Outlander, Season 5: The Fiery Cross transposed and transformed

Claire (Caitriona Balfe) in her surgery (Episode 2)

Murtagh (Duncan Lacroix) listening to Jamie say they must part for a while and Murtagh join the regulators … (Episode 1)

Dear readers and friends,

This is the first of (I hope) four blogs intended to explain why and demonstrate how Season 5 of Outlander is a quiet miracle. I would like to suggest it is the best of all five seasons, except it’s so dependent on the previous four (parts of them so brilliant), and functions as a kind of coda or transition to a coming sixth — presumably, A Breath of Snow and Ashes, and the American revolution. For this first, I write a structural comparison of book to other books and this 5th film series. The next two will be Episodes 1-5, then 6-11 of the5th  series, and a last on the extraordinary twelfth.

From “Never My Love” — Jamie (Sam Heughan) hugging Claire in her escape dream in the 20th century, with the cloak he originally put round her in the 1st episode of the 1st season (the song echoes throughout the dream part of the episode)

The Fiery Cross is a long tedious book, with little story: Gabaldon’s first two books, Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber, are propelled by two forces, the story momentum of the Scottish catastrophe at Culloden, and the falling into intense love of the principals, Claire and Jamie, with their attempt to stop it. It defeats them and a pregnant Claire must flee to the 20th century. For the third, Voyager, Gabaldon stretched out the aftermath of Culloden (20 years worth): the long time of Claire in Boston, with Jamie slowly rehabilitated into a printer-smuggler, the sleuthing for Claire to discover Jamie alive, her getting back, the uneasy new adjustment, and re-settling her.

Now what? it seems to me, sometime during the composition of Voyager, then announced in the prologue, and got going about about a quarter in, our narrator-author moves into the voyage across the Atlantic (hence the title and powerful theme of voyaging).  She brings from Ardsmuir, our secondary homosexual hero, Lord John Grey, to bring them all together, to North Carolina where a group or groups of Scots highlanders did settle, at the opening of a fourth book, Drums of Autumn. (The idea may have been gotten in part from Gabaldon’s extensive reading — see her bibliographies in her Outlandish Companions).  Now what? She invents a new villain, the gay psychopath Bonnet, has Brianna coming to warn the couple of a coming death (with the ghost of Frank cheering her on), Roger following her, a traumatic adjustment for them, throws in some Native Americans, Ian’s coerced but willing assimilation to the Mohawks, and yet a third time traveler (a young man also turned into Native American); the second was Geillis Duncan, the fanatic 20th century Jacobite). But we have come to stasis.

Roger and Brianna falling into one another’s arms — he is seen riding up on his horse form afar, she runs out to him ….

The story (such as it is) of Gabaldon’s The Fiery Cross does not begin until well after Brianna and Roger’s wedding, which does not occur until near mid-point of the book. For the first half of the book one is put off, with delay after delay (over religion), anecdotal incident after anecdotal incident, conversation after conversation (between Claire and Brianna over breast-feeding! preventing another pregnancy). In the film series, the first hour (“The Fiery Cross”) is given over to a celebratory wedding between Brianna (Sophia Skelton) and Roger (Richard Rankin) and clan ritual where nothing goes wrong (very daring I think); then these anecdotes, so frustrating in the book becomes well-chosen brilliantly and slowly quietly developed episodes (some originally long, some short) to form the central matter and pivots of each hour, each self-contained. For example, Claire and Jamie come upon a Bluebeard situation where a very old man has abused and destroyed four wives and the fifth is now destroying him (Episode 3, “Free Will”). Or a young girl and boy have fallen in love, and secretly made love, become engaged, she is pregnant, and her father enraged (Episode 4, “The Company We Keep”).

What is astonishing and perfect is how quietly and slowly each sub-story is intelligently developed and woven in to the mood of the hole season, which is the quietude of Jamie and Claire’s certain fundamental love holding all together. It is tremendously daring to spend a full opening hour on an utterly predictable wedding, with our main entertainment being the bliss of three sets of lovers making love towards the end (beyond Claire/Jamie, Brianna/Richard, we have Jocasta (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and Murtagh, the camera switching from one to another lovingly. But this pace is the pace of the whole series, this kind of modulating psychologically slow subtle tone, the way the tones of the episodes work. Yes interwoven are other events, Claire re-invents pencillin, is teaching Marsali to become a doctor, a tonsillectomy; there is Jocasta’s wedding, Ulysses’s (Colin McFarlane) protection of her and flight, but basically one or at most two actions to an episode, each drawn out and developed lovingly

