Outlander offers a uniquely female take on the pay-cable drama, both for its focus on Claire, and for choosing to avoid many of the pitfalls of other “mature” programming. There’s no trip to a Scottish strip club or bordello just for the sake of reminding you that Starz lets you see naughty bits; what nudity is present is contextualized, and if anyone’s getting ogled at, it’s the frequently shirtless Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan), a slab of ginger beef with a shady past that Claire gets entangled with early during her trip to the past. Outlander is also not needlessly violent or grim, either. The first episode offers a couple shootouts and a bit of swordplay, but the series is more interested in examining social mores than bloodying the Scottish moors.
The singular focus on Claire’s experience in this world is not without its drawbacks. As a holdover from the novels, narration is required to fill us in on her thought process as she plies her medical skills and gumption to her advantage in an environment hostile to both women and Brits. It’s necessary as a means of establishing her motives in a moment-to-moment context, but when it winds its way into musings on the show’s themes, it’s as blunt as a caber to the head.
More concerning is whether the show being built around Claire is going to be entertaining on either a character or production level. The politics of the past are mostly talked around while Claire finds her footing, but the show will eventually need to separate from her, and spend some time focusing on the locals if we’re ever going to care about them. The location shooting lets veteran TV director John Dahl work with some gorgeous backdrops in the first two hours, but the staging in the open-air environments is often too open, making you wonder where all the extras and props are hiding.
The pilot manages a fair few more memorable scenes than the altogether scattershot second episode, such as when Claire’s transportation to the past is visually represented through a particular memory of a different experience. The real standout sequence sees Claire and Frank spying on local women engaged in a torch-lit dance around standing stones, as part of the pagan ritual presumably connected to her temporal displacement (those big on answers and show mythology won’t find much to chew on through the first two hours). As Bear McCreary’s soundtrack whirls and skirls towards a crescendo, Outlander lets its romantic spirit ride to a fever pitch in the light of the morning magic hour.
The show then immediately undercuts the sentiment once the women finish the ceremony, casually walking away, chatting and laughing amongst themselves as they return home. In the world of Outlander, it’s okay to get caught up in the sensation of the moment, and have a chuckle at how silly it was once the spell breaks. The sequence epitomizes Outlander‘s contradictory balance between skepticism and mysticism, tradition and modernity, romance and realism that it only occasionally strikes successfully over the first two episodes. Whether it can succeed in doing so on a more consistent basis will take longer to determine, but for the time being, Outlander should offer viewers a series that’s as intriguing as it is hard to pin down.