episode ‘Of Lost Things’, when the Earl of Ellesmere looked at Jamie and uttered the line: ‘If a child of mine had hair that colour I’d drown him before he drew his second breath.’ It filled me with a sudden, unexpected and all-consuming rage, that was only sated when Jamie walloped him in his stupid face with a bullet towards the episode’s end.

It’s little wonder that UK Prime Minister David Cameron was reportedly so concerned about the ‘Outlander effect’ in the run up to the Scottish independence referendum that he arranged a meeting with Sony to try to mitigate and control it. Diana Gabaldon later went on record to state that, to the best of her knowledge, the delay in bringing the show to the UK (it premiered in the UK many months after its US debut, and only after the independence issue had been ‘settled’) had nothing whatsoever to do with politics. It’s almost irresistible to conclude that it was. If the UK government is now taking pains to rebrand Scottish produce as British in Scottish supermarkets in a bid to dampen our sense of national identity, then it makes sense that they’d cut a deal to delay transmission of a TV show capable of turning even the most timid and anglicised of Scots into chest-beating, dirk-wielding warriors.

I wish Jamie would reclaim some of his trademark fighting spirit. If anyone needs an infusion of fury, it’s Jamie in ‘Of Lost Things’. He’s never seemed less warrior-like than he is here (with one notable, and harrowing, exception from the first season, of course), worn down to a nub by his heavy losses and hardships.

He’s now a groomsman working on the Dunsany family’s English estate, which, on balance, is probably a lot better than being chained to a galley ship and rowed across the Atlantic Ocean to a life of toil and turmoil on untamed lands. The reprieve is courtesy of his benefactor, Lord John Grey, who, as well as being indebted to Jamie for his life, also has the hots for him. We’re talking full-blown hots; you know: posters on the wall; inscriptions in permanent marker suffixed by IDT DNDT; nights spent converting the letters of both their names to numbers to calculate their love-match compatibility. Johnny boy’s got it bad. Without a doubt, Jamie has not only fate to thank for his good fortune, but genetics, too, both for making him such a handsome bastard, and for making John Grey gay.

It’s lucky too that Lord Dunsany is such a noble man. He knows that Jamie (or Alexander Mackenzie as he’s now known) is a Jacobite and former prisoner, but chooses to give him the benefit of the doubt, recognising that they’ve grit, integrity and sorrow in common. Lord Dunsany further promises to conceal Jamie’s true identity even from his own wife, who is still grieving the death of their soldier son on the battlefield at Prestonpans.

Jamie’s role forces him to spend a lot of time with the two Dunsany sisters, one of whom, Isobel, is courteous, noble, and all-round nice (‘It pains me that my father confines such magnificent creatures,’), while the other, Geneva, is wild, haughty, cruel and condescending. Isobel looks upon Jamie as a human being and an equal; Geneva looks down upon Jamie as a cat would a mouse.

When I hear the name ‘Geneva’ it transports my thoughts to Switzerland; which in turn takes them to clocks, rugged landscapes, and Dignitas, the institution where terminally-ill people go to end their suffering. It’s quite an apt volley of associations where the character of Geneva is concerned: she’s terrain that’s hard to navigate; she reminds us, and Jamie, of the time he’s spent and the time he’s lost; and she’s a place where men with few options left open to them go to die.

When Jamie dropped Geneva in the muck following what I’m content to call her false-flag nag fall I was certain he’d end up a human metronome swinging on the end of a hangman’s rope. But it quickly became apparent that Geneva’s teasing and confrontational jibes were a somewhat childish manifestation of her desire for him. Most things about Geneva are childish.

Though attractive and sensuous, she was at root a spoiled and sheltered adolescent, deeply unconcerned with the rights and feelings of others, and completely uninterested in limiting her impulses. I’m not sure if she acted this way because she was hopelessly narcissistic, or simply rich. I guess the two aren’t mutually exclusive. In any case, she elected to pursue Jamie through less-than-traditional romantic means. And by that I mean she discovered Jamie’s secret identity and used it to, em, leverage him.

It’s odd to call this a rape scene, even though it kind of, maybe, sort of is. Is it? I concede I may be guilty of some double-standards here. It’s hard to push back against a life-time of culturally-reinforced gender stereotypes that say men can’t be raped by women. Not only men, but teenage boys, too. While a male teacher who seduces one of his female pupils is unambiguously decried a criminal and a sex offender, we allow for shades of grey when the gender roles are reversed – informally and conversationally, if not legally (and as long as the victim isn’t one of our own sons or brothers). The implication is clear: men are mighty, women are weak; a stiff penis implies cast-iron consent; and men are horny machines who would never pass up an opportunity for sexual release.

Rape, abuse of power, blackmail, unethical and underhand, call it what you will, it’s also undeniably erotic. When Jamie realises how vulnerable and naive Geneva is behind the brashness and bombast he’s able to reassert some form of control, and wields it with sensitivity and passion. Geneva, in her own way, is being held hostage sexually, having been promised to the perfectly hideous Earl of Ellesmere, and Jamie – though he has every right to feel violated and aggrieved – responds compassionately.

What happens between Jamie and Geneva is a through-the-looking-glass re-imagining of Jamie and Claire’s first love scene, this time with the roles reversed. Here, Geneva is the virgin, and Jamie the tender and patient mentor. Geneva’s resemblance to Claire is no accident. He misses companionship. He misses sex. He misses Claire. He misses love.

‘I love you,’ declares Geneva, which Jamie quickly but kindly shoots down. ‘Love is when you give your heart and soul to another, and they give theirs in return.’

Love is Jamie and Claire.

Geneva falls pregnant, and later dies in childbirth. Her baby – their baby – almost dies shortly thereafter, when the Earl of Ellesmere threatens to murder it with a knife, suspecting his young wife, quite correctly, of having cuckolded him.

Jamie tries to defuse the situation, standing between one Lord with a knife, and the other with a pistol. It’s a testament to how thoroughly Outlander has established its brutal credentials that I wasn’t really sure if the baby would survive. A commendably tense stand-off that ends, as previously mentioned, with Jamie saving the life of his secret love-child with the help of a bullet.

The next episode – as you’re all acutely aware – brings us one step closer to the moment fans had been waiting for since the end of the second season: a long overdue break from Brianna.

I’m being devilish, of course. It’s the reunion of our stone-crossed lovers, an event that must’ve coaxed from Outlander’s loyal viewership (who’d waited a year or more for it to happen) a squeal loud enough to smash every window in the Empire State Building twice over, and caused thousands of bottom lips to blubber and jump like washing machines on their final spin cycles. The cumulative force of all the gasps that were surely gasped when Claire and Jamie locked eyes again after twenty years apart would’ve created a vacuum powerful enough to suck the earth inside of itself and spit itself back out again, before shattering in a cosmic thunder of swoons.

