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    AlienJesusKayla Kumari Upadhyaya
    12/03/17 8:36pm

    Showing the horrors of slavery through the eyes of uncomfortable white people centers their comparatively minor trauma rather than the actual trauma of the slaves. It’s voyeuristic and plays into the white savior narrative. Being disgusted by slavery doesn’t make Claire and Jamie heroes

    Okay Kayla you have really overplayed your hand here. This show is nothing more than a bodice-ripper with shades of sci-fiction and lots of sexy time. It isn’t Amistad. Your pre-occuaption over a scene that lasted barely 6 minutes has found you self-righteous and sanctimonious and it’s not a good look.

    I actually liked that this episode went off the rails a bit. It had a batshit crazy energy sorely missing these last few episodes Plus “third-wheel Clair” to Jaimie and John Gray was delicious. More please

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      br4ve-trave1er.asfAlienJesus
      12/03/17 8:40pm

      Thank you for expressing my thought about what the reviewer said! Totally agree.

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      KatmanduAlienJesus
      12/03/17 8:51pm

      Your attempt to shame someone for pointing out problematic white savior-ism and racism why displaying your own racism is the true bad look here.

      But I guess you just couldn’t help overplaying your hand here.

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    PunkrockoldladyKayla Kumari Upadhyaya
    12/03/17 8:26pm

    Geillis has always been a villian. The reviewer might think back to the last episode of season 2 in which she burned her husband alive in order to power her trip back through the stones. Why is it somehow beyond the pale that she gets up to no good with young boys? So far we know of two husbands that she’s killed with a third likely. This is not a nice person nor were she and Claire ever really all that close. Yes, she was probably Claire’s closest friend next to Jamie but that’s not really saying much. They had stuff in common, but were not bosom buddies.

    As for Outlander going with a male gaze for a change: Jesus H Christ, that scene was from a teenage boy’s literal point of view! Why wouldn’t it show a male gaze?

    That said, I wasn’t wild about this episode the first time through. The bath of goat’s blood was just straight-up stupid. I’m going to wait until the season is over and watch the whole thing at once. This wouldn’t be the first episode I warmed up to on repeat viewings.

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      Lindsay MaureenPunkrockoldlady
      12/03/17 9:02pm

      I do think that Outlander has objectified women less than other shows of a similar ilk (Game of Thrones coming to mind). Yes, that scene was from a young boy’s perspective, but it was the choice to show it from that perspective that was a bit meh for me. Granted if I had felt differently about the rest of the episode maybe I wouldn’t have been as annoyed by it.

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      frootloopsPunkrockoldlady
      12/03/17 9:47pm

      Plus, if you reconfigure the timeline a bit in your head, you’ll realize that Geillis probably recognized Claire when Claire first arrived at Castle Leoch. Claire would have looked 20 years younger than when Geillis last saw her, but Geillis sidled up to her for a reason.

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    FatherOctavianKayla Kumari Upadhyaya
    12/03/17 11:07pm

    The fundamental flaw of this review is that it judges a woman of 1968 and and a man of 1767 by the standards of 2017.

    Of course Clare’s narration features a bias toward the British colonialist first world/third world view. She is a product of that society. Of course Clare and Jamie would take advantage of the human resources they have at play — the recently purchased slave and their “Chinaman” compatriot. They don’t have the tools necessary to understand the problem, and they (correctly) assure themselves that they’re still treating those men better than their compatriots would.

    But when you look at the writers’ choices, they made the slave the architect of his own destiny. He figured out a way to secure meaningful freedom under his own terms and on his own timetable. He did not wait for Claire and Jamie to do it for him. And Yi Tien Cho aligns himself with Jamie by choice. He willingly submitted himself to being exoticised at the governor’s ball because it was a way to contribute to young Ian’s rescue. He is also used to being exoticised, because it has been a chronic experience since he arrived from the East.

    So yes, from a macro standpoint, there are storytelling issues here. But they unspool naturally from telling a time travel story where the “future” characters are still several decades in our past.

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      keithzgFatherOctavian
      12/03/17 11:35pm

      Not that people in the past would have been incapable of realizing things we more readily (although still depressingly unevenly) realize today, but yeah, it certainly would have been a *lot* more uncommon.

      (And actually, thinking more about my parenthetical, recent politics in the U.K. have driven home that there’s a lot of people literally today that persist in having very colonial and racist views. I mean, personally I’d wish for more progressive views to be expressed by protagonists in such stories and find the clash between the present and the past to be one of the more interesting things about time travel stories, but Outlander shied away from that to degrees from the very get-go by having our POV protagonist coming from a time far less progressive than our own and alien in ways that are more subtle than the time she goes back to but nonetheless deep and pervasive.)

