Outlander, the off-season Game Of Thrones

(With Game Of Thrones between seasons, I asked a few critics if they wanted to talk about the shows they’re using to fill the King’s Landing-shaped hole in their lives. First up, my colleague from The A.V. Club, Brandon Nowalk, discussing Starz’ Outlander.)

Ever since Arya set sail for Braavos, I’ve been ruing the wait until spring for more Game Of Thrones. A couple months later we got a show that’s been whetting my appetite for more Thrones, another pre-modern fantasy saga based on a series of novels. I’m talking about Starz’s Outlander, which airs its mid-season finale tomorrow.

The show starts in 1945, just after the war. English nurse Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe) and her husband Frank (Tobias Menzies–Edmure Tully on Game Of Thrones) are spending their honeymoon touring his ancestral stomping grounds in Scotland, when she stumbles upon a Druid ritual and, long story short, she wakes up in the 18th century with a sexy Scot savior named Jamie (Sam Heughan). I was skeptical to see Game Of Thrones comparisons in early reviews of Outlander, but the season has largely lived up to them, not least for having Edmure Tully in such a prominent role….

Both shows are costume dramas with latent magic woven into the background, but beyond that, there’s the way both shows slowly acclimate us to their historical(ish) settings. Over the course of the Outlander’s half-season, showrunner Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica) has been very deliberate in doling out information about the complex world: the tense pre-war relations between the Scottish clan Claire’s fallen in with and the occupying English Redcoats, the feudal economy and taxation system, and the antiquated role of women. Power, economics, and gender are all systems Game Of Thrones gradually reveals to its audience, too.

And speaking of the world, Claire eventually learns that Scotland is on the verge of a failed uprising. (Frank’s a historian, so we keep flashing forward to him regaling Claire with some historical background that conveniently applies to her present situation.) She even tries to talk her king in the North out of it.

One big difference is that Game Of Thrones has a whole continent or two of characters to follow, but Outlander has a much narrower focus; Outlander is told almost entirely through the eyes of Claire. She’s kinda sorta trying to get back to her “real” life in the 1940s, but mainly she’s just trying to survive. Which is tough considering she’s an Englishwoman in Scotland. The Redcoats are led by Captain Jack Randall, her husband’s ancestor (also played by Menzies), a ruthless, vicious leader who is a bit like Roose Bolton with a touch of Ramsay. After some frightening encounters with him, Claire’s happy with her Scots, but they’re not sure if they can trust her. And that’s the scope of the story, give or take a “heretic” or two.

Which leads me to the brutality. That’s part and parcel with the historical setting, but nevertheless, Outlander is surprisingly violent for a romance novel come to life. It actually approaches Game Of Thrones in a central whipping scene where Captain Randall personally administers hundreds of lashings to young Jamie. That’s part of the backstory between these two characters, and we’re constantly reminded by the deep, rubbery scars on Jamie’s back. Captain Randall describes the experience as ecstatic. His violence was art. (He’d make a good Game Of Thrones producer.)

Like Game Of Thrones, Outlander is that rare show that can depict and even revel in patriarchal abuse while simultaneously exploring its rich female characters (or character) as a counterweight. What really stops you cold is how often Claire is threatened. It’s all threat, so far, but at any moment, any of these hulking warriors could dominate her if they wanted, and they know it. Whether Randall pins her against a bank or a Scot corners her in the dark passageway outside a party, the threat’s the same and it’s intense. But the point is, from this woman’s perspective, rape is a threat because rape is the threat. She’s not going to fight on a battlefield. Her life is the battlefield.

And Outlander isn’t crying wolf. The sixth episode puts Claire through the wringer both emotionally and physically. It’s the show’s best episode to date, in part because it’s serious about exploring how an independent woman is treated by this patriarchal society without getting exploitative. The threat of sexual assault has been a touchy topic for Game Of Thrones, but it’s persistent in Outlander, too. The difference is Outlander‘s perspective. It’s all about this woman’s experience.

It’s essentially a feminist bodice-ripper. Jamie’s the dreamboat who has no idea how beautiful he is, the good guy who doesn’t realize what a catch he is. He’s even a virgin! Meanwhile Claire is more sexually experienced and less repressed. In the premiere, Frank goes down on her inside a ruin, the show focusing on her sexual pleasure. Several subplots involve the disparity between men’s work and women’s, with Claire always sticking up her nose about her modern conceptions of equality. She’s a bit like early Daenerys without the training wheels or the platform. Claire is focused on female empowerment from the start, but she doesn’t have the authority to right any wrongs by decree. In fact, on more than one occasion, her mouth has gotten her in trouble simply because men don’t want to hear her speak her mind.

Finally, what’s become clear over the course of the season is that Frank’s lectures aren’t just exposition. Outlander, like Game Of Thrones, is about history. Specifically, it’s about how history isn’t impartial. How it can be distorted by different sides. How it’s written by the winners. The major example is the lashing scene, which gets told a few different ways by different tellers in different episodes. But there’s also the contrast between the history book version of things that Frank tells and the events that Claire lives. Game Of Thrones is all about the conflict between two (or five, or a dozen) legitimate perspectives on its recent events. The longer it goes, the more it seems like Game Of Thrones is as much about history as anything else. Outlander’s the same way, only its wedding nights are way more fun.

Brandon Nowalk is a freelance television and film critic whose work has appeared at The A.V. Club, Indiewire, Salon, and more. He’s just begun two new series at the blog he never updates, But What She Said. He thinks it’s time to resurrect King Renly already.

• Published on 09/26/2014 at 1:00 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 12:40 PM CDT