spinofflive
outlanderfeature

LightboxMay 16, 2016

Adventures with Schemey MacSchemeface, and other thoughts on Outlander S02E06

outlanderfeature

Our resident Outlander fanatic Tara Ward shares her thoughts from the much-anticipated return of time-travel romance series. Contains spoilers. And smoulders. 

There was so much plotting and conspiracy in this week’s episode of Outlander that Jamie Fraser officially changed his name by deed poll to ‘Schemey MacSchemeface’. Charles Stuart schemed with Jamie, Jamie schemed against the Comte, Claire schemed with anyone who would listen, and Louise just got drunk.

Intoxication may be the best way forward, given this episode marks the beginning of the slippery slope towards Culloden Moor and the ruin of Highland society (sob). Let’s save the gut-wrenching tragedy for later, and enjoy our weekly fix of ginger curls, lace sleeves, glow-in-the-dark stallions and wine – lots of wine.

Hoist yourself onto your trusty steed and hold on tight, as we gallop into into the dark world of Outlander, episode six.

Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.28.15 PM

1) Where did I put my night vision goggles

It appears episode six was filmed inside a cupboard, at night, during a power cut. It’s certainly atmospheric, even if all I can see is a horse’s arse.

Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.34.35 PM

It gets worse. There’s the sound of wine bottles being opened – a noise I’d recognize in my sleep – and the contents tipped onto the ground. Every delicious ‘glug’ is a knife to my heart, making me cry tears of 12.5% alcohol. Millions of innocent grapes, ripe with potential and possibility, now lying wasted upon the filthy ground. Perhaps it’s best I can’t see this with my own eyes.

Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.44.14 PM

Hold the phone, imagine if the spilling of the wine was a metaphor for the Jacobite Uprising – the needless waste of life, the loss of a happy future, bodies lying ruined on Culloden Moor or stuck in a dark cupboard staring bleakly at a horse’s arse. OMG, this whole pitch-black filter thing is bloody genius. Outlander is a televisual onion: SO MANY LAYERS.

2) Claire totes has it all, therefore not tempting fate in any way

Two husbands, a baby on the way, hundreds of matching hats and gloves, a fulfilling career tending to the sick and pustulent, and unlimited access to dead-man moisturizer. Life is tres magnifique (that’s French for ‘kick-ass amazing’).

 Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.14.12 PM

3) Cheer up, love, it might never happen

“We may find ourselves staring into the bottom of the abyss that is Culloden Moor,” Jamie muses, as he and Claire settle down for another romantic evening in Chez Fraser. Later, they enjoy a candlelight dinner and discuss the effect of syphilis on the brain. Sigh, so romantic.

Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.57.18 PM

4) This is what it felt like to watch episode six 

 Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.22.45 PM

5) Claire came to save the world, not to be mansplained to

Not only does the Executioner/Doctor (confusing job-share situation) make Claire wash a dead body, but he also gives a riveting lecture on how to draw and quarter a hanged man. Pull out the heart in one swift movement, blah blah blah – enough already, where’s that funny little dog that sniffs out pus?

 Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.11.37 PM

6) “Murtagh’s angry” – nothing gets past our Claire

Not sure what gave it away: the slammed doors, the sarcastic comments, or the fact he called Jamie and Claire a pair of idiots. Or was that me? Hard to tell.

Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.20.55 PM

7) Subtitles are awesome

Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.53.46 PMScreen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.43.02 PMScreen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.21.24 PM

8) 20th Century History 101 with Professor Claire Fraser

Claire’s time travel secret is out, but Murtagh was too busy doing the world’s crappiest Sudoku to notice. Claire points out her significant dates: born in 1918, helped broker world peace in 1945, and in 1937 she bought the cutest pair of leather boots, on special at 40% off.

 Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.29.59 PM

9) Saint Germain and Jamie argue over who has the best hair

Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.54.05 PM 

10) Book Group Night at Louise’s (aka Get Sloshed On Wine Night, aka Every Night)

It’s fun to hang out with the BFFs, discussing current affairs and wondering why the Baron can’t get it up. But Claire’s the friend you wish you hadn’t invited, because she kills the mood quicker than you can say “doesn’t it depress you how this city treats the poor and underprivileged?” More wine for everyone!

Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.47.30 PM 

11) If you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise

Haven’t these clowns ever seen The Princess Bride? You never go into the fire swamp!

Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 6.04.49 PM

12) Remember that time Jamie pierced Black Jack’s testicles with his sword, Claire began to haemorrhage, and Jamie got arrested?

Crap. Schemey McSchemeface is going down.

Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 6.06.58 PM

13) Finally, does Charles Stuart make anyone else feel uncomfortable? 

Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.38.02 PM

What about you, Louise?

Screen Shot 2016-05-15 at 5.49.26 PM


 

Pour yourself a dram and dive into the new season Outlander on Lightbox below (new episodes arriving every Sunday at 7pm)

SpinOff_WatchNow_Blue

This content, like all television coverage we do at The Spinoff, is brought to you thanks to the excellent folk at Lightbox. Do us and yourself a favour by clicking here to start a FREE 30 day trial of this truly wonderful service.

Keep going!
Screen Shot 2016-05-10 at 3.40.38 pm

Pop CultureMay 12, 2016

Monitor: Escape series Underground shatters the museum glass on slavery

Screen Shot 2016-05-10 at 3.40.38 pm

For Monitor this week, Aaron Yap tackles Underground, a escape drama that seeks to combine modern times with history.

