*SPOILERS … AND REDCOATS AND A DISTINCT LACK OF TWITTER OR TEXTING AHEAD*
It’s been clear ever since Claire Randall Fraser (Catriona Balfe) stumbled through the stones at Craigh an Dun back in episode one of the television adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s sprawling historical novels Outlander, that the show was more than happy to take its own sweet time telling its richly-realised stories.
Not for Outlander the weekly, endlessly cliffhanger-y, almost viewer-manipulative narratives of other modern shows who, fearful that their viewers might depart in the blink of a Nielsen rating for the lure of another more exciting, relentlessly climactic show, seemed more than happy to put their major characters in possible or certain doom on almost minute-by-minute basis.
While some shows such as Game of Thrones have used this characters-in-almost-constant-mortal-peril device well, others unnamed have not, leaving you with the sense that you watching less a show than a helter-skelter, meth-fuelled dash to the storytelling finish line from which few will survive.
It’s not that the latter approach doesn’t have its merits; simply that you can often have too much of a good thing where the constant perched on the precipice sense of dread becomes an addiction that subsumes the characters and any sense of rational narrative integrity.
Secure in the fact that they had a perfectly-wrought, well-told story to begin with, Ronald D. Moore (who knows a thing or two about taking his time telling a story; the sublime delights of Battlestar Galactica anyone?) and his team have taken their own sweet, not of their TV era time telling the story of Claire’s extraordinary journey down the rabbit hole into a world that she, despite being an eminently well educated and more than capable woman, has found herself ill-eqipped to handle.
Time, and a great deal of it, has been taken showing how different eighteenth century Scotland is from twentieth century life, that it is not as backward or sterile as the history books may make it out to be, and that modern sensibilities and perspectives, though grounded in well-founded scientific and social advances, are not always superior, nor often superior to the attitudes of 200 years earlier.
And it’s shown over and over that love, sweet deep enduring love, is as vital and true an imperative then as it is now, a centuries-spanning truism never more on display than in “The Search” which saw Claire and her companions, firstly her sister-in-law Jenny (Laura Donnelly) and then Murtagh Fraser (Duncan Lacroix) doing everything in their power to rescue Jamie (Sam Heughan) back from the dreadfully cruel hands of the Redcoats, and specifically one Captain “Black Jack” Jonathan Randall.
What made “The Search” such a satisfyingly fine example of the studied, patient approach taken by Outlander‘s production team – in this instance writer Matthew B. Roberts and director Metin Hüseyin – was the care taken to demonstrate that finding someone in eighteenth century Scotland was not as simple as sending out word via radio or some other newfangled communication device.
In that day and age getting word out took a considerable time and effort, something that Claire, used to the far more advanced connectivity of the mid-twentieth century world, finds inordinately hard to appreciate at first.
She physically bristles with impatience at Murtagh’s suggestion that they take their own sweet time travelling from village to village, croft to isolated hamlet, posing as storytellers, dancers and singers (herein lies some much needed humour by the way; Murtagh, we quickly discover, is no real dancer but lordy can Claire sing though only reluctantly), singing a song that Jamie, hiding out in the wilds of highland Scotland, will know could only have come from Claire and those loyal to her and Jamie’s cause.
Knowing this will take more time that which she is comfortable , time that she doesn’t believe Jamie has in abundance, if at all, it takes much persuasion to bring her around to the fact that in an age bereft of radio (and of course to our modern sensibilities tweets, emails and texts) this is the only way to get word out and get Jamie safely back in her arms.
The beauty of the episode is that it expends much precious narrative time showing Claire, and first Jenny then Murtagh, riding hither and yon, finding good leads and bad, being stymied by gypsies who take up their identifying song as their own to make a quick buck, underlining all the time how different, attenuated and taxing a search was back in the eighteenth century.
They could have easily sped the plot up by whisking the searchers between villages, cut out the scenes where Claire is forced to consider if she will take a life to save Jamie’s or where she and Murtagh railed against each other before realising they were pursuing the same cause from the same place of unconditional love for Jamie but much would have been lost, most obviously the enduring sense, there from the start in Outlander, that we are most definitely “not in Kansas anymore Toto”.
Even more impressively the episode ends up with Claire and Murtagh knowing where Jamie is – in Wentworth Prison due for imminent execution after the gypsy’s unintentional but self-serving misdirection lured him into what became a trap – but face the very real prospect of being unable to get to him in time.
That means Outlander has broken an other rule of modern TV storytelling, which is not leaving the narrative tied in a pretty, evenly spaced red bow by episode’s end.
Thus Claire, child of the whizbang, bracingly-modern twentieth century, is left furious at the impotence of her cause, having to both beg the Clan Mackenzie, only a few of whom are willing to accompany her and Murtagh on what is to all intents and purposes a suicided mission, while having to simultaneously bat away an opportunistic play by Jamie’s uncle, Dougal MacKenzie (Graham McTavish) to marry her and take over the estate at Lallybroch before Jamie has even faced the hangman.
That’s a lot to deal with even if you are an assured woman of great capability and purpose and Claire is tested greatly, though not found wanting to the approval of both Jenny (with whom she bonds ever more closely and with whom she gives some timely prophetic advice about the nature of things to come, advice Jenny accepts thanks to Jamie’s forewarning) and Murtagh, throughout an episode in which Jamie’s life hangs very much in the balance and time, sweet blessed time, is all she has at her two centuries out of her own era disposal.
It was good old-fashioned storytelling that dared to take its time, and Outlander, once again, was all the better for it.
*Things are slowly but surely building to a rip-roaring climax for Claire and Jamie, proof that good drama comes to those prepared to wait; witness how with the promo to next week’s penultimate season 1 episode “Wentworth Prison” …