Paul Levinson's Infinite Regress

reviewing Black Doves; Citadel; Cross; Dark Matter; Dept. Q; Dexter: Resurrection; Dune: Prophecy; For All Mankind; Foundation; Hijack; Memory of a Killer; MobLand; Outlander; Paradise; Presumed Innocent; Severance; Silo; Slow Horses; Smoke; Star Trek: Strange New Worlds; Tehran;The: Day of the Jackal, Diplomat, Last of Us, Night Agent; Your Friends & Neighbors +books, films, music, podcasts, politics

George Santayana had irrational faith in reason - I have irrational faith in TV.

Showing posts with label Outlander. Show all posts

Monday, January 6, 2025

Outlander 7.15: Penicillin and Again Television Logic

Another powerfully wrenching episode -- 7.15 -- of Outlander on Starz, to say the very least. But I'm an optimist, and I'll you why.

[After I alert you to spoilers ahead ... ]

So, if you've seen the episode, you know what I'm talking about. And you haven't, that's why I cautioned you about spoilers.

Claire is shot in the abdomen -- she says, in her very critical condition, maybe in her liver. But the med she trained gets back in time to attend to her, along with a gift from Lafayette, some Roquefort cheese! And turns out the Frenchman's not crazy. Claire knows the cheese comes with the kind of mold that we today -- since the 1940s -- call penicillin. This can help treat her life-threatening wound,

So why, then, in the coming attractions, is Jamie seen crossing himself, and, more importantly says to Claire, who's unconscious, "we didn't have much time". I don't know, but I don't think it's because Claire is gone, certainly not for the remainder of the series. As I've said many times -- including earlier this season when Jamie was thought to be drowned -- unless you see a character blown to bits, with a head chopped off, television series usually just don't work that way.

And since Outlander is after all a time-travel tale, Jamie or someone could go back in time and prevent Claire being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I haven't read the books, so I don't know what happened at this juncture on those pages, and how much the TV series is adhering to the novels, or branching out its own, especially at this very crucial juncture. But I'm predicting we'll see Claire alive and well, again, if not next week, then when the series resumes with its final season. And not just in flashbacks, as ubiquitous as they've become.

But I'll admit to being a little worried, anyway. I'm not a time traveller. I can't see the future. I'll see you next week.

Sunday, December 29, 2024

Outlander 7.14: Prostitute Economics

An excellent episode 7.14 of Outlander up on Starz this week. I won't warn you about spoilers because there will be none -- nothing too specific -- in this review. [But if you don't want any hint of a spoiler at all, be so advised.]

My favorite scene in this episode is when Arabella (Jane) explains to William how she charges as a prostitute, breaking down her services into three options. I don't recall hearing quite such salty language, certainly not in this context, before in the now long history of Outlander on Starz. There used to be a time in cable TV history when HBO and then Showtime were the leaders in these kinds of scenes with that kind of language. (Network TV, of course, is too frightened about FCC bans to include that language in their shows, however necessary for the story. Those FCC bans, and the FCC itself, are unconstitutional, in my view, because they blatantly violate our First Amendment. But don't get me started.)

Anyway, the scene between Arabella and William is not only frank, but surprisingly tender (with excellent acting by both Silvia Presente as Arabella and Charles Vandervaart as William). But maybe "surprisingly" is unfair to the series, certainly this season, where there has been a mix of violence, and brutal honesty, and tenderness, many times. The relationship between Claire and John Grey is a great example, played out over a few episodes. It was very good to see Claire tenderly -- and not so tenderly -- patch up John's eye, whose socket had been fractured by Jamie's outraged punch in episode 7.12. Patching up the eye, I think, is symbolic for patching up the relationship of Claire and John, and I hope the beginning of doing that for Jamie and John, too.

Meanwhile, over in Scotland, it looks like Brianna and Roger are on the verge of crossing paths through time, with Brianna going back in time to look for her husband, just as Roger has realized that Jem their son may no longer be in the past. I hope for that family's sake that they don't get those wires too crossed in the episodes ahead.

