"Outlander, Prestonpans, Alamance" Topic

One of the shows I binge watched while under Covid house arrest (not me, but where I worked) was Outlander.
Yeah, it's a Chick Flick, but it's also quite manly.
It has the usual unexplained time travel plot. Please. Let's keep it unexplained. Time travel stories work better that way.
Claire is a nurse in WWII, and she gets zapped back in time to pre-Jacobite Rebellion Scotland. She is of course gorgeous. That keeps the make interest.
She "encounters" the fine strapping young Highlander lad Jamie Fraser. Romance ensues, and of course History.
We get a pretty good representation of Prestonpans. She tries to warn against Culloden, but Bonnie Prince Charlie is a useless blockhead and nitwit (historical accuracy from the show runners) and … she is only a woman. Nobody listens.

Spoiler Alert! There are a couple more seasons! So, if you worried about Jamie, don't bother. He's doing alright, while Claire is zapped back.

We encounter pirates, voodoo, and everyone ends up in North Carolina just in time for FIW and AWI action. Neat sidetrack features the Regulator war. Or skirmish.

The show is great fun. The men are manly, the ladies are hot. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad. If you have, or are planning doing the ‘45, FIW or backwoods AWI, you'll appreciate it even more. The next season will feature Widow Moore's Creek Brudge. I've gamed that already. Great fun.
The show is based on a series of books by Diana Gabaldon. Fortunately, she is able to stay a book or two ahead of the tv series, so we can avoid train wrecks when the show runners run out of written material. >cough cough. Game of Thrones. Cough cough<
Season 6 is on track.
Available on Netflix for first few seasons, but it's a STARZ production.

John;
I still have to see the last few episodes.

I saw the season finale, but missed the stuff with Alamance.

Eric

John thanks for the tip. My wife has the books and it will be good to have something that we can both watch together.

I'm pleased that you are pleased enough with it. For me, the first episode of season two was a deal breaker and I lost interest in it. A shame becasue I though the first season was extremely well done and high entertaining.
I can hardly keep up with the better quality dramas (historical, sci-fi and fantasy) which we are getting these days thanks to internet television. The historically based stuff all have their flaws of course but it's generally better than we've ever had before. You just need to compare it to the material I grew up with and there was more chaff than wheat in the old mix. I'd say your summation of Outlander is spot on.

I've been watching this show since 2015 or so, and I've enjoyed it immensely. I think the best thing about this series is that it appeals to both men and women, because it's both a trashy romance *and* a trashy historical action drama.

Alex Burns is one of our ilk and an actual credentialed historian with an obsession for 18th C. history, and he picks many nits with Outlander on his blog, so it's fair to say there are plenty of accuracy problems to bother those who Know Too Much™. However, I'm an Age of Sail geek, and I was actually quite satisfied with the job they did on the nautical details. There were plenty of little things I could object to, but the ships had believable color schemes, hull forms and sail plans for the mid-18th C., an impossibly rare attention to detail for a TV show.

The biggest obstacle to my suspension of disbelief turns out to be the lack of aging of the main characters. The older characters just don't seem like they've aged 20+ years in the course of the story arc, and I expect this to get worse as the show proceeds into the AWI and the characters should all be in their 50s and 60s. OTOH, I guess I'm pretty happy they didn't swap out actors for older ones, which would be even more jarring.

I'm also a little disappointed that they couldn't find a taller actress for Brianna (in the books she's a Jamie-scale amazon), but I always give a show some slack for this kind of thing. Acting skill and on-screen chemistry are more important than perfect physique.

The show is based on a series of books by Diana Gabaldon. Fortunately, she is able to stay a book or two ahead of the tv series, so we can avoid train wrecks when the show runners run out of written material.

Diana Gabaldon is indeed a prolific writer (8x 800-page books in this series so far!), but she's not really "keeping ahead" of the show – all of the published books were written before the first episode of the show was released. The show is chewing through the books really fast, but Gabaldon has slowed to a pace of 4-5 years per book, and the latest is now 6 years old and still unpublished. The show remains really popular, so I expect a Game of Thrones-style background material problem to come up in a few years. They might have to start making the Lord John series while they wait for Gabaldon to write more Outlander books.

- Ix

It has the usual unexplained time travel plot. Please. Let's keep it unexplained. Time travel stories work better that way.

It is a show my wife loves and I enjoy mostly but I hate/detest/revile time travel plot deus ex machina bull puckey in pretty much any form. Generally it always seems to me that when writers feel a dry spell coming on, time travel is a cheap easy fix.

Culloden. Alamance. Moore's Creek Bridge. My Scottish ancestors had large testicles and small brains, seems like. The Black Watch was the best thing that ever happened to them.

My Scottish ancestors got shipped over for fighting for the King in the BCW, so they missed out on Culloden.

While contemplating a ford made impassable by a burn in spate, I got talking to the chap who provides the 'heritage' livestock for the series. He'd come to feed the beasts he still farms, having virtually given up his previous agricultural activities for lure of the Yankee dollar.

'BCW'?

My wife and I started watching this and I admit at first it was mostly for her…but I became interested. Up to this point I knew next to nothing about the '45. But then Ian, from Flags of War came out with a kickstarter and it had a "Jamie" figure. Showed it to my wife and she gave the green light. Well I dove in head first, signed up for all three kickstarters, added several wonderful books to my library and so I added a whole new period to my gaming!!

Just watched the episode with Alamance. Meh. On the bright side, it got me researching the real battle to game it. A militia-on-militia battle sounds like a fun twist to the usual red, blue and green coats.