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      SunshineynessFatherOctavian
      12/04/17 12:04am

      Yi Tien Cho also had a big speech about how much he likes women and he saw an opportunity to have women hanging off him and whilst they did so as an ‘exotic’ he looked at it better than being a ‘heathen’ and went for it. He also had a moment of genuine connection with the fortune teller that played as an abused women of one culture getting a kindness of a man from another and both just seeing the other as people with a kinship.

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    Lindsay MaureenKayla Kumari Upadhyaya
    12/03/17 8:12pm

    These are the areas where historical fiction often stumbles and Outlander is no different. I think the Carribean/America stuff in general suffers from the uncomfortable historical circumstances involved. Having Claire in the midst of other white Europeans allowed her to be critical and patronizing without it have an uncomfortable racial dimension — and, for the record, I don’t think it’s intentional (neither in the sense of the writers purposely trying to show her racial shortcomings or in the sense of thinking it’s appropriate thinking), but it is a problem.

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      XagzanLindsay Maureen
      12/03/17 8:17pm

      In this situation, it seems you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You either do what this episode did, and bring on that type of criticism, or ignore the slavery issue altogether, which would probably draw worse ire.

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      Lindsay MaureenXagzan
      12/03/17 8:29pm

      I disagree very much on that point.

      For a start, Claire doesn’t need to refer to non-white cultures as primitive and it’s totally possible to do that while still acknowledging slavery and its evils. You can acknowledge that slavery is happening without having your main characters take part in the buying and selling of slaves. You don’t use exoticism and Orientalism as the driving forces of other characters continue existence and use in the narrative.

      Yi Tien Cho is very problematic in the books. Those problems are more on display in the show.

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    TsunamiKayla Kumari Upadhyaya
    12/04/17 6:11am

    As beautifully as this show is filmed (from a cinematic perspective), I had some issues with how well lit that ballroom was. They didn’t have electricity and during most of that mingling scene, you could clearly tell there was a fuckton of artificial light in that room. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the first time I’ve noticed something that’s been done all along, but this episode was pretty glaring.

    Otherwise? I liked this episode, despite Kayla’s eviscerating review. Meh. Different strokes.

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      ds234Tsunami
      12/04/17 9:21am

      I agree the lighting in that scene really bothered me. It made it look like a soap opera, which it sort of is, just a really, really good one.

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      Punkrockoldladyds234
      12/04/17 2:23pm

      Ever since I got a decent high-def television, EVERYTHING looks like a soap opera to me.

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    Bastard PeopleKayla Kumari Upadhyaya
    12/04/17 12:22pm

    I thought this was the worst episode of Outlander yet. Every scene with Geillis was embarrassing. According to the “behind the scenes” short at the end of the episode, the bloodbath scene was a man’s idea, inspired by vampire movies—what a shocker. I agree with the reviewer that it was a cool visual for the first 1.5 seconds; after that it may as well have been soft core porn. I guess they needed to explain the fact that Geillis still looks 30 when she’s supposed to have aged 20 years too.

    “Ok I guess we should go to this governor’s party to find Young Ian, I’m sure we won’t know anyone th—oh hi, EVERYONE WE KNOW”

    (It really annoys me that Jamie always calls him Young Ian)

    Might finally give up on this show.

    Editing to add: Although I did laugh at Geillis’ Benjamin Button line.

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      Chibiusa40Bastard People
      12/04/17 4:11pm

      Re: Calling him Young Ian, it’s just meant to differentiate him from his father, the same way we’d call someone “Ian Junior” or “Little Ian” when his father has the same name. We often also ascribe them a kiddie-sounding name vs that of their parents, eg. father is Michael, son is Mikey; father is Nick, son is Nicky; or father is Mark, son is Marky. It’s just the naming convention of the time.

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      PunkrockoldladyBastard People
      12/04/17 4:46pm

      They call him “Wee Ian” in the book and it’s to distinguish him from his father, also named Ian.

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    Ivan's bloody nippleKayla Kumari Upadhyaya
    12/03/17 8:38pm

    Sure, it was a bleh episode, but not exceptionally so. We’ve seen worse this season. This piece reads more as a review of the character of our protagonists, who are indeed self-absorbed nitwits most of the time, than the review of the show.