Sunday, December 22, 2024

Outlander 7.13: Good Scenes, Ad Hoc Metaphysics

Lots of good scenes in Outlander 7.13, but the story -- or, more precisely, mostly Roger's story in 1739 -- was a little muddled, at least to me.

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

Here are the scenes that I really liked:

Young Ian and Rachel getting married, and later that night in bed. Both were handled with sensitivity, intelligence, and passion.
Jamie and Claire in bed together was good to see, too.
Roger and his father in 1739 was excellent, too.

But speaking of Roger in 1739, although I was glad to see him at the end of the episode realize that Jem was likely no longer in the past -- important, because we need to see him get back to Brianna in the 1980s -- the time travel, the conduit through time via the stones having never been crystal clear, was even less clear as we hear Roger musing about it. The way the stones are now working, or maybe always worked that way, is if you think really hard about someone when you touch the stone, you're more likely to end up in that person's precise time? I got that Roger said the stones brought you in general back and forth over a 200-year period between the 1900s and the 1700s. We knew that already. But this fine tuning ... I don't know. As I've said lots of times in these reviews, I haven't read the books. Maybe that fine tuning is made more clear on those printed pages. But it seems a bit like some kind of mind-over-matter hocus pocus in the television series.

Time travel of course is science fiction, and not real either. But I guess I like my science fiction to be governed by a somewhat discernible series of cause-and-effects. You have these stones in places on both sides of the Atlantic, and touching them in the right place can get you back and forth in time, 200 years either way. But giving the time traveler the power to affect the exact arrival date or year, that's quite a lot more.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing how all of this plays out in the remaining episodes in this second half of the seventh season.

Sunday, December 15, 2024

Outlander 7.12: The General

Episode 7.12 of Outlander was one powerhouse of an episode, firing on all kinds of cylinders, in what is one wild ride of a second half of a season.

(And there will be spoilers ahead .... ]

There were many favorite moments and interludes, but the most momentous in terms of alternate history is Jamie appointed General Fraser by none other than George Washington himself. What could be in store here, in futures we'll see and not see, but certainly can imagine. Will General Fraser replace not Washington but Adams as President, and succeed Washington to become our second Command in Chief? In our reality, you have to be born in America, or have at least one parent who is a naturalized American, to be eligible to be elected President. But those restrictions are in a Constitution -- ours -- which hasn't been written yet at this point in Outlander.

Many of the other highlights concern carnal knowledge, which is the title of this episode. Among the best:

Jamie and Claire finally getting back together, after John tells Jamie he had "carnal knowledge" of Claire and Jamie comes home and demands an explanation from Claire. (I didn't like Jamie beating John, but I suppose that makes sense.) At least he didn't raise a hand to Claire, who gives Jamie a good, responsive explanation.
William sleeping with the prostitute was good to see, too.
John didn't have time to sleep with the doctor who alerted John that he had to get out of that American camp in a hurry, but all of that was good story, too.
And I liked seeing Rachel forgo her Quaker beliefs and slap William.

The show is really on a knife's edge now. A lot of lives hang in the balance. All we know for sure is that the Americans win the war -- because, so far, none of the alternate histories set in motion in Outlander have changed history on that level. So far, only personal lives have been changed.

I rather like that restriction, because it's one of the things that makes the Outlander narrative different from most time-travel stories. But with less than a season-and-a-half left, I reckon almost anything is possible. (I'm spending so much time watching life in the late 1700s that I'm beginning to write a little like people did back then, too.)

"challenging fun"
- Entertainment Weekly

e-mail received from a reader:
Dear Paul, I just dreamed of airships flying between raindrops. I just returned from 2042 CE, where I sold my hardcover copy of The Plot to Save Socrates for seventy million Neo-Euros, because it had your response to this e-mail from way back in 2007 scotch-taped onto the inside of the cover. A Paul Levinson collector paid top Neo-Euro, because of the authentic archaic e-mail printout from you. It turns out that not many of your e-mails from before your tenure as CEO of HBO/Cinemax and terms as United Nations Secretary General will survive that far into the future. So, please respond to this e-mail, to help found my great-grandchildren's fortune. My Will will stipulate that they must share with your great grandchildren. Thanks! Tom

I of course happily replied...

42 reviews of The Plot to Save Socrates!