The next morning: Jocasta and Murtagh discussing what’s to come …

For a clothesline (as it were), a rope to hang everything on, the film-makers took Murtagh, Jamie’s beloved god-father, brother-friend, dead since Culloden (in Dragonfly in Amber in the books), kept alive or brought back (Drums of Autumn) and made him the linchpin or chief actuator of a plot design where takes us from his leaving after the wedding to the second episode through the fifth into sixth as now and again we glimpse Murtagh leading farm and working people, Americanized regulators in their struggle against the outrageous taxes and other injustices inflicted on them (they feel) from the the upper class British type establishment, whom Jamie is at the same time coerced into heading or at least aiding. This seems to come to an end at Episode 5 (“Perpetual Adoration”) when Jamie, suddenly and surprisingly strangles the officer, Knox, with whom he is playing chess (a cold-blooded calculated act complete with disguising the body, not like Jamie usually but repeated at the end of the series when he tells Fergus and Roger to execute the gang of men who beat, raped, humiliated Claire) in an effort to end the search for Murtagh since the Governor seems to have said except for Murtagh the war with the regulators is over.

It is when Jamie comes home after this murder, that he finds and brings home the kitten-looking Adso — a softening note

So now what? time out for another wedding, this time Jocasta’s at River Run to Duncan Innes, with the problem of locusts back at Frazer’s Ridge occupying our two young couples (Marsali [Lauren Lyle] and Fergus [Romann Berrux] are very much part of the season), and a reminder that Stephen Bonnet (Ed Speleers) and his criminal smuggling friends are about (Episode 6, “Better to marry than to burn”). It emerges after all the war is not over, and we get a long arch with a difficult battle for all, where Roger (not meant for a warrior) comes near death unable to prevent himself from being mistakenly hanged (Episode 7, “The Ballad of Roger Mac”) to a spill-over of trauma and his slow recovery with young Ian’s return from the Mohawk (Episode 8, “Famous Last Words”).

Back to anecdote when Jamie’s leg comes near amputation from a snake bite (9, “Monsters and Heroes”). As we move through the series, each character is given due weight: from Lizzie, Brianna’s loyal maid, to the two young men Claire and Jamie manumit. Also the evil characters: the violent abusive male Browns. The story of Stephen Bonnet, his character, criminal side-kicks, kidnapping of Brianna (complete with Bonnet’s apparent merciless execution from drowning & Brianna shooting him in the head), the brief indication of a prostitute’s story, do not take the second half of the series (as it does the second part of the book) but rather just another in the series of self-contained anecdotes (Episode 10, “Mercy Shall Follow You”). Lastly two more: Roger and Brianna with their baby son, Jemmy, think to return to the 20th century as safer (11, “Journeycake”) and Claire is gang-raped, a horrifying sequence, prelude to a coming violent internecine set of wars (12, “Never My Love”).

Since Ulysses was driven to murder Forbes, the lawyer, attempting to smother Jocasta (for her money) he must hide out — we learn he was manumitted a long while ago, has been Jocasta’s lover (she has had several) and will go with Lord John Grey as his servant back to England; Jamie brings him Pamela to read

What’s the miracle? that this material set out this way does hold us. Why? the film-makers expect that we are and they themselves all become, write, act, rootedly invested in these characters. Unlike the second season of the series, where much effort was made to lure us to re-bond once again (the French sequence, Claire’s time at the hospital with Mother Hildegarde) the third and fourth less so, this fifth one just assumes we know who everyone is, though for the first time they use a long flashback (Boston, 1968, showing why Claire took Brianna to England to see where her father had grown up, and to Inverness, to show her Rev Wakefield’s house — unknown to her Roger’s step-father has died and they come upon a funeral). When we glimpse Marsali and Claire becoming mother and daughter, doctor and apprentice, friends, we are supposed on our own to remember Marsali hated Claire when they first met (as the woman who took her mother’s husband). They rely throughout on this investment of already built admiration and acceptance.

There is a risk here: sometimes the dialogues between the characters is too ideal; there is not enough conflict between the principals except perhaps Jamie and Roger, and there it’s that the two men are slowly learning to know, accept and like one another for what they are. That’s a central true plot-pattern for this series: it’s no happenstance that it opens with Jamie shaving Roger for the wedding because the shaving implements of the 18th century take some getting-used-to. The paratextual music has changed again to a slow haunting version of the Skye-boat tune in minor key.

The season was filmed in Scotland

Next up: Outlander Season 5, Episodes 1-5

Ellen (to be cont’d)