    Claire is 1950s woman living in the middle of the the 18th century... to have her be all evolved and progressive would be we weirder still... or else they could portray the slavery appropriately, call it “12 years a slave; the TV show” and forget about advancing plot for the rest of the season. The show “grappled” with slavery about as well we could expect from it. It just couldn’t win here. Any show that fancies itself “historical drama” has to use, the frequently horrible, horrible history, as the background to its’ story.

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      sbellIvan's bloody nipple
      12/04/17 4:18pm

      Totally agree that historical fiction is by definition an uphill battle - but even worse when you have time-travel involved, and it’s not even OUR time they’re from... how do we find a perspective to align with? Pretty tricky.

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    SunshineynessKayla Kumari Upadhyaya
    12/03/17 11:36pm

    All right Kayla. Tell me how Claire could have saved the slave in a way that would fit your perfect 21st century liberal view? (btw, I’m as bleeding heart 21st c as they come, but I’m also an historian and a pragmatist). They bought him to save him and were always going to free him but Jamie *is* right- running around buying and freeing slaves wasn’t cut and dry, as the later abolitionists realized when they tried to do it in the 19th c.

    Slavery is complicated. And it was different in the islands than the states and different in the 18th c than the southern antebellum period (which I’m gonna asume is all you are basing your knowledge of slavery on, cuz, yeah, you’re really American) in 1766 Jamaica abolitionisism was honestly a crazy fringe group and Claire saw a horror in front of her and did the best thing any of us could do: you can’t save them all so just save one.

    And seriously? It was pretty clear the baby is Brianna. It doesn’t take reading a book to piece that together, just watching the show and knowing how stories work. I’ve never been unkind or needlessly vicious to your reviews but this one cinched it.

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      SunshineynessSunshineyness
      12/04/17 12:17am

      Also, Claire called Jamaica primitive because of the gross rich European sugar plantation slave owners when in her time (as of 1963) it was an independent nation.

      Temeraire chose to go with the maroons because he wanted to, Jamie and claire too busy hand wringing how best to help him and he specifically asked to. Yes, more time with him and his story would have heloed but as a group of runaway slaves living in the woods money wasn’t really a thing he needed.

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      Lindsay MaureenSunshineyness
      12/04/17 4:13pm

      For me, the bigger issue is having her save a slave at all. Having them wring their hands over how best to save him is the problem. It’s placing white people in a savior position and it’s uncomfortable. My problem with the scene is that it does contribute to Claire being a little inconsistent, but more than that, it’s why the writers thought it was a good idea to include it at all (and, yes, I include Diana in that assessment).

      Outlander isn’t the only show that has had this problem. GoT which isn’t even set in our reality has made narrative choices that play into White Savior narratives.

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    frootloopsKayla Kumari Upadhyaya
    12/03/17 8:23pm

    Geillis needs to find a child who was born 200 years after being conceived. That’s Brianna, who Geillis met and spoke with in last year’s finale. Geillis saw Brianna with Claire at the stones. She knows that Brianna is Jamie’s daughter.

    Weird that you stated your theory with such aplomb.

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      BitterQueenfrootloops
      12/04/17 8:41am

      I’ve read the books (and try not to be annoying) but I always snort when people declare their theories as 100%.

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      frootloopsBitterQueen
      12/04/17 5:49pm

      Yep, I’ve had Lost or Fringe or Game of Thrones theories I was SO SURE about, and they ended up not coming to pass. Such is the nature of talking about crap on the internet. However, I think it’s especially dumb in this case, since we just spent a whole bunch of episodes hanging out with the person who is described in the prophecy. Plus it’s not even a hard prophecy to figure out as an audience member. “Hmmm, which badly acted character was born 200 years after her dad boned her mom?”

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    IceHippo73Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
    12/04/17 9:57am

    “It’s initially a stunning shot, but it becomes increasingly overwrought, an indulgent display of nudity on a show that’s usually more deliberate and less fixed in the male gaze when it comes to naked bodies.”

    Counterpoint: Geillis is hot! And naked ! Yay!

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      PunkrockoldladyIceHippo73
      12/04/17 12:01pm

      And Ian is what? 16? I think the actor did an excellent job of portraying exactly that while being simultaneously terrified because that woman is clearly batshit. That scene was filmed exactly the way it should have been to depict what was actually happening.

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      Steve3742Punkrockoldlady
      12/09/17 9:32am

      In the post episode commentary, I think they said he was 15. Which probably wouldn’t change his reaction to Geillis that much, but makes Geillis’ seduction of him worse.

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