So many sandwiches, so little Outlander left.

Pop CultureMay 5, 2020

Outlander recap: Like sandwiches through the hour glass

Staff writer

So many sandwiches, so little Outlander left.

It’s the penultimate episode of the season, so what better time to reveal what Jamie Fraser’s sperm looks like? Tara Ward recaps season five, episode 11 of Outlander.

We’ve been surfing the Outlander wave for many moons now, but our beloved drama still knows how to surprise us like Jamie Fraser jumping out from behind a tree during a hectic game of hide and seek. This week we learned that nothing gets our two favourite hornbags more hornbagged up than the stench of each other’s skin, and that the Frasers love a bit of sexy time out an open window. For starters, that’s quite the draught around your kidneys, and also, won’t someone think of the health and safety risks? And Claire a doctor, too. For shame.

Well, hold onto your hairpieces. The most surprising thing we’ve seen after five seasons, 66 episodes and nearly 4,000 minutes of Claire and Jamie magic was the sight of Jamie Fraser’s sperm.

Seeing the tiny fruit of Jamie Fraser’s loins waving back at us through a microscope was the last thing you expect to see in a drama about a woman with two husbands in two different centuries, but this was an episode bursting with surprises. Claire told Ian she was from the future, Bree discovered she had a secret brother, and I was shocked and saddened to see that Willy’s luscious season four mullet is no more. Things change and seasons pass, but the loss of that hairdo was the truth bomb that hurt the most. Slide my tears under your microscope, Claire Fraser, and you will see what grief looks like.

But there were bigger things to worry about, like the Frasers realising that Jemmy has the gift of time travel. Suddenly, the road back to the future was wide open for the Mackenzies, and Bree and Roger prepared to leave the 18thcentury forever. Nobody was happy about it, especially Marsali, who was pregnant again, even though she just gave birth two weeks ago. If there’s sperm we need to see under a microscope, it’s Fergus’s. That stuff is potent.

Just as powerful were Claire’s peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, whipped up in honour of Roger and Bree’s departure. Those sandwiches were a metaphor for the episode, with the bread being the two chunks of violence at each end, and the jam being all the lovely, gooey emotional bits in the middle. I love bread as much as I love gooey bits, but those opening scenes with the dying fire victim were brutal.

If only Claire had made an open sandwich, so instead of a burned body we’d had a heartfelt farewell scene between Roger and Jamie, where Roger softly touched Jamie’s hair and thanked him for teaching him everything he knew about being a man in the 17th century.

And Jamie would reply “thanks for teaching me how to rock and roll, Captain”, and Lizzie would bring out bowls of mashed potatoes to comfort everyone while Lord John danced like nobody was watching, because a Lord John jig makes everything better. Bree would realise she belongs on the Ridge and she’d tell Roger “but I CAN be an engineer in 1772” and Roger would laugh like he has never laughed before, because even though he’s been beaten, enslaved and nearly hanged, he loves the 1700s too. Jamie would cry tears of joy and tell Claire she smells like pickling cucumbers again, and everyone would be happy.

Dreams are free, friends. Nobody is happy on the Ridge any more, and it’s all down to those nasty Brown brothers. They have bad stubble and bad hair, and you should never trust anyone in Outlander with that combo. I would not like to look at any of the Brown family sperm under a microscope, is all I’m saying.

Jamie’s refusal to join the militia made the Browns really mad, and if anyone needed to chill out with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, it was these clowns. Revenge was in the air, and when the men of the Ridge were distracted by an explosion at the whiskey still, Brown’s gang burst into the Fraser house. The men struck Marsali and kidnapped Claire and stabbed a random patient through the guts. That poor bloke came to the surgery with a sore shoulder, and now he has a new set of problems to deal with, like being dead.

Claire has disappeared, Bree and Roger are gone, and Jamie is standing alone on a cliff having a bonfire. It’s a literal cliffhanger, and I am literally hungry for a sandwich. See you at the season finale.

Read all of Tara Ward’s Outlander recaps here.

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Mi Ying has accused Jowsey and another man of scamming her out of hundreds of pounds.

Pop CultureMay 3, 2020

Heartbreak Island star under fire over online ‘business accelerator’

Alice Webb-Liddall

Contributing writer

Mi Ying has accused Jowsey and another man of scamming her out of hundreds of pounds.

