Let Outlander Be Weird and Gross and Surprising Again

The historical drama Outlander’s seventh season comes to its midseason conclusion on Friday, capping off a run of episodes that have been, for many viewers, a letdown. On the subreddit dedicated to the Starz television adaptation and its source material, the novels by Diana Gabaldon, fans have been complaining since last year about the show’s recent arc, which has our central couple, Claire (Caitríona Balfe) and Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan), living in backcountry North Carolina, seeing the American Revolution coming, and figuring out how to react. Fans point out that the show looks too clean (correct), that Claire and Jamie’s farmhouse on Fraser’s Ridge is far too nice and fancy (it’s very nice and fancy!), and that the lead-up to the American Revolution is a snooze, as a setting, in comparison to the first few seasons, which took place in the Scottish Highlands before and during the Jacobite rising of 1745. (“Something in me has Scottish FOMO,” one fan complained. “I know about the American Revolution, already!”)

These gripes get at something interesting about this story’s appeal. Yes, Outlander is for romance readers—I mean, it’s about a brave English war nurse from the 1940s who travels back in time and falls in love with a brawny and charismatic Scottish warrior (although, over the course of many long, long books and shows made from those books, so much other plot comes into play that Claire and Jamie come to lose a bit of their centrality). But Outlander also has appeal for people who like history shows with fighting in them, who are curious about old-timey medicine, and who can readily take the sight of a pus-filled abscess suddenly appearing like a little white bubble in an already-disgusting wound. (That does happen in Season 7—viewers be warned.) In fact, the story is known to be a special favorite of historians of nursing and healing, if that tells you anything.

Outlander, at its best, has been one of the most interesting thought experiments out there on how actual history is unknowable: always more disgusting, weirder, and more surprising than history nerds think it will be. We watchers and consumers of Outlander are, like Claire and her fellow time travelers, in a constant position of fascination and confusion, always coming close to understanding what it is about the 18^th century that interests us, but never really feeling at home.

Roger MacKenzie (Richard Rankin), the husband of Jamie and Claire’s daughter Brianna (Sophie Skelton), works as a historian at Oxford in the 20^th century, and the severe shock he feels upon leaping back into the 18^th century in Season 4 is the most interesting way the show has to explore this question. At first, Roger Mac, as Jamie calls him, is fascinated by everything he sees: what people wear, the way they move their bodies. But the strange reality of it really sinks in during the seventh episode of Season 4, aboard a transatlantic voyage, when the ship’s captain finds an outbreak of smallpox on the ship. A girl who has the disease, and is being hidden by her mother, is discovered. The captain grabs the girl and throws her out into the ocean, and her mother leaps after her so that her daughter won’t die alone.

Because this is a show famous for its many, many rape scenes—so many that the fandom subreddit is rife with discussion of their multitudinousness (lately, posts on the topic are thick with links to the many previous posts on the topic)—the smallpox-daughter scene doesn’t always get play when you’re making your list of “terrible things Outlander does to its characters.” But it’s a scene that I think about probably twice a month. It’s not the last time Roger comes up against a behavior that surprises him completely, in the century that he studies and is now trying to inhabit: In Season 5, he is hanged and left for dead after a man misunderstands a helpful gesture Roger makes toward the man’s woman.

Roger doesn’t seem to have many super fans among Outlander readers and viewers; he looks, to speak frankly, like something of a cuck when put next to Jamie, the hypercapable laird. In fact, there are stretches of his acclimation to the 18^th century during which Jamie explicitly wonders whether Roger might not be strong enough to hack it, and maybe, as a result, is not a great husband for Bree. Among the other time travelers, Claire, at least, has her medical skills, and Bree is an engineer; both jobs are important on the Colonial frontier, even if the women have to work around 18^th-century sexism to contribute. Roger can’t build or fight, so what’s the point?

Roger Mac eventually rises to the occasion, acclimating himself well enough to the past and deciding to study to become a pastor. But in Season 7, the show whips him back to the 20^th century, due to a series of only-on-Outlander events. (Roger and Bree have a daughter; Claire realizes that the baby needs heart surgery, which she can’t do by candlelight with only her homemade ether for an anesthetic; they make a hop back to the future through the standing stones.) Back in his time, having (I assume!) been gone too long from the tenure track to be able to return, Roger is left a househusband, and feeling a little bit out of sorts as a result.

The past savor of Roger’s (and, to a lesser extent, Claire’s and Bree’s) character arc as a confounded history tourist is, I think, why this season feels like a letdown to Outlander’s history nerds. The American Revolution, as presented in this show, has very familiar beats to it; the stakes are too clear; it all kind of starts to look as if the characters are reenactors working at a living history museum. Jamie is too much of a hero, always charging into battle and being in the perfect place at the perfect time. Claire is always coming up with the right bit of medical knowledge to save some poor sap’s leg from being amputated (then staring off into space dramatically when she doesn’t have the modern facilities to keep him from dying from a pulmonary embolism in the aftermath of the surgery). And in the last of its first batch of episodes, Season 7 commits the cardinal sin, in fiction set in the past, of introducing a famous historical figure and having him announce his name: “Oh, I didn’t introduce myself, did I? My apologies. I’m Benedict Arnold.” (Everyone gasp!)

We end the season with Claire and Jamie away from the war, stepping off a boat, back in Scotland. Hopefully, in the second part of Season 7—which will air at a yet-to-be-announced date, Hollywood strikes depending—the show can recover its essential shagginess, the weirdness of the past that compels the time traveler to return.