Outlander: Sassenach

For reasons I can’t quite explain to myself I decide to watch Outlander. Here’s my background on the source material: I’ve never read the books. I know that Diana Gabaldon made a rather ridiculous summation of fan-fiction a few years back in which she compared it to white slave labour. I know that Orange is the New Black summarized it thusly:

 Hey, why not?

Here are my brief thoughts on the premiere (I can’t promise there will be no snark involved).

Claire Randall was a WWII nurse, now on a second honeymoon with her husband Frank in an attempt to reconnect after so many years apart. They go to the Scottish Highlands, visiting various old castles and investigating Frank’s family lineage with help from Hugo from The Vicar of Dibley.

It potters about for a bit as the couple explore the countryside, learn important bits and pieces about local history, and have sex in various locations, all with the help of Clare’s interminable voice-overs.

Seriously, END VOICE-OVERS. I’ve said this recently in relation to Winter’s Tale, but it was infinitely worse here, with Claire either describing the obvious, sharing meaningless exposition, or interrupting fairly intense scenes in order to narrate what was going through her mind. Here’s a helpful hint: if you don’t think that your audience is intelligent enough to grasp what’s happening without a voice-over to explain it, then I can assure you that the problem is with your writing.

Finally though Claire returns to a circle of standing stones for flowers, is rendered unconscious by some powerful force, and wakes up in 18^th century Scotland. Running into a man who is the splitting image of her husband (and played by the same actor) she soon realizes that Jack Randall is an unpleasant brute and narrowly escapes rape at his hands by the intervention of a Scotsman.

He takes her to rejoin his companions in a nearby hovel, where she meets Jamie MacTavish, the thinking woman’s Edward Cullen. He’s much hotter than her husband. Just saying.

In fixing his dislocated shoulder and warning them of an ambush site she earns some degree of trust from the Scots, and the episode ends with them approaching a castle that she visited back (forward?) in the 20^th century.

As I mentioned before, I haven’t read the books. I know they’re hugely popular (the words “sweeping romance” seem to pop up a lot in reference to them) but if that’s the case, I’m not entirely sure the show has captured its spirit. That is to say, I wasn’t really caught up the mystery and magic of the whole thing – not yet anyway.

I appreciated that the time-traveling aspect was subtly played – no flashing lights or weird special effects, just a cut scene to Claire’s comparative experience in a car crash (the only time the explanatory voice-over feels justified) before she wakes up in the same place, different time – and perhaps with a deeper colour palate than the more sephia-toned 20^th century scenes, reminding me of the transition between Kansas and Oz in The Wizard of Oz.

I think by this point I’ve read so many time-travelling stories that this feels like well-trod ground (the Identical Ancestor for example) though there were unique details that I enjoyed: the fact that Claire is not a contemporary woman but from the 1940s, which already gives her a sense of displacement in the minds of the audience, and that she is rescued from Randall not by Jamie but by a very short and hairy Scotsman, leaving the romantic meet-cute to operate under the Florence Nightingale Effect.

 

There are a few inadvertently funny bits (in her Establishing Character Moment Clare is introduced as a field nurse, yelling instructions over a badly wounded man, wiping sweat/blood off her forehead with her sleeve, and taking a swig straight from a wine bottle) but for the most part it’s solidly put together. “Solidly” is just not the same as “elegantly,” that’s all.

The interminable voice-overs is the worst offender, which is so invasive and jarring that I wanted to yell “shut up!” a couple of times. They occur during sex scenes, chase scenes and suspense scenes, and most of the time they’re superfluous anyway.  Likewise, there’s some clunky exposition that serves to blatantly foreshadow what’s going to happen later, including the requisite fortune telling that predicts aspects of Claire’s contradictory future.

But Claire makes for a strong protagonist, with an intelligent, melancholy air about her, and a good grounding in medicine and botany. In other words, she’s not just a blank slate for female audiences to graft themselves onto in their enjoyment of Jaime’s bewilderment and eventual love, but a fully-realized grown woman who has her own backstory, interests and skill set.

People talk a lot about “catering to the male gaze” when it comes to nudity and sex scenes on television, but I think there’s also something to be said about shows that abashedly target a female audience by presenting them with female protagonists who only exist as empty vessels for audience surrogacy. Because that’s still putting the male character first.

But Caitriona Balfe as Claire is easily the strongest part of the show – at least at this point. She’s a clearly defined individual, but she’s also an everywoman, reacting to her impossible circumstances with the same amount of fear, confusion and helplessness that you’d expect (no inexplicable kung-fu powers manifest themselves here). But it’s when her nursing instincts kick in that she really shines. This is something that she’s good at, that she knows she’s good at, and which wins her tentative respect and trust in a manly man’s world.

This episode’s best scene is easily when she tends to Jamie under the watchful eye of his bewildered Scottish brethren, barking orders and expecting them to be obeyed – and because she acts as though she has authority, they are obeyed.

I’m ready to enjoy Outlander. I’m not strictly a romantic, but I like a good love story as much as the next person, though what I’m really hoping for is to get swept up in its premise. A 20^th century nurse is now stuck in 18^th century Scotland. I want to see how she’ll deal with that.