Bolstered by a gutsy female lead, this sexy historical drama was the perfect antidote to a life reduced to groceries shopping
Outlander is the television show that has got me through lockdown thus far. Perhaps you don’t know it, but it’s wildly popular. Simply put, it’s an historical sci-fi romance epic , based on a series of novels by Diana Gabaldon, a former Disney scriptwriter who also happens to hold a PhD in quantitative behavioural ecology. I had to Google that: apparently it involves animals, evolution and ecological pressures. Anyway, the show follows Claire Randall, an English combat nurse who is visiting Scotland with her husband in 1945, when she unwittingly travels through some stones and ends up in the year 1743, where she falls in love with a Highlander named James Fraser.
Alongside romance and adventure, plenty of absolutely horrific things befall Jamie and Claire and the rest of the Outlander gang throughout the five series of the show. They suffer through illnesses and injuries, they are shipwrecked and they lose their minds, they are assaulted and imprisoned, as well as periodically separated from their loved ones by hundreds of years and thousands of miles. This drama is heightened as they are forced to make choices that would quickly destroy any real person, choices like: “Will I stay here where there is antibiotics and recorded music or go back to being accused of witchcraft for drying herbs?”, or “Should I kill my uncle to stop the battle and change the future, or is that a bit much?”