Me? I just shrugged and went, ‘That’s nice’, which prompted my partner to look at me like I’d just force-fed a child to a lion. (Hey, I cried when Claire visited Jamie’s Culloden graveside. I cry at ‘Up’ and ‘Watership Down’, what else do you want from me?) I’ll concede that the reunion was a jaw-dropping moment, despite its inevitability. It was also a Jamie-dropping moment. The Laird of Lallybroch went down like a bagpipe filled with bowling balls. Making Jamie the fainter was a neat touch; a funny and memorable subversion of the ‘over-emotional woman’ trope we’ve been conditioned to expect from the genre.

Before the universe could bring them back together, each of the lovers first had to walk away from their children: Jamie, because he would never be able to stake a claim to his lad’s paternity (how very Dougal-ish of him); would be in big trouble if he did, and might not want to even if he could, since it was clear that his boy was developing into a desperately kickable little arsehole; and Claire, because… well… because… because she’s a bad mum. THERE I SAID IT!

Before Claire ran back to the past, she first tried to run from it. She left Scotland to return to Boston, content to leave Jamie in his long-ago grave. But there was no running. The past pursued her, in the form of Roger, who crossed the sea to be with Bri, and stayed to help mother and daughter crack the case of Jamie’s life after Culloden.

I haven’t read the books, but it was blatantly obvious from the moment we first saw Roger resplendent in his turtle-neck that he and Brianna were going to have their own for-the-ages-style romance. Claire was prepared to cross time for her love, Roger an ocean for his, gestures equal in scale when judged on their own merits.

I didn’t particularly like ‘Freedom and Whisky’, ‘Claire’s’ episode. It’s the first time it really felt as though Outlander was treading water. I understand that the episode’s function was to pave the way for the dramatic cliff-hanger in the episode’s closing minutes, but there was no excuse for the preceding thirty-five minutes to feel like an exercise in joining the dots. The dialogue was overly scripty, filled with blandishments and too many moments that were too on-the-nose, particularly the moon-landing analogy. There was no heat or depth. Just noise and light. And while I knew the story had to reunite Claire and Jamie, I didn’t buy how readily both mother and daughter accepted what was about to happen. I’ll say it again: CLAIRE’S A BAD MOTHER!

I like Caitriona Balfe. I do. She’s a good actress. And I like Claire, too. She’s tough, capable and head-strong. That being said, I occasionally struggle to sympathise with the character on account of how blinkered and selfish she can be, and that’s despite the good many times she’s risked her life to heal friends and enemies alike. Is it down to Caitriona? Good as she is, is she good enough to really fully sell it – the turmoil, the nuance, the duality? Yes. Yes, I think she is. Then what is it? Is it the character? Is it possible that Claire’s moral grit – the thing we admire most about her – is actually nothing more than a manifestation of pathological stubbornness? Is she exactly as selfish and dismissive as she sometimes seems?

I interrogated my own perspective so I could be absolutely sure that my feelings weren’t being skewered by gender bias. Men can sometimes judge women and fictional female characters more harshly than male characters, often without realising it, and while I’d like to think that I’m less prone to this kind of mental framing, it would be impossible for me to claim that I was exempt from it, or somehow above it.

Lots of Breaking Bad fans, not exclusively but predominantly male, regularly poured steaming hot mugs of scorn over the character of Skylar. Her crime appeared to be playing spoilsport to her dying husband’s burgeoning criminal career. They called her whiny, uptight, disloyal, a nag. Why couldn’t she just give Walter a break? This was an almost laughable mis-reading of the Whites’ marriage, and indeed all marriages in general, given that the average husband would struggle to avoid the divorce courts after an illicit blow-job, never mind the transformation from a mild-mannered chemistry teacher into a murderous, drug-dealing kingpin. We may have ‘loved’ Walt, even understood him, but he was always the villain. At least by the end of the second season.

Ditto Carmella Soprano. She was arguably complicit in her husband Tony’s crimes – or she was, at the very least, as one of her own therapists put it to her, ‘an enabler’ – and entered his world fully cognizant of the consequences of the mob lifestyle, but that doesn’t mean that she should’ve just quietly accepted his behaviour and infidelity without question or rancour. Standing up to her husband didn’t make her a nag, or a bitch, or a hypocrite. Just human. Just a fully-formed character.

So, no, I’m not some hard-hearted misogynist with an axe to grind, which means, ipso facto, that there must be something wrong with Claire. Sorry, Claire, but as you can see I’ve spread a thin layer of spurious reasoning across a handful of paragraphs and arrived at a cast-iron conclusion, from which there is no escape. Case closed. This court finds you guilty.

Guilty of being a dick.

Why wouldn’t you try to take Brianna with you at least? Why wouldn’t you promise to make some mark on history to let Brianna know you’d made it back safely? Why would you risk going in the first place when there was absolutely no guarantee you would emerge in the correct time-frame? Most strikingly of all, why wouldn’t you take a History of Scotland book with you – your very own Grays Sports Almanac?

Great Scot? Prove it, Claire.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

Doctor Who references abound in this show, at least to my consciousness. Roger is the Rory to Brianna’s Amy. Which makes Jamie…em, The Doctor? A larger-than-life, time-travelling figure! Or perhaps Claire’s the Doctor. I’ve already remarked in a previous binge-diary entry that she’d be a good choice as the Doctor (if they insist on continuing to go down that route).
Diana Gabaldon got the idea for Jamie from watching an episode of Doctor Who called The War Games, from Patrick Troughton’s tenure as the second Doctor.
‘Are you actually offering your body to me in payment if I promise to look after Wullie?’ My head swirled with euphemisms after John said this to Jamie.
‘History is just a story – it changes depending upon who’s telling it. History can’t be trusted.’ I liked this line of Brianna’s. Very apt.

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

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

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

Posted on January 4, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Part 10: Let me be dead frank with you

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

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

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

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

Oh.

Oh dear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How very hollow and perfunctory.

Bye, Frank.

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

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

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

But not quite.

Jamie has miles and miles to go before he sleeps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few final, disjointed thoughts

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

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

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 2, Ep 13

Posted on December 19, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

Part 8: Love Me Do

Wherein the years fly by, and everybody swaps tartan for turtle-necks

I’ve admitted in previous entries that I’m woefully ignorant of the intricacies of my own country’s history, and have tended to glean most of my impressions of life in the 18th century highlands from fictional sources, Braveheart and Rob Roy among them. Although Outlander is yet another fictional source to add to my pile of well-intentioned misinformation, atleast the show has recently half-inspired me, half-shamed me into picking up a few history books.