When Quentin Tarantino released his blaxploitation-cum-spaghetti western opus Django Unchained in 2012, he had a justification for his typically incendiary, controversy-baiting approach to one of the most awful and shameful periods in American history. “When slave narratives are done on film, they tend to be historical with a capital H, with an arms-length quality to them. I wanted to break that history-under-glass aspect, I wanted to throw a rock through that glass and shatter it for all times, and take you into it.”

django

And shatter that glass he did. The cartoony, politically incorrect bluster of Django Unchained marked a sharp contrast to that other antebellum period trip of the same year, Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave. It was unlike pretty much any notably prestigious screen depiction of the subject, from Steven Spielberg’s Amistad all the way back to Roots, the 1977 milestone miniseries that remains the quintessential document of the slave experience on TV.

Django Unchained was an exploitation film at heart, its throat-grabbing, overwrought tenor channeled the same disreputable energy as Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo, or for a more extreme example: Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s noxious, utterly gob-smacking 1971 pseudo-documentary Goodbye Uncle Tom. One could call the latter The Triumph of the Will of slave cinema, a work so enraging and offensive Pauline Kael deemed it “the most specific and rabid incitement to race war.”    

Though less likely to stir up the same level of outrage, WGN America’s Underground deserves to be part of the same conversation – particularly with the currently turbulent politics of racial representation in movies and television. Created by Misha Green and Joe Pokaski, the show tackles the under-examined history of the Underground Railroad, an intricate network of escape routes used by slaves in the 19th century. But this is no arty, HBO-style prestige costume drama.

underground

Not too far off the soapy, overbaked tone of Empire, it’s unabashedly a genre piece. A pacey, pulpy potboiler fueled by a boisterous sense of empowerment that the best blaxploitation movies of the ‘70s can offer. The characters are smart, determined, and easy to root for. Without sanitising the punishing realities its enslaved protagonists suffered through – whippings, sexual assault, and a dead baby all figure in the first ep – Underground seeks to entertain first and foremost.

Strip away the period/subject trappings and what you have is essentially an old-fashioned men-on-a-mission caper. In fact, Underground can’t help but draw similarities to the soon-to-be-rebooted mid-2000s FOX series Prison Break, which sold us the preposterous idea of an inmate’s full-body tattoo serving as a blueprint for an escape plan. Here, it’s a spiritual, printed in blood on fabric, that requires decoding by its escapees, a group of seven slaves at a plantation in pre-Civil War Georgia.

hodge jurnee

A commanding, fiery Aldis Hodge (Straight Outta Compton) plays Noah, a fast-thinking blacksmith who sets the plot – a treacherous 600-mile journey to freedom – into motion. He heads up the solidly cast “Macon 7”, which includes wily teenager Henry (Renwick Scott), gentle giant strongman Zeke (Theodus Crane) and one-eyed preacher Moses (Mykelti Williamson). Also along for the ride are Rosalee (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), a house slave who develops a romantic interest in Noah, and Cato (Alano Miller), whose position as a black plantation overseer adds some thorny dynamics into the mix.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the white characters have less interesting parts. Christopher Meloni is a gruff slave catcher-with-a-conscience who’s hired by plantation owner Tom Macon (Reed Diamond) to track down Noah. Marc Blucas and Jessica De Gouw are husband-and-wife abolitionists whom I seem to tune out of whenever they appear. Even acknowledging the assistance of characters such as theirs in establishing the Underground Railroad, there’s still an uncomfortable hint of the “white saviour” syndrome so common in Hollywood here. The story of the Macon 7 is compelling enough – it would be tighter and fiercer if these B-plot lines were shortened, or excised completely.

ernestine

Underground’s biggest drawback is John Legend’s ill-fitting music supervision. Featuring hip-hop artists like Common and Kanye West, who originally were to supervise, the music is often gracelessly juxtaposed with the action. At its worst, it destroys the illusion of its otherwise handsomely produced period setting. The intentions of bridging past and present, I get. The audacity, I get. And staying true to WGN America’s trend of anachronistically soundtracked shows like Salem and Manhattan, sure. Sorry, it just does not work for me at all.

On shows like Manhattan and The Knick, atmospheric electronic scores fused beautifully with the stories that dealt with the advancement of science and technology. When Underground throws a club banger like Glitch Mob’s ‘We Are the Wild Ones’ over a governor’s ball in 1857, the effect is like a desperate DJ trying to get the guests of a masquerade party grinding on the dancefloor.

Fortunately, these iffy stylistic choices – which extend to director Anthony Hemingway’s fondness for Michael Bay-esque colour-saturated flash cuts – are minimal and do not detract from my overall enjoyment of the show.

Underground isn’t high art but it’s never boring. It gets the right kind of tawdry-crazy elements, like staging a mini-heist around the slave fetish of an elderly plantation owner, or lingering over head house slave Ernestine’s (Amirah Vann) seduction of Macon in a basement wine cellar. It can be earnest, corny, exciting. It does its part shattering the museum glass, reminding us that crafting entertainment based on historical atrocities need not dishonour the memory of its victims, but can embolden their plight on a gut, if not cerebral level.


The final episode of Underground arrives express to Lightbox tonight, click here to watch:

SpinOff_WatchNow_Blue

This content, like all television coverage we do at The Spinoff, is brought to you thanks to the excellent folk at Lightbox. Do us and yourself a favour by clicking here to start a FREE 30 day trial of this truly wonderful service.