Reality TV star Harry Jowsey has been taken to task on YouTube by a British teenager over a $600 online business accelerator scheme.

He was the charming Aussie with the Ledger-esque smile who graced our screens last year in New Zealand reality show Heartbreak Island, and more recently made his international telly debut on Netflix’s Too Hot To Handle, but now Harry Jowsey has been accused of billing a teenager hundreds of dollars for an incomplete and misleading online coaching course.

In a video uploaded to YouTube last week, 17-year-old Mi Ying recounted the events of October last year that, she said, left her being £300 (NZ$600) out of pocket after forking out for a “business accelerator” run by Jowsey and his friend, “Eli”.

Jowsey’s first stumble into the spotlight was on TVNZ’s 2018 reality show Heartbreak Island, which he won with then-girlfriend Georgia Bryers. The pair broke up very shortly after the show finished, and Jowsey decided to take another shot at love on reality TV. In April, Too Hot to Handle was released on Netflix and Jowsey’s familiar face was back. Following a string of successful Netflix reality formats, Too Hot To Handle became instantly popular, and Jowsey metamorphosed from New Zealand telly’s cheeky Aussie to the world’s cheeky Aussie. He now has a merch line, consisting of hoodies and tees embroidered with his “signature phrases” like “naughty possum” and “boyfriend dick”.

Ying said she and a friend had been looking into ways to get an e-commerce business off the ground when they came across his Instagram account. At the time he had about 40,000 followers, a speck against his 2.8 million following today. Jowsey was promoting a business accelerator, asking people to put in £1,000 for a package including business advice, a website and marketing. Ying said she was interested, but couldn’t afford the initial £1,000, so the pair settled on a programme costing £297.

In a voice message she plays in the YouTube video, which she describes as being from Jowsey, Ying is told that “Eli is getting the final people onboard… so if you’re ready to jump onboard, take action and go out there and start crushing it, let’s do it. We’ll get you onboard now and by the time you wake up you’ll be set up and ready to go.”

Ying said she invested that night, reassured by a “100% money back guarantee” she was promised if her business didn’t make any money. Her plan was to create an e-commerce business that sent product straight from the supplier to the consumer. She would sell products through her website, but wouldn’t need to worry about handling or shipping the product herself. It’s a strategy called dropshipping that is widely used by online retailers.

The first component of the accelerator was a three-hour-long mentorship video, from which Ying was instructed to take extensive notes. She said the information could have been summarised in a much shorter video, and later found one on TikTok that explained the exact same concepts.

“A few days after I’d paid for this e-com programme through Instagram, I came across a TikTok that literally gave me all the information they’d given me in that three-hour-plus video, in one minute. It explained word for word exactly what Eli and Harry had sold to me.”

She says she was reassured by the promised 100% refund if her business made no money, so she invested. When it came to setting up her website, however, Ying noticed a few things that she didn’t think added up to the “all-inclusive” package she had been told her £297 would cover.

After two weeks, she realised she would have to pay an additional £30 a month for a website, and then £300 for Facebook marketing as part of the programme. She tried to pull out. She had made no money thus far because she couldn’t afford to even finish setting up her business, but when she asked Jowsey for her refund, all she got were some voice messages telling her not to have “a loser mentality”, she said.

In a voice message, which she said came from Jowsey, the plea was: “I don’t want you to give up I don’t want you to have this loser mentality where you give up and that’s going to be the end, because even with your YouTube [channel] I can see that you hustle, you have a drive and you want to make things happen.”

Ying was then told that unless she completed all the steps in the programme, the money-back guarantee wouldn’t be upheld, she said. These steps included paying the extra costs for a website and Facebook marketing, which, she said, she could not afford. According to Ying, there was no mention of the exceptions to the money-back guarantee until after she had paid. Jowsey is no longer advertising these services on his social media accounts.

Ying said the whole ordeal had been very embarrassing for her, and wants people to make sure they have done their research before signing up for anything like this.

“All of these programmes on Instagram, you can do for free … You need to be careful where you’re investing your money, you need to research it first, because there is so much information on the internet for free.

“And if you have a gut feeling that it’s wrong, it is wrong.”

Since her video went live, Ying was “contacted by [Jowsey’s] people” and received a full refund, she told The Spinoff. She was asked to take the video down. It is now unlisted on her YouTube account, but remains online.

Jowsey has not responded to requests for comment.