I’m ready to share with you already, class. The following passage, which appears early in John Prebble’s 1963 book ‘The Highland Clearances’, seemed to jump up from the page and lodge itself into my brain: “Beyond the mountains the Highlander was despised and hated. Mi-run mor nan Gall, he called it, the Lowlander’s great hatred. And this hatred was to persist until Walter Scott and his imitators took the Highlander out of his environment, disinfected him, dressed him in romance, and made him respectable enough to be a gun-bearer for an English sportsman, a servant to a Queen, or a bayonet-carrier for imperialism.”

I wonder if Outlander, despite its unflinching portrayal of blood, death and violence, has been guilty of this ‘disinfection’ of Highland culture through the romantic figure of Jamie. It’s certainly guilty of the disinfection of the Highland sex life. As I’m on record as saying, many times over, I rather imagine that sex in those days was more of a leaky, itchy, dirty, pus-filled sort of an affair, as opposed to a slow, sexy and cinematic experience: warts-and-all, both literally and figuratively.

Putting my sex obsession aside for a moment, I think it’s fair to say that late 18th century Scotland is unknowable. Not unimaginable, but unknowable. We can draw on a range of physical, historical and literary evidence to construct a workable facsimile of the era in our minds, or on our screens, but we’ll never know for certain if the world we’ve created looks and feels right. We’ll never know exactly what it smelled like, what it sounded like, what it tasted like. If the future is an undiscovered country, then the past is an undiscoverable one.

We don’t, however, have to travel too far back in time to reach the limits of our knowledge. It struck me while watching ‘A Dragonfly in Amber’ that the 1960s are just as unknowable to me as those heather-strewn highlands of the Jacobean era, despite the wealth of audio-visual evidence, and the functioning memories and recollections of the hundreds of millions of still-breathing people who lived through that decade in all its swinging glory. Although the 1960s finished only ten short years before my triumphant emergence into this world, they might as well have been the 1860s for all the connection I feel to them.

I suppose the recent past can seem so otherworldly in large part due to how quickly the world moves these days. Whereas the gaps between us used to be measured in multiples of generations, the size, scale and frequency of the leaps we’re now making in science, technology, industry, law, ethics, and art can render a person socially and technologically obsolete within a handful of years. There isn’t a generation gap: there’s a generation minefield, and it’s expanding every day.

TV and pop culture has helped both to enshrine and demarcate the different decades of the late 20th century. The 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s all seem unique and wholly distinct from one other, even though the blends, blurs and overlaps between them would’ve made them difficult to tell apart if not for our habit of partitioning the stories of our lives into acts, blocks and scenes.

Of course, each ‘distinct’ era means different things to different people depending upon which stage of their lives they’re experiencing as they pass through them. My great-grandmother, for instance, was unlikely to have spent the 1960s lounging around a squat, smoking joints and listening to the Monkees. Likewise, I’m reasonably sure that my grandmother didn’t shave her head on the morning of January the 1st 1980 and then spend the rest of the 80s togged up in denim, and throwing bricks at police cars while chanting ‘Death to Thatcher’s fascists!’

AMC’s stunning, 60s-set series Mad Men first brought the duality of the decades home to me. When Don Draper and his debauched colleagues in ad-land come into contact with 60s counter-culture, they’re amused, bemused and repulsed by it in equal measure. It runs past them, and over them, but not to them, or from them. Their world isn’t one of swinging hips, pop music and loose-fitting fashions, but of double-breasted suits, stiff upper lips, jaunty-angled hats and incredibly heavy-drinking at all times of the day and night. Don Draper may have been living through the 1960s when we met him, but he came of age in the 1940s, and that era and its attitudes left an indelible mark on his head, heart, and… many other organs, too. In many ways, the world that washes over us in our adolescence tends to preserve the larger part of us in, well… amber.

What, then, must it feel like for Claire, who began her journey at the end of World War 2, jumped to the beginning of the second Jacobite uprising, and now finds herself a middle-aged woman living in the age of beatniks, Beatles and Bob Dylan? Who is Claire now? And who are Claire and Jamie without each other?

‘Dragonfly in Amber’ sees Claire return to Scotland to attend the Reverend Wakefield’s funeral. Along for the ride is her now-adult daughter Brianna, who’s as snappy, sarcastic, and sassy as she is just occasionally very grating. The Reverend’s adopted son, Roger, serves as their host, splitting his time between eulogising, drinking whisky and rocking that faux folk-singer look. I’m pretty sure Roger is going to try to, if you’ll forgive the crudity, well… roger… Brianna. Frank is with them all in spirit, if not in body, on account of him being so hip that he’s actually dead.

He’s not the only one…

Back in 1746 – if you’ll permit me to nip through the stones for a second – it’s time to bid a rather gruesome farewell to Dougal.

I knew Dougal was going to die. Not only because narratively, and perhaps even historically, there was no other way, but because somebody let the cat out of the bag without meaning to. Or, I suppose you could say, they put the cat into the bag and killed it right there in front of me. It can be dangerous to share binge-watch re-caps in Outlander fan forums on Facebook when you’re seasons behind the herd, and happen to share a first name with one of the show’s main characters. One blissfully unaware lady accidentally tagged me in a post to tell me that Jamie killed Dougal, without meaning to tell me, or even realising that she had. Don’t cry for me, ladies and gentlemen. I knew the risks going in. Besides, the particulars of Dougal’s death were thankfully still surprising.

Dougal’s death felt a little sudden and perfunctory, but I guess the character had already made his big exit – certainly his emotional one – in the previous episode. The tears he cried over his brother’s body – and those he coaxed from my eyes – were plenty enough for both brothers. When it came time for Dougal to actually die, by a Clamie tag-team take-down no less, there was nothing left to feel.

Dougal’s fierce patriotism and nationalist zeal had been so firmly established that when he overheard Claire and Jamie discussing the best way to bump off Bonnie Prince Charlie, there was a grim inevitability to what came next. Culloden would’ve killed him anyway, but death decided to knock a day early for Dougal. I guess the bureaucrats in the afterlife had occupancy issues to consider for the following day, so tried to stagger admission a little on the Scottish side.

Ah, Claire and Jamie. You know what they say about the couple that kills together, don’t you? That they, uh… suffer… from… some description of shared post-traumatic stress disorder together…em, I’d assume. That’s not very catchy is it? I’ll try again: the couple who kills together, em, chills together?Would a murder bring you closer as a couple? I suppose it would. In its own perverse and shocking way, it’s rather an intimate act.

