Okay, technically this is what I was watching until I accidentally caught up to where we’re at in the current season. All I have to say about that is: I’ve come to loathe episodic time-gated television. Netflix has spoiled me. I like to binge entire seasons. As a result, I tend to fall behind on things that air over the course of a traditional (outdated) season of programming and catch up on them once the season is finished.
Alas, this time I was… impatient? More like unobservant. I don’t find Outlander to be completely riveting, but it does have its charms. (And by charms I mostly mean Sam Heughan with his shirt off. And the accent! Shiver.) I mean, there are reasons why I stopped reading the books, and I suspect I’ll probably lose interest in the live action version once we get to that point too. But for now… I’m still on board. For infrequent subscribe-for-a-month-and-binge sessions.
So, here I am. Caught up and waiting for the next installment. There are only 2-3 episodes left in the season, so it’s not like this is going to drag on indefinitely. But it still sticks in my craw.
Outlander. Okay, so if you just crawled out from under a rock… Outlander is a historical time travel series involving a woman who travels back in time a couple hundred years. While she’s there, she ends up meeting the love of her life and they absolutely do not live happily ever after. That’s why I’d never call Outlander a romance. I mean, the relationship between Claire and Jamie is the foundation of the show, but the story gets so much bigger…
And that’s where the original material lost me. I was all in on Jamie and Claire and their story against the backdrop of history, but as the story got more complicated with trying to also tell a secondary love story (I won’t spoil anything) involving another pair of time travelers… it started to lose me. It lost me even more when a certain side character came of age and earned himself a POV. Sigh.
One of the things the show/series does well is take some of the romance out of time travel. By that, I mean, the characters recognize just how dangerous the past really is, how it lacks all the conveniences that we take for granted, like running water, medicine, and not having to grow our own food. There’s a lot of hard work involved, and fortunately our heroine(s) aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves and get to work. Still, it doesn’t seem to bother them as much as you’d think. Why? Love.
I’m not sure there ever was red-headed highlander compelling enough to get me to stay in the 18th century. It’s dirty, it’s scary, and it’s a lot of damn work. I have enough trouble motivating myself to do the minimal tasks that are required of me as a modern day human. What if I had to carry all my laundry down to the creek to wash, and then back to the house to… hang it out to dry? Ugh. What if cooking dinner meant growing the vegetables and butchering the pig first?
Yeah, I am so spoiled. And not just by Netflix.