‘It gets worse,” Mary said as I lay stunned in my recliner after having winced and writhed in sympathetic pain throughout yet another episode of “Outlander.”
“That’s the good news, I guess,” I said.
If you don’t know, but I guess you do, for it’s been around, Mary says, for the past 10 years, this series is about the Highlander clans of Scotland in the mid-1700s and England’s occupying Redcoats. I know practically nothing about the period — even to the extent of confusing the Jacobites with the Jacobins — except that, as Claire, the time-traveling English-born heroine, knew, it all was to end with the Battle of Culloden in 1745 — with the sword-wielding clansmen slaughtered as they charged into well-emplaced British cannon and muskets.
We haven’t got to that point yet, which is why I think she said the other night that “it gets worse,” but in the meanwhile there has been gore aplenty, graphically evinced in excruciating floggings, hacked-off limbs, gaping wounds, up-to-the-hilt through-the-back sword thrusts, and various torturous and foul acts by the English officer, “Black Jack” Randall, that will leave you crying “Hold! Enough!”
Claire, a modern woman plunged into a benighted era, certainly insofar as women were concerned, and Jamie, her Highlander husband, as noble and brave — and almost as kind — as she, are compelling. You want to see the lovers through.
That desire, an innate sympathy for the underdog, and perhaps the blood, which is pretty much all I can remember from reading the “Iliad,” the “Odyssey,” “Beowulf,” and the Old Testament, keeps you, perhaps a descendant of the rentier class (though I’m not sure I want to probe too deeply), coming back each night to wince and writhe in your comfortable recliner.