I wish I could recommend just skipping to that one, but it’s a highly serialized show. The sixth episode is especially well done, and I predict it will be hailed as one of the better hours of television this year. Also, for the record, I am still awaiting all of these steamy Sam Heughan sex scenes that I was promised.ĭespite my small problems with it, Outlander gets better as it goes on. Claire and Jamie are well developed, but many of the side characters aren’t. The music by Bear McCreary is wonderful at first but can get irritating. It makes sense exposition-wise in the pilot, but later in the series, there are times when Claire is literally narrating things that we are watching happen, over-explaining as if talking to a child, and it’s frustratingly distracting. The voiceover is terrible, often unnecessary, and obnoxiously overbearing. The pilot episode, easily the worst of the six shown to critics, is mercilessly slow - to the extent that I had to watch it twice because I kept drifting off the first time. The show can be a little confusing at times - I suspect reading the novels would help I haven’t gotten around to them yet - but never disorientingly so. It doesn’t help that she is immediately attacked by the villainous “Black Jack” Randall, who happens to look exactly like her 20th-century husband Frank (Tobias Menzie plays both characters, and he’s tremendous).
The pilot episode doesn’t immediately hook the viewer, but it gets interesting when, back in the 18th century, Claire experiences the requisite confusion and shell shock. It’s a period piece - in fact, Claire is a period piece inside of a different period piece. It is, at once, fantasy, history, and romance. One of the most impressive things about Outlander is its flawless ability to jump between various genres. While on vacation, she inexplicably jumps back in time to 1743, where she meets and reluctantly marries Jamie (Sam Heughan, aka the Internet’s new boyfriend). When the show begins, Claire (Caitriona Balfe) is a World War II combat nurse who has just been reunited with her husband. And for the most part, Outlander gets it right. Outlander isn’t a game-changing show for Starz, but a successful and faithful adaptation could do wonders for the network. I also understand why Starz decided to adapt it: Outlander is its version of Game of Thrones, it already has a built-in group of loyal fans, and Starz needed to step up its original programming. It’s been hilarious to listen to them describe the premise with a straight face - a time-traveling romance about a woman with two husbands in two different centuries and also lots of very long sex scenes with a cute Scottish guy - but I understand why it’s popular. During the past few weeks, many people have tried to explain the appeal of Outlander to me.
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