Even still… they probably shouldn’t make a habit of it.

Anyway, time to go back to the future.

The segments set in the 60s begin with Claire and Brianna being haunted by Jamie’s ghost, and end with the tantalising, life-altering revelation that Jamie might not be as dead as Claire had believed. Even though, you know, he’s still dead, because it’s 1968, and Scottish people don’t tend to live past 50, never mind 200. But you know what I mean.

Claire’s goodbye to Jamie, as she touched ‘his’ grave-marker on the battlefield at Culloden, wasn’t sad or emotionally affecting at all, and I DIDN’T CRY, SO FUCK OFF. (coughs) OK? I did NOT cry…

STOP GOING ON ABOUT IT, CAUSE IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.

OK?!

It’s hard for me to judge how well the Outlander team has captured the essence of 1960s Scotland, but it seems to me that you can’t go far wrong with putting everyone in turtle-neck sweaters.

Whatever else the show may have got right, I found myself deeply sceptical that an Inverness college in 1968 would have been a place of fervour, passion, bustle and enthusiasm. I cringed a little as Gillian Edgars – aka Geillis the Witchy Wifey – led a chant of ‘We are Scotland’ inside the college. It wasn’t the sentiment that registered as incongruous – after all, I’m a card-carrying member of the SNP, and passionately pro-independence to boot – but the articulation. I suspect that the American writers responsible for adapting this episode for TV, Toni Graphia and Matthew B Roberts, let a little bit of spiritual Americana bleed into the mix.

Just for future reference: modern and semi-modern Scottish people don’t tend to gather excitedly to pronounce unabashedly life-affirming sentiments to all who will listen; unless they’re so drunk that they can hardly hold their fish supper aloft, or locked in the fury or fervour of a football match’s assault-ridden aftermath.

In the corridors of colleges and polytechnics the country over – even now – Scotland’s youth are far more likely to be found huddled in hostile sub-groups, nary a second of eye-contact shared between them, kicking, shuffling and grumbling their way down the blank-walled corridors, with blank minds to match. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief long enough to believe in shards of stone that can send people hurtling through time, but a Scottish college brimming over with happy, healthy and reasonably attractive people? Come on, Outlander. There are limits to my credulity.

And who’s got these students whipped into a frenzy with all their talk of patriotic duty? Hey, everyone, Geillis is back! Well, she’s not back, if ye ken whit a mean, for she hasnae left yet. Och, dinna fash, it’s the time travel, ye ken. Spins yer heid, so it dis.

I guess it doesn’t matter too much to non-Scottish ears, but I always found something a little off-kilter with Geillis’ accent. It was almost-nearly-sort-of-okay, but the enunciation was too over-stated, and it had a weird twang to it. It was obvious to me that the actress wasn’t a native Scot, but I’ll tell you something, I respected her attempt all the more once I discovered that she was Dutch. Everybody thinks they can do a Scottish accent (in reality, there are a multitude of languages, accents and dialects in even this small country), but few can do it well. Lotte Verbeek, when I say that your attempt was almost-nearly-sort-of-okay, believe me, that’s a supreme compliment.

Geillis functions to bring us full circle to the first season of the show, and to make fresh connections going forward. The burning tableau Geillis makes of her alcoholic husband in the centre of the stones, and her subsequent disappearance into the winds of time, make a believer out of Brianna, who up until that point had been understandably sceptical of her mother’s story of having been impregnated by an 18^th century highlander after falling through a magical portal into the past.

Now that Brianna knows the truth, and Claire knows that Jamie survived Culloden, how will she get back to him? And how can she be sure she’ll be able to jump back into his time-line at the correct point – even supposing that he lasted much past Culloden? More importantly, how can she leave her daughter behind to go gallivanting through time once again?

Only time will tell.

Here’s to season three.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

There’s a lot of accent horseplay and sleight-of-hand in Outlander. In this episode, Brianna, a character born and raised in America, attempts a Scottish accent, which moves Roger to pronounce: ‘That is the worst accent I have ever heard.’ Even funnier, the actress who plays Brianna, Sophie Skelton, is actually English. So she’s an English woman pretending to be an American pretending to be Scottish. Hats off to you, Sophie. That’s a tricky hat-trick.
I’ve also just recently learned that Duncan Lacroix is ENGLISH! Jesus, that threw me. Again, there was always something just a teeny, tiny bit unusual about Murtagh’s accent, but Lacroix always inhabits Murtagh so completely, that I didn’t even stop for a second to consider the actor’s heritage.
There are a lot of lovely little touches in this episode. Like when Brianna asks her mother – ‘Do you miss him?’, meaning Frank, the man she’d always believed to be her father. The look of hesitation on Claire’s face, and the torturous duality of her answer, all unbeknownst to Brianna, works really well.
Claire to Roger, as Geillis’ husband smoulders nearby. “Roger – go get help.” Em, I think we’re a little past that, Claire. You’re not the world’s most perceptive doctor, are you?
There’s a neat, if a little on-the-nose, symmetry at play here: Geillis burned her husband, and got burned in return. Hell begets hell. And Dougal and Geillis beget Roger, by the looks of it, give or take a few begets.

I’ll be back with season three of my binge-watch in 2019. Thanks for coming on this journey with me, and rediscovering your favourite show through fresh eyes. It’s been a blast, and as much as I may sometimes jest, I’m really enjoying it so far.

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

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

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

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

Posted on December 8, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

Part 7: Death Becomes Them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there’s no changing Culloden.

See you for the finale.

A few final disjointed thoughts

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

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

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

Posted on November 24, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

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.

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

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

Posted on November 17, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

Part 6: Sometimes… they come back

Wherein of course he comes back.

Episode seven brings to a close the first phase of the Fraser’s failed time-travel experiment, a project I’m content to call ‘Cullodegeddon’. Despite Claire’s and Jamie’s best and most unscrupulous efforts, history is still drawing them inexorably towards the doomed battle. We know how this story ends, not just because history demands that it ends this way, but because we’ve already seen a distraught and defeated Claire lament her fate – and all their fates – in post-disappearance Inverness.

Now, however, having failed to stop the Jacobite rebellion by cutting off its funding, Claire and Jamie intend to defeat the curse of Culloden by winning the bloody thing – or at least trying their damnedest.

I’m watching the show along with my partner now, having caught up with her at the fifth episode of this season. Long-term relationships are amazing things, aren’t they? A good union never loses the capacity to surprise you. For instance, after all these years of near Olympic-level arguing, this week Outlander allowed us to add ‘the mechanics of time travel’ to the long list of things we’ve almost killed each other over.

