Warning: Spoilers for Outlander Season 6 below.
If you’ve been with Outlander since the beginning, as my partner and I have, you may not recognize the current iteration of the series. For us, it began as the rare show we could watch together. I’d get to fuel my love of Highlanders and bagpipe music and she’d get juuuuust the right amount of girl porn, where a strapping young buck was also a gentle lover. Bahahaha! As if! It always had some cheese to it, but it was enjoyable and was a show I’d watch from beginning to end.
Over the years, the show changed, and my commitment to it changed with it, namely my partner would yell “I’m starting Outlander!” and instead of sitting down with her from the get-go, I’d yell back “Start without me! I’ll be right there!”
Then I’d continue to do whatever the hell else I was doing for forty five minutes or so before dropping in for the final ten minutes in case it had succeeded in putting her in a romantic mood. I say that tongue in cheek. Really, it was more about how Claire and Jamie connected, their various shared travails and adventures, which would affect her mood and remind her that her own partner was nearby, not suffering through slower episodes with her.
Mostly, though, the show went from good to bad to awful. Now it’s borderline unwatchable.
In the old days, you had the spine of the love story between Catroina Balfe’s lovely Claire and Sam Heughan’s Jamie. But you also had the amazing Tobias Menzies playing not one but two roles to raise the bar for the whole enterprise.
You had the captivating Graham McTavish to lend raw masculinity to the show.
And you had the show’s secret weapon, Duncan Lacroix as Murtagh Fitzgibbons Fraser.
As long as I could get a scene or two with Murtagh, I was good. It turned out that my partner wasn’t the only one who tuned in for a mance. Hers was a ro- between Claire and Jamie and mine was a bro- between Jamie and Murtagh.
Now, with the season six premiere in the books, I find that I don’t have much to latch onto. The Frasers are still in the new world. I preferred the stories centered in Europe. Murtagh is gone and with him the largest part of my interest in the show. He was just a piece this ensemble couldn’t afford to lose. Young Ian still can’t be just called ‘Ian,’ even though he’s a Mohawk, and hard working Marsali doesn’t even crack the cast photo.
They’ve lost a number of brilliant actors since the start and absolutely blown it with their casting since. The character of Brianna, from the writing to the acting to the directing, has been a total miss, and actively hurts the character of Roger. It’s one of the most uniquely unwatchable performances I’ve seen in a show of this caliber, and it breaks your heart to see. I can’t place all of the blame on actor Sophie Skelton as the character is almost always poorly written, but the cumulative result is a show-killer. I groan every time she and Roger have a scene. Showrunners should really seek to better protect actors when they’re this overmatched by a role.
And what’s the plot of season six? Well, it appears to be retconning Jamie’s prison days to morph him into a Freemason and also add this fire-and-brimstone-looking bastard.
The first 20 minutes or so took place in the past, at Ardsmuir prison, where thirty or so Highlanders carried rocks while like four redcoats watched them. I have no idea why they didn’t overwhelm the redcoats and escape, but maybe it was because they spent all of their time fighting amongst themselves, Catholics vs. Jacobites or whatever.
I could not care less.
I had zero idea what was going on with the nondescript Scottish prisoners all garbed in the same green, and zero inclination to care.
It’s a shame to mention, but this show also used to lean into the eye candy, but has, of late, taken a turn toward more hearty looking fellows. That’s not a bad thing, per se, it’s just not what was originally on the menu.
Season six also featured a new intro and recording of the theme song which sucked out loud, adding a male voice to what was once a haunting woman-sung ballad. They’ve turned Fergus into a souse and Claire into Walter White. Here she is brewing up some colonial meth in the form of Ether.
Now, don’t get me wrong, if anyone has earned the right to self medicate it’s Claire. The things she’s endured on this show have shaken me to my core. The decision to put that trauma front and center, along with her coping mechanism, isn’t what bothers me. It’s that at this point I get more out of watching Outlander Season One than I do watching the last few seasons, which are plodding and pockmarked with brutal writing and acting.
Last night I read on a bunch of Outlander message boards where people were asking about Jamie’s pecs and wondering if he had tumors on them. Tumors! How much goodwill has the show lost when getting Sam’s kit off leads to comments like that? Yikes!
I miss the tartans and the moors and the before time. Before Culloden, when everything felt more simple.
Mark me! Claire and Jamie are still great and I love them, it’s pretty much everyone else (with the exception of Lord John Grey) that I can do without.
Diana Gabaldon’s epic romance marches on but I’m not sure if all of Outlander Nation will be in step.
Sadly, it might be time to go back through the rocks at Craigh na Dun and be content to rewatch season one. It’s where the true heart of the show lies and unfortunately, it’s mostly all downhill from there.
