Jamie went from being tortured to being yelled at to being on a boat. As it was, it's hard to feel anything but sad after this episode.
Perhaps if they'd split the episode evenly between Jamie hurting and Jamie healing, the audience might have had a fighting chance to reach a sense of emotional justice. The finale established many levels and nuances to Jack Black Randall and Jamie's relationship, but Claire and Jamie got short shrift, and considering we've invested our time in them for the past year and a half, that was unsatisfying.
#Outlander season 1 review series
Claire and Jamie's confrontation in the series was both rushed and half-baked and woefully inadequate.
While Claire's reconciliation with Jamie was both ill-conceived and improbable in the book, at least it carried the emotional catharsis of a climax. And without the cloak of social justice, as an act of story telling, it is a punch in the gut for the audience. But under no circumstances would I inflict the Outlander finale on a survivor. And I will always stand behind a thoughtful depiction of sexual assault in the service of furthering awareness and empathy and justice for survivors. I truly appreciated that Outlander portrayed the sense of shame survivors can impose on themselves when they physically respond to sexual abuse. But surely they could have found a way to illustrate Claire saving Jamie that was more visual? More dramatic? More satisfactory? That perhaps didn't collapse his healing into what read like 48 hours?Īs it was, Jamie and Claire sort of hugged it out, then he cut his brand off, and then they got on a boat, and then Claire was like "We're okay right? Also I'm pregnant." The series definitely had a plot hole to navigate there. Like, fire that fact checker, because no. That particular scene in the book is indefensible, unreadable, and certainly un-filmable. Granted, it would be extremely insane to show, on television, this kind of pseudo-psychological role-playing as effective therapy for someone with PTSD from sexual abuse. Now be a part of this marriage again or I will just die." Which, you know, way to make this about you Claire. To get her to knock it off, Jamie confessed that during his night of torture, he and Randall had made love, and he'd been into it (though with the caveat he'd been thinking about her) and Claire was like "No worries, over it. Then we found out Jamie had been talking in Scots Gaelic all this time about wanting to kill himself, so it was time for Claire to pull out the big guns: she made some lavender oil and slapped him around. Especially if you threw in lots of sections about really specific herbology!" would be weirdly popular as a book I bet. However the monk was like, "Wow that story. Then Claire talked to a monk and "made him a confession" of the entire story up until now, including her time-travel experience, which is asking a lot for any monk to sit through with a straight face. Then Jamie had some pretty interesting-looking scenes where he talked heatedly with Murtagh in Scots Gaelic but too bad I don't know Scots Gaelic, I guess. Jamie woke up next to Black Jack Randall and begged Randall to kill him, but before he could a herd of Angus cows (the especially adorable kind of cow with the emo bangs) trampled into the prison, knocking Black Jack Randall down and allowing Murtagh and company to scoop up Jamie.
And I think a shade of that applies: WE GET IT, OUTLANDER! VERY BAD THINGS HAPPENED! BUT SEEING THE DETAILS OF SEXUAL ABUSE IN REAL TIME IS NOT WHAT WE SIGNED ON FOR! YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO SING US A SONG ABOUT A LASS THAT'S NOW GONE! INSTEAD YOU SANG US A SONG ABOUT INCREDIBLY GRAPHIC SEXUAL ASSAULT Yet I have to say if this had been a female character being tortured, I'd be screaming bloody murder about the gratuitousness of it all and the utter lack of any emotional justice for the audience after 45 minutes of intimately shot, grisly rape scenes. I affirm, once again, that representation of sexual violence between males is necessary and valuable. Sometimes, social justice aside, the world is just hard and cruel enough without seeing a beloved character bleed out of every orifice while weeping on the floor of a dank prison. However there is a line where bold creative choices bleed into torture porn, and this whole episode danced on that line. I wrote a lot last episode about the value of representing male-on-male sexual assault, and how Outlander subverted the idea that some acts of violence were "unspeakable" and too shameful to be confronted in media, and thus saved victims from alienation.