“Don’t they realise that time is a closed loop and any effort to change the future is essentially futile?” I asked, though perhaps not as eloquently as I’m phrasing it now.

“Are you stupid?” raged my partner. “The future – i.e. 1940s Inverness – is already in Claire’s past, so whatever they do in their current present can’t change it, although that’s not to say that they won’t create an entirely different future.”

“You mean an alternate time-line, like in Back to the Future 2 when Biff stole the Almanac as an old man and gave it to his younger self in 1955, who used it to get super rich and transform himself into a somehow slightly-less unpalatable version of Donald Trump?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Preposterous.”

“Is not!”

“Is!”

“Is not!”

“Star Trek rules apply.”

“DO NOT!”

“DO TOO!”

“DON’T!”

“DO!”

“YOU’RE JUST LIKE YOUR MOTHER!”

“…YOU BLOODY WELL TAKE THAT BACK!”

Ronald D Moore

Although Outlander is based upon the books of Diana Gabaldon, conversations like this one remind me that sci-fi supremo Ronald D Moore is the man in the captain’s chair. Having cut his teeth on Star Treks The Next Generation and Deep Space 9, and the modern-day reboot of Battlestar Galactica, he’s the perfect choice to helm a show as otherworldly and ceaselessly peripatetic as Outlander.

Ron’s resume speaks for itself. He’s spent a career exploring the ins and outs of time travel; juggling large casts; telling grounded stories in fantastical settings; chronicling the sagas of weary protagonists who just want to go home (or find a new home), and pinging, plucking and unpicking the intricately inter-woven web of science and spirituality. He’s dealt with the perils of power and command, the interlocking of politics and religiosity, factional in-fighting, uprisings, rebellions, stretched loyalties, and infinitely more shades of grey than fifty.

Deep Space 9

Tonally, Outlander shares Deep Space Nine’s sense of humour, its belief in the strength and sanctity of the family unit (especially those families we construct from the friends and misfits around us) and a cautious optimism about the future. With Battlestar Galactica, it shares a grim and weary aura of danger and foreboding, a nihilistic streak a mile wide, and a sense that one must surrender to the journey, the chase, the pilgrimage, even if the destination isn’t always known (and sometimes especially when it is). With both shows it shares a sense of paranoia. Whom can we trust? Are the people around us who they say they are? Are we who we say we are? And, most strikingly, it shares a sense of prophecy and Godhood.

(Plus, is it just me who thinks of Klingons every time somebody says Lady Broch Tuarach? I keep expecting Claire to violently head-butt everyone to whom she’s introduced.)

In Deep Space Nine, Captain Benjamin Sisko was occasionally forced to lean into his (unasked for and unwanted) role as prophet/Emissary of the Bajoran people. He’d don the spiritual guise for utilitarian reasons or to dodge danger, and only when he felt there was no other option open to him. In a similar fashion, Claire occasionally throws on the invisible outer-wear of the white witch, mostly to save her life or the lives of those around her, but sometimes just to put the shits up someone for a laugh.

The scene in which the King of France compels Claire to embrace her role as La Dame Blanche and preside over the fates of diminutive dispenser Monsieur Raymond and wig-wearing bad-boy the Comte (or Diet Randall, as I like to call him) is tense and thrilling to watch. Catriona does sterling work here, in what comes over like a successful audition for Game of Thrones (hey, they’re casting the prequel soon: you never know).

The King wants Claire to use her witchy powers to divine whether or not the two gentlemen have been dabbling in outlawed black magic, with the guilty party, or parties, doomed to be dragged off by the resident executioner, who is literally standing next to them. I have absolutely no doubt that ITV will turn this into a game show at some point after Brexit.

This is a great test of Claire’s moral character, and it’s fitting that, despite both her occasional impulsivity and entirely warranted hatred of the Comte, she comes up with a plan intended to save all of their lives. Her plan is to make both men sick with a doctored drink, hoping to prove their essential purity and thus innocence, and at the same time satisfy the King’s love of theatrics.

Unfortunately, Claire yet again finds herself deceived by a mystical apothecary with whom she’s struck up a friendship. Monsieur Raymond sneaks some fatal poison into the Comte’s drink (beautiful touch and brilliant call-back with the whole necklace thing there, I’ve got to say) and it’s bye-bye for this season’s big bad. For any of you who do watch Game of Thrones, this won’t be the first time you’ve witnessed a man of noble birth choking to death on a drink that’s been poisoned by an angry little guy.

Sorry, Comte, my fiendish friend. You had to go. You were getting too close to the truth of Jamie’s highway-man high-jinks, and sooner or later – after losing most if not all of your money to yet another small-pox scandal – you were bound to snap and kill the Frasers, and we couldn’t have that. Plus, there’s only room for one irredeemable rogue in this show.

That’s right.

Black Jack’s back, baby.

The last time Claire and Jamie encountered Captain Randall was in a dark, dingy prison cell. This time around they meet him in the vast, immaculately-kept gardens of Versaille, surrounded by opulent explosions of bloom and colour under an endless blue sky. The contrast couldn’t be any starker. Black Jack is here both to convince his old pal the Duke of Sandringham to go easy on his brother (whom I was amazed to discover wasn’t Tobias Menzies’ actual, real-life brother) and to fulfil his destiny as impregnator of Mary Hawkins (though he doesn’t know it yet and, mercifully, neither does she, the poor lamb).

It’s always nice to see the Duke of Sandringham, a sort of Boris Johnson for the 18^th Century. On the surface he’s a foppish, bumbling buffoon, full of praise, puffery and pointed remarks, an ideal choice to guest present Have I Got News For You, but there… just below the surface, just behind the mask, stands a cold and calculating figure, more ruthless and cunning than those who dismiss him with a snarky chuckle give him proper credit for. It’s also nice to see Captain Randall, if only because his presence means a whole bag of spanners in the works.

Jamie can’t kill him. Not yet. Not out in the open, in any case, as it’s a capital offence to draw your weapon in the presence of the King (something that probably applies in a euphemistic sense, too). It’s also an offence to duel someone to the death, but that’s exactly the gauntlet that Jamie throws down to Black Jack. He accepts, but Claire certainly doesn’t.

I don’t know why Jamie doesn’t get this basic principle: keeping Black Jack alive long enough to sire a child with Mary Hawkins isn’t just about showing deference to Frank. It’s about preserving the time-line so that Claire will be in Inverness to touch the standing stones of Craigh na Dun in the first place. Quite simply, if there’s no Frank, then there’s no Claire and Jamie.

