Outlander "Rent" Review: Claire Gets Pissed Off/On 

Outlander "Rent" Review: Claire Gets Pissed Off/On

For those of you who sat down to watch "Rent" hoping that Claire would travel through time to an East Village apartment building full of bohemian young people living with fatal illness and ripping off

La Boheme, my apologies. However, Outlander\'s take on the title was pretty darn dramatic, and it didn\'t make us guiltily revisit our teenage fashion choices.

Finally, Claire is out of the dungeon hospital of Castle Leoch, crossing the beautiful, cinematic Highlands in the company of some rough-and-tumble Scottish warriors AND a lawyer who likes the same poems she does. I imagine that hanging out with a bunch of bros in the 18th century was very isolating; all they talked about was sex, or they\'d gossip about you in Gaelic so you couldn’t understand what they were saying. And to be honest, if you\'re hanging out with a bunch of dudes and you\'re the lone woman, that\'s always kind of a tightrope act. Even if you completely conform to bro code and chug a beer and eat some hot wings and do an “Oh, you!” laugh when some bouncing bosoms are loudly commented on, you’re always the non-man out. Still, Claire is keeping a stiff Sassenach upper lip, because in her mind she’s confident that she and her fellow travelers will run across the time-portal standing stones any day now, at which point she\'ll be able to discreetly vanish back into the super progressive 1940s.

Much like he did in the book, Dougal was putting on a bit of a show in the taverns of the towns they visited each night, delivering a scorching Scot screed that crescendoed with him ripping off Jamie’s shirt to display the warrior\'s scars and then collecting money. Claire, who still has not absorbed more than three words of Gaelic, was not sure what the little spiel was all about, but hey: not her problem. Standing stones. Frank is waiting. Have a nice life.

And that’s when the show once again veered slightly from the source material into strange new territory: While the villagers were bringing forward their bags of oats and goats and piglets for rent (wish I had that rent option), she disappeared into the village and found a group of ladies. So starved was Claire for a little girl-talk and female camaraderie that she happily set to slopping a big roll of wet wool in hot piss just to feel like part of a clique. (Did anyone get really uneasy that no one rolled up their sleeves first?)

While the scene was original to the TV series, this heightened the overall sensibility that differentiates

Outlander from your typical time-travel romance fantasy; few tales of this ilk include such gritty, revolting details as setting wool dye with hot piss, let alone taking a little time out to get knackered and refresh the piss stores. Claire was hiking up her skirts to contribute to the next round of a-singin’ and a-sloppin’ in the sizzlin’ urine when Angus came in without knocking, and then when she tried to return a goat to one of her new lady friends, Dougal really lost it with her and they all had a shouting match right in front of the Scottish villagers, making it was horrifically clear just how alone Claire was in the world, when suddenly a male English accent rang out.

This was a very effective moment that vividly illustrated how alienated Claire feels, as a woman, as a time traveller, and perhaps most of all as an English person in an (understandably) hostile land. While her countryman was too outnumbered to really help her, the argument it triggered made Claire spill some of her mounting suspicions about Dougal’s nightly strip routine with Jamie: He was using people\'s pity for Jamie to fill his own coffers! He was stealing from the Laird! These Scots were all just a bunch of crooks!

Kindly lawyer Ned helped set her right later on, and she learned that Dougal was actually raising funds for a Jacobite uprising against the English with his little Jamie-scar freak show. Claire, with her 200-year leg up on history, knows this is ultimately going to lead to the intensely tragic Battle of Culloden, a literal and figurative massacre of the Highlanders that led like day into night to Scottish language and culture being suppressed by the victorious English. The battlefield in her own time (and today) is essentially a giant graveyard which serves as a monument to a way of life gone forever. Claire wants to warn the clansmen not to attempt an uprising, but as someone who\'s highly suspected of being an English spy, any naysaying on her part will only sound like the enemy protecting their own interests. Claire is like some poor British Cassandra, cursed with foresight and yet in a position where she is uniquely unbelievable.

Once she realized that the callous bros she’s with are almost certainly doomed to death or displacement in another three short years, Claire started seeing them in a completely different light. Not to mention they started a bar fight to defend her honor, and Jamie slept by her door to protect her after a drunken night of carousing. Maybe the roughness of these men is a necessary, even beautiful strength. Claire’s perspective was changed enough to even join in with the rowdy joking: She’s one of the boys! (Isn’t it funny how that phrase is vaguely a compliment, whereas calling a man “one of the girls” is an invitation to a fistfight? Ha ha ha, our culture secretly despises everything feminine, ho ho ho.)

So when the young Englishman returned in his redcoat, flanked by fellow officers, Claire had a choice to make: Was she a guest of the MacKenzie, or a hostage? Should she defend Dougal, or take the chance to abscond with the British soldiers?

"Rent" ended before she could answer the English soldier who confronted her and Dougal, away from the group near a stream. It was another event that was original to the TV version of 

Outlander, which provided even those who\'ve read the books with a cliffhanger. 

... Is Claire failing to be adaptable to her circumstances, or would you have been far past your own breaking point by now if you were in her position?

... Slapping a big wet piece of wool in hot piss: What is the appropriate attire for this activity? Would you take part?

... WhereTF is Claire getting all those gorgeous clothes!? And curl cream?! Girl knows how to PACK.

... Have you ever been the odd gender out for a prolonged social experience, and if so, what did it teach you?

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Outlander S01E02 "Castle Leoch" Review 34 comments

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