New season, based on Drums of Autumn, starts 11/4 at 8p on Starz. Our beloved Jamie and Claire are making a life for themselves in pre-Revolutionary War America, while in the “present” (1960ish) Brianna tries to get on with her life without her mother.
Thirteen episodes! The show is already renewed for Seasons 5 and 6.
Will be watching as it airs, am unspoiled this time. I had read most of book 3 last time.
Mrs. Mahaloth? She just finished reading the entire series. She listened to the audio. It took about 6 months of driving to work.
They’re showing a marathon of seasons 1-3 all weekend!
I was able to watch it On Demand at 7:30 this morning (damn time change.) I won’t say anything until after it airs tonight.
Wow, lucky.
Watching it now.
I think Ed Speleers is going to make a wonderful Bonnet. So charming, until the claws come out.
Ian and Jamie in the cemetery were wonderful. I know it’s decades before PTSD will be recognized, but Jamie knows what Ian went through.
There’s some talk about the Ray Charles song at the end, but I thought it worked. We could see what was happening, we didn’t need to hear it, and the juxtaposition of the lovely song with the violence was haunting.
Terry Dresbach’s costumes are as always, stellar. Onto Riverrun next week!
I really admire how hard Ron & Co work to get things historically accurate. One little gem I noticed in the end of last season’s finale was the throwaway line from the Georgia man who found Jamie and Claire on the beach, and told them they were in America; his accent was slightly English, but definitely inclining to what would become the American accent. A nice touch.
I read something interesting yesterday…because this is a non-SAG production, not filming in the US, they had to use Canadian actors for the Native Americans, not US actors.
I noticed Ronald Moore has written not a single episode of this season. Is he still the showrunner?
I hope so. Battlestar Galactica is the best show of all time and Outlander is one of my favorite shows as well. Star Trek held him back, but his stuff since then has been great.
I loved that not-picked-up pilot for Virtuality, too.
I think he stepped back to work on other productions, but he’s still executive producer and his partner, Maril Davis, is front and center. I thought he only wrote one episode, the season 1 finale with Ira Stephen Behr?
If you get a chance, look for the free podcasts for Official Outlander on iTunes. It’s a fascinating behind the scenes look of how they did the show. Ron said he had to ask for help in writing the season 1 finale because it was such a difficult subject.
He’s written about 4 or 5 episodes.
If you aren’t familiar, Bear McCreary is the composer(same as BSG). He has a very active blog on the music composition.
Here is one from season 3 and sometimes, he includes the snippets with the bars as well. No composer I know of gives such access to his process.
This episode veered from the books, in that the slave dies at the house instead of the timber yard, but I think it made for a more powerful story.
We meet Aunt Jocasta at River Run (damn, the visual effects are outstanding), John Quincy Meyers intrigues Young Ian with his talk of the Indian lassies, and Claire once again acts with 20th century sensibilities in an 18th century world.
Even the slaves were part of it, with Ulysses telling her that Rufus was a dead man walking and it was going to cause problems for the other slaves if he didn’t die. Poor Claire had to euthanize a man she just saved, merely because she saw him as a man while everyone else (except Jamie and Ian) saw him as a slave. And kudoes to Young Ian for being such a capable surgical nurse!
This moves the story forward in that there is no way Claire and Jamie can stay at River Run, so off to the wilderness! Don’t forget, Roger and Bree have adventures of their own, and we’ll soon meet Nayawenne!
Yeah, there seems to be no middle ground on that song choice. I thought it was bold.
Agree on the visual effects. Mrs. SMV said everything was filmed in Scotland, but River Run sure as hell looked like a North Carolina plantation house.
It’s been a while since I read Drums of Autumn, so maybe this came from Herself, but I wondered if the way the show deals with slavery and slaves this season owes anything to Twelve Years A Slave. I’m glad they’re dealing with it as a complex issue - as Fearchard Campbell pointed out, manumitting a slave was not a simple process. Campbell was a real person, by the way - a merchant who’d come to Cross Creek in the 1720s.
Good episode, but hard to watch (especially for this descendant of North Carolina slave owners).
I’m reminded of a scene in Roots way back when. Alex Haley is researching his family and asks a descendant to look through old ledgers for mention of his great great-whatever. The descendant can’t find anything, so Alex asks him to look at the livestock ledgers, and lo and behold, there’s the great great-whatever. The descendant was of course shocked and mortified, but as Alex pointed out, slaves were property, not people. I thought Outlander handled it well with Jocasta honestly believing that her slaves are better off and she considers them friends Some more than others, as book readers know but the slaves not knowing how to act around Mistress Claire, who doesn’t treat them as they think they should be treated in this time and place.
Are we sure that was Scotland? I asked my wife if they came to the US for this and we both thought they did. Looked like America to me.
No, they’re in Scotland. A lot of the Blue Ridge mountains look like Scotland, which may be why a lot of Scottish immigrants settled there.
I was sent the casting call many, many times by my friends. However I am not Indigenous.
Or I would have applied in a hot minute.