“For Christ’s sake, Jamie Andrew, Claire has already touched the stones, so the decision to save Frank isn’t predicated upon any regard for their own future or present as a…”

“ARE YOU STILL GOING ON ABOUT THIS?”

“I’LL GO ON ABOUT IT UNTIL IT SINKS IN!”

“WHY DON’T YOU PULL YOUR HAIR OUT OF THE PLUGHOLES?”

“WHY DON’T YOU PUT THE BUTTER BACK IN THE FRIDGE, YOU WASTEFUL IMBECILE?”

“I WAS LYING WHEN I SAID I LIKED THAT DRESS!!”

Just when you think that Black Jack Randall has scraped the very bottom of the barrel, he turns up with the drill machine from some 1960s sci-fi movie, punctures the bottom of the barrel and then proceeds to tunnel his way into the molten core of the earth, through to the other side of the planet, and on, out into the infinite void of space, drilling through suns and planets by the million-load on his merciless voyage through a suddenly helpless universe. Yes, that’s right. This run of episodes reveals that Black Jack has a predilection for raping children.

Tobias Menzies must have opened his scripts for this run of episodes and said, ‘Oh thank you VERY much. What are you going to have me doing in next week’s script? Raping an entire family and then forcing their children to execute the family dog? And then raping it, too?’

How cruel of Outlander to introduce a quirky, cheeky, winsome little character like Fergus, an adorable slice of comic relief, and then within the space of four episodes subject him to life-long psycho-sexual trauma. What is this, Eastenders? A Mike Leigh film?

In any case, Fergus could never be as unlucky as our time-crossed lovers. The pairings of Romeo and Juliet, Heloise and Abelard, and Laurel and Hardy combined have got nothing on Claire and Jamie in the disaster-stakes. Rape, murder, peril, pursuit, miscarriage, death, loss, and that’s only within the first fragile year of their union.

I suppose, though, that a life lived without incident is a privilege that’s always been extended to the richer and more powerful among us, whatever the era. The heartache and misery at the core of Jamie’s and Claire’s relationship is perhaps something of a daily occurrence for people in poverty the world over, even now in 2018. Outlander, then, is at root a story about what happens when two relatively privileged people – one a well-to-do lady of good breeding, the other an estate-owning Lord – are forced through cruel circumstance to live the lives of fugitives, peasants and vagabonds.

To be fair, the bulk of their misfortunes spring directly from the evil agency of Black Jack Randall, whose rape of young Fergus in this clutch of episodes leads Jamie to break his vow to Claire, duel with Black Jack (he stabs him in the cock! What hope for Frank now?), and land himself in prison. And, of course, Black Jack’s behaviour indirectly brings about the loss of the couple’s unborn child.

Whatever your station in life, losing a baby is among the most wretched and harrowing things you can experience as a human being, magnified a million-fold for the mother who’s carried that incipient life in her belly: felt it wriggle and tickle and grow. If Sam Heughan deserved plaudits for his brave and visceral performance in the previous year’s ‘To Ransom a Man’s Soul’ then Caitriona Balfe deserves equal credit here for her unflinching, haunting, honest and heart-breaking evocation of a woman locked in the grief, anguish and turmoil of miscarriage. I welled up when Claire was cradling her still-born child. And, irreligious though I am, Mother Hildegarde’s defiance of protocol to baptise Claire’s baby so the little one could have a proper burial, was incredibly touching. The aftermath: her discovery of Jamie’s real reasons for breaking his vow, how she deals with Fergus’s guilt and shame, and how she expresses the full gamut of her feelings to Jamie, including her hatred, is all deliciously (if uncomfortably) rich, and earnest, and raw.

Though the ordeal clearly destroyed pieces of Claire’s soul, some of which might never grow back, she’s too strong a woman to be felled by even this most unspeakable of tragedies. She allows herself to submit to the King’s sexual advances in order to secure Jamie’s freedom from the Bastille. The King’s performance might very well be what we Scots would term ‘two pumps and a squirt’, but it’s a horrible liberty for any man to take, regardless of how big his wig or his wallet is. I think, though, that after losing Faith (they probably shouldn’t call their next kid ‘Hope’), Claire was numb to the King’s fumbles. Her body was a husk, an empty vessel. What more damage could one lousy little prick possibly inflict on the site of such sorrow and horror?

Kudos for the ‘lie back and think of England’ line.

And so it’s farewell France, toodle-pip Paris, au revoir you randy raconteurs and rapacious rapists, but dinnae fash, cause we’re awa’ back tay the faitherland, ken? Back to Bonnie Scotland and its limping lairds, sleekit soldiers and bekilted cu… cu… stodians… of… honour. Alliteration can sure be dangerous sometimes.

I shall miss the pomp and ceremony of the French court, and the many flouncing ponces of Paris. I’ll miss how all the tough guys talk like Niles Crane from Frasier. I’ll miss seeing Claire dressed like a cross between Mary Poppins and Missy from Doctor Who, with big, poofed out dresses that look like they were designed to smuggle dwarves across enemy lines. And I’ll miss Jamie’s trademark Wee Wullie Winkie dressing gown.

Look out, heelands, here we come.

A few final disjointed thoughts:

I think the Duke of Sandringham speaks for us all when he sums him up Bonnie Prince Charlie thusly: “He’s an utter arse.” Also, I’ve finally worked out who BPC sounds like: the aliens from Galaxy Quest.
I really enjoyed how Murtagh responded to learning the full truth of Claire’s origins: by punching Jamie in the face. Not because he didn’t believe the story, because he did, but because Jamie hadn’t trusted him or loved him enough to be honest with him from the start. How classically masculine. No festering grudges, no enduring rancour, just THWACK. Now, let’s go get breakfast.
Future-child, eh? Interesting.

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

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

Posted on November 10, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

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 in18^th 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 18^th 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 18^th 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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Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

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

Posted on November 2, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

Part 4: Well, that was lovely…

Wherein Jamie is stunned into silence. Not the Jamie in the show. This Jamie. The one writing this now.

If I’ve got one complaint about the final stretch of episodes in Outlander’s maiden season, it’s that they’re just far too bloody nice. But that’s not really a complaint, is it? At least not one I’m prepared to lodge, because nice is… well, it’s nice, isn’t it? The world is so over-run with horrible things, that you should snatch up every crumb of nice whenever and wherever you can, am I right?

