After a holiday and term-start delay, we’re back! This week’s recap covers episodes 11 and 12 of Season 3 of Outlander, “Uncharted” and “The Bakra.” Episode 11 picks up right after cliffhanger at the end of Episode 10, when Claire jumps off the Porpoise in the middle of the night, hoping to escape her…
Today’s re-cap covers Episodes 7 and 8 of Season Three of Outlander, “Crème de Menthe” and “First Wife.” These episodes complicate some of the narrative’s confidence in Jamie and Claire’s relationship that we saw in Episodes 6 and 7, where, as Jessica Cook pointed out in our last review, Claire doesn’t hesitate to assure Jamie…
It’s a pleasure to be back writing recaps and reviews with the estimable Jessica Cook! Today I’ll be covering episodes 3-4, and Jessica will be back next week with episodes 5-6 (lucky girl!). I recall reading many years ago a quote by Andrew Davies, beloved BBC screenwriter, in which he admitted that adapting Middlemarch (1994)…
The opening scene of “Prestonpans,” episode 10 of Season 2 of Outlander, has Claire standing next to the ravaged corpse of a Scottish warrior as he lies gently in repose against a felled tree. As the dappled light of the forest surrounds them, Claire quietly contemplates the number of men she’s seen killed in war.…
Wow… after one of the world’s most disastrous dinner parties, who thought that things could get so, so much worse for the Frasers? The nail-biting sixth and seventh episodes of Outlander’s Season 2, “Best Laid Schemes” and “Faith,” ratchet up the trauma the show inflicts on its main characters with stillbirth, treachery, child rape, occult…
Welcome to Outlander, Season 2 reviews! This Season we’re shaking it up: to find a happy medium between the often glacial pace of academic writing and the rapid speed of TV production, we’ll have two reviewers, Leigh Dryda and Jessica Cook, to recap every couple of episodes. This review covers Episodes 1-3 of Season 2:…
Episode three of the TV adaptation of Outlander continues Claire’s foray into the eighteenth-century experience, but raises the stakes considerably as she challenges the local judicial system and priest with her modern ideas of punishment and health. Humour is conspicuously absent from episode three of this fish-out-of-water tale (where’s the montage of Claire teaching Dougal…
Episode 2 of the TV adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander picks up right where we left off, with Claire arriving as a prisoner at Castle Leoch. It’s another exposition-heavy episode, but fills in necessary information about Jamie, introduces some intriguing secondary characters, and sets the stage for Claire’s prolonged visit to the eighteenth century. A…
Despite the fact that many reviewers have cast the TV adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander as a classic “bodice ripper,” or, more whimsically, “the mother of all highland flings,” the first episode of this beautifully shot and thoughtfully written new series proves it just isn’t so. The series has romance, yes, but also adventure, historical…