Of course I am. I mean, some people might have thought that the bit in episode 12 where Jamie was pardoned and given the keys to Scotland by the King himself was a bit far-fetched, but yah boo and sucks to them, that’s what I say – the bloody killjoys. Where’s the magnificence in their souls? I guess they didn’t like the bit where all of the bunny rabbits started dancing to ‘Feed the World’ underneath that rainbow, either. Or when Claire spent two whole episodes working her way up and down a line of seventeen-thousand soft, fluffy, dewy-eyed puppies cuddling every single last one of them, as Murtagh gave thanks to the sun through the medium of song, and Geillis came back from the dead, and everybody held hands and skipped and danced and cheered and EVERYBODY WAS HAPPY AND NOTHING, AND I MEAN NOTHING, BAD HAPPENED TO ANYONE.

NOTHING.

HAVE YOU GOT THAT?

NOTHING!

A soft voice calls to me from just outside the room. I almost don’t hear it over the noise of my own frenzied rocking. ‘Mr Andrew?’ the voice says, ‘Are you ready for your medication now?’

‘Yes, nurse,’ I tell her.

‘You haven’t drawn a smiling face on a watermelon, taken your clothes off and started hugging it against your tear-soaked breast again, have you?’

I ignore the question, and hug the watermelon all the tighter. ‘Everything’s…still lovely out there, isn’t it, nurse? I mean nothing… nothing bad has… happened… to anyone, has it?’

She doesn’t answer. The silence stretches to what feels like an infinity, each beat of its empty, noiseless drum causing my heart to leap and thump in my chest.

‘Nurse?’ I ask plaintively.

‘NURRRRSSSSSSSSSSE?!!’

A squad of twelve men in white coats bursts into the room, each man grabbing a limb or hunk of flesh and squeezing down, pushing down, hauling down, until they’re sure that I’ve been subdued. One of them snatches a syringe from between his gritted teeth, holds its needle aloft like a tiny fencing sword, and then plunges it into my bicep, the world turning to stars and jelly before me.

‘Went…,’ I mutter as I start to slip into the darkness, ‘Wi-wi-wen… Wentworthhhhhhhhh…’

FADE TO BLACK

I guess what I’m trying to say, in an incredibly indulgent and circumlocutory fashion, is: “Holy merciful fuck, that was absolutely soul-shatteringly, gut-wrenchingly brutal! Worse than Lem taking a grenade to the crotch. Worse than Negan giving Glenn an eye-ectomy. Worse than Ragnar ripping out some poor schmuck’s spine and ribs to commemorate the opening of Norway’s very first ‘World of Wings’.”

Gore, guts, blood, and brutality have been frequent visitors to Outlander’s highland vistas. And death: horrible, senseless, agonising death. Hangings, guttings, slittings, gougings, gurglings – every revolting, disturbing thing ending with ‘ing’ that you can think of, up to and including sing-ing (sorry, Claire). But Jamie’s treatment at the hands of Black Jack Randall outstrips and outranks the lot, certainly in terms of its haunting impact and savage, psychological cruelty.

I knew it was coming. Well, I knew something was coming. Not only thanks to the chorus of ‘Wait until you see the last episode of the season!’s I heard from everyone who knew I was bingeing Outlander, but from a one-star review on Amazon I foolishly read that – while it didn’t identify a recipient – mentioned a bout of rape and torture that the reviewer had found so foul and disturbing it had put him off the show for life.

I can see why the chap would have been disquieted. What happens to Jamie is horrible and harrowing, but while it’s unpleasant and hard to watch, I didn’t find it in any way gratuitous. Randall is a narcissist, a psychopath and a sadist. His treatment of Jamie – wooing him; beating him; smashing him; threatening him; envying him; loving him; hating him; hurting him; curdling him; soothing him; breaking him; reprogramming him; generally toying with him as a cat would a dying mouse – was absolutely in-keeping with the sort of full-spectrum assault a damaged and dangerous man like Randall would launch upon a victim, especially one so completely, situationally, institutionally and legally at his mercy as Jamie.

It was a grimly effective touch for the classic ‘hero races against time to save their lover’ cliché to be subverted by having Randall, and not Claire, arrive to rescue Jamie just in the nick of time. The hangman’s noose would’ve been kinder.

‘How does it feel to be alive, but wear so much dead flesh?’ Randall asks Jamie as he inspects his own handy-work. It’s a question that Jamie could just as easily have asked of Randall himself, a man who carries his deadness on the inside.

Claire attempts to rescue Jamie from Wentworth, but only succeeds in getting ring-side tickets to his torture, and almost earning a place by his side in the process. Jamie helps her to escape by killing Randall’s goon, leaving him at the mercy of the malevolent maniac’s grotesquely intimate end-game. Jamie is violated, beaten, broken, branded (or rather made to brand himself), all of which is viscerally upsetting, but in the end the most brutal parts of his treatment are those that would’ve seemed affectionate, even loving, in a different context. Randall weaponises tenderness, and uses it to inflict greater damage upon Jamie than a hundred-thousand lashes ever could.

I know I’ve often characterised Jamie’s and Claire’s romps as something akin to soft porn meets soap-opera, but in retrospect it’s a relief that those scenes exist. The couple’s lingering, loving, intimate embraces ultimately serve as a necessary counterpoint to Randall’s abuse, a crucial reminder of gentler, happier times – although you could also argue that Claire’s love only serves to accentuate Randall’s hatred.

Is there more to Randall than just evil and psychopathy? What does he want? The most terrifying answer to that question is that he just wants to love and to be loved in turn, but hates himself so much that in order to show any vulnerability or tenderness he first has to destroy someone’s body and spirit utterly and completely. It’s chilling that what Randall does could simply be a souring and a corruption of the human desire to belong. Randall is a mess of mental illness, malevolence and contradictions: he wants Jamie, he hates Jamie; he wants to be Jamie, he wants to destroy Jamie. He wants Jamie to love him of his own volition, yet he never wants to cede control and thus risk rejection. He wants to co-opt the ready-made love that Jamie feels for Claire, to erase her face in his recollections and replace it with his, so that every thought in Jamie’s head always leads back to him.

Sam Heughan and Tobias Menzies deserve plaudits for bringing this monstrous, one-sided love story to life with such pain and conviction. If it was hard for us to watch, then think how hard it must have been for them to play it.

Now, let’s get the hell out of Wentworth; regroup our collective sanities and have the psychological equivalent of a long, hot shower.

So much of Outlander deals with people trying to conceal their true natures, identities and intentions. Sometimes they hide it from others, sometimes they hide it from themselves. These secrets and subterfuges make for some entertaining scenarios, and also – as we’ve already seen before in this show – some of the most awkward dinner parties known to man.

The scene where Jamie and his family dodge volleys of suspicious questions from the Watch Commander, Taran MacQuarrie, was a masterclass in tension. When Horrocks showed up the next day with his big bag of slippery tricks and a tip-off for Taran, I knew the triple-crossing Irishman wasn’t long for this world. Even still, it was a nice surprise to see the death-blow landed by Jamie’s brother-in-law.

Things quickly descended into the realms of classic farce, and I braced myself for a brutal and bloody confrontation between the lads of Lallybroch and the Watch, but I’ll be damned if Taran didn’t welcome the news of Jamie’s outlaw status and the murder of Horrocks with a hearty laugh.

The ability to create secondary characters and bit players that the audience cares about is a good measure of a series’ overall quality (unless the main characters they’re supporting are less interesting to watch than paint drying on a dead tortoise’s back, in which case there may be a problem). Outlander has them in spades, and the show is never frightened to kill them off in service of the story, no matter how accomplished the actor or popular the character. The story is king, and I’d imagine even kings will be cast aside if they stand too long in the way of the show’s time-crossed lovers.

I was very sorry to see Taran go. He was a wonderful character and Douglas Henshall gave a commanding performance. There was a Chicken McNugget of nobility hiding beneath the cold fries of Taran’s knavery, and I’d like to have seen that nugget blossom – and, yes, I’m well aware that I’ve royally fucked that metaphor and you’re now thinking about fields of chicken nuggets blooming in the spring sunshine.

As MacQuarrie approached the gallows I kept thinking, “He’ll survive this. He’s too good a character. Think of the adventures he and Jamie will have together. He’s not going to… well, the rope’s going round his neck… ach, someone will yell ‘Stop’, any second now. They’ve pushed him off. He’s… he’s going rather blue now… but… but I dare say it won’t be long before Jamie’s punching a guard and running up there with a sword to cut him down, and then they’ll both fight their way out of that castle. Any minute. Any minute now. Annnnnny minu.. he’s doing a really good job of pretending that he isn’t violently choking to death up there… Annnnnnnnnny minute now…”

It wasn’t until one of the English soldiers swung onto Taran’s corpse and started pulling it groundwards with all of his might that I realised the only way Taran was going to walk again would be if his body fell through a portal in time and space and dropped down at Rick Grimes’ feet in post-apocalyptic Georgia.

One of the many things I admire about Outlander is how often and how quickly it moves. Neither the story nor the characters ever remain static for long. Just when Castle Leoch starts to become too familiar, Outlander takes us into the nearby town, or out on the road collecting rent. We could be in an English garrison one minute, a west-coast fort the next, Lallybroch the other, the characters in a constant state of propulsion and flux, growing and changing as they speed their way through the highlands, running from and towards both their enemies and loves alike.

Jamie’s disappearance gave Claire a chance to try out some different double-acts away from the core relationship. Her time with Jamie’s sister involved a lot of moping through the woods followed by an almost-death, but it was as part of Team Clurtagh that Claire really shone. While some pathos was wrung from the pairing, their time together was mostly characterised by dressing-up, singing saucy songs and boozy dancing – all in the name of smoking Jamie out of his Heelan hidey-hole, of course.

When Claire donned a dusty little jacket to help kick-start her singing career, she looked like she wouldn’t have been out of place in Christmas panto at the Edinburgh Playhouse; playing Buttons in Cinderella, perhaps. But the more I looked at her, the more I realised that there – right there before my very eyes – stood not just a viable front-runner for the next Doctor Who, but the perfect one. Caitriona Balfe is in many ways a far stronger candidate than the Tardis’s incumbent betitted Time Lord.

One thing I’ve noticed since starting this binge is that the Outlander fan-base is more rabid, fierce, animated and committed than the Star Trek and Star Wars lot combined, so if they want to make Caitriona Balfe the next Doctor Who, then Caitriona Balfe will be the next Doctor Who. If they sent a squad of Outlander fans back through time to Culloden, they’d win the fucking thing.

A few asides: What an unscrupulous and horny old goat you are, Dougal; Jack Sparrow gypsy guy? I hope you come back. You were pretty cool; and Sam Heughan looks a dash like Wentworth Miller (STOP MENTIONING WENTWORTH – starts rocking again), though doesn’t share his prison breaking skills. The award for best prison breaking skills of course goes to… erm, some cows.

Claire treated Jamie’s physical wounds, but his psychic ones will take far longer to heal. And though we saw Randall lying prone on the ground following a frenzied coo attack, he definitely isn’t dead. He can’t be. That would be too quick, bizarre and incidental a death for a larger-than-life, havoc-wreaking figure like Black Jack. Especially when Jamie has an awful lot of closure to reap from Randall’s violent demise. I guess I was wrong in my last: Jack’s coming back.

Or rather Jamie’s coming back, because as the season ends he’s on his merry way to France.

When Claire stood on the deck of that ship and revealed to Jamie the news of their impending parenthood, I smiled. And smiled again as they lost themselves in a sea of love and joy – their wounds, for the moment at least, healed; their bond strengthened by the age-old mathematics of procreative multiplication. I may even have offered an involuntary volley of affirming words to the empty room, like ‘Aw, that’s nice,’ or ‘You go, girl.’ Thank Christ I didn’t cry or anything. I’ve escaped season one with some small sliver of masculinity intact.

Never-the-less, I think it’s time to re-watch Game of Thrones and The Wire to remind myself of the callous indifference of the world before I end up perched on the couch with a tub of ice-cream on one side of me and a box of tissues on the other doing box-set marathons of Drop Dead Diva and Sex and the City.

In my defence, I think that after all Jamie and Claire had been through by that point, both separately and together (poor Jamie especially) they probably deserved a clichéd, soap-style coda. Some simple, honest-to-goodness good news and happiness.

Ah. [breathes a heavy sigh of relief]

She’s going to lose the fucking baby, isn’t she?

NUUUURRRSSSSSEEEEEEEE!

PS: I’ve been thinking about how Jamie’s ‘ghost’ appeared in 1945 Inverness during the first episode. That’ll be Jamie coming to say a final, silent goodbye just before his death in the very last episode of the final season. I’d wager three sheafs of corn, twelve gold coins and a goat on it.

PPS: Season 4 starts in the real-world this weekend. I’ll catch up soon. In the meantime, my binge-watch will continue, but less frequently than before (don’t want to intrude upon the fans’ excitement about the new season). I’ll return for Season 2 Eps 1 – 4 next Friday. Thanks for reading.

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

Posted on October 29, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

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:

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.
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 18^th 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 18^th 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 20^th 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, 18^th century or no 18^th 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 18^th 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 18^th 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.

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