The Highland half of this Outlander prequel is well cast and handsomely made, and Harriet Slater’s Ellen MacKenzie could carry a series on her own. The Beauchamps’ half is thin, the script explains everything twice, and the whole thing is built as a mirror of the parent show.
Matthew B. Roberts, who ran Outlander for most of its life, has gone back two generations. Blood of My Blood is a ten-part prequel that tells how Jamie Fraser’s parents met and, in a second strand running alongside it, how Claire’s did. Diana Gabaldon, whose novels the parent series was drawn from, is among the credited writers. The idea is that the great love story of the original was itself the child of love stories, and that we would like to see them. About half the time, we did.
The half that works is the Highland one. Red Jacob MacKenzie (Peter Mullan) is laird of Clan MacKenzie, and the question hanging over the gathering is which of his sons comes next: Colum MacKenzie (Séamus McLean Ross), the thinker, or Dougal MacKenzie (Sam Retford), the fighter. Their sister Ellen MacKenzie (Harriet Slater) is the prize either would trade for an alliance, and Slater plays her as someone who has already worked this out and is not going to make it easy. Jamie Roy’s Brian Fraser, son of Lord Lovat (Simon Fraser) (Tony Curran), turns up at the gathering, which is the last place a Fraser should be welcome. The two of them have the thing the show needs, which is that they look as though they want to be in the same room. Curran plays Lovat as a man who enjoys being disliked, and he is the best thing in every scene he is given.
It is handsomely made. Four cinematographers, Peter Robertson, Neville Kidd, Alasdair Walker and Søren Bay, share the ten episodes, and between them they keep the glens grey-green and wet and the halls lit by fire, so that faces come out of the dark the way they did in the original. Mike Gunn’s production design fills the MacKenzie seat with smoke, antlers and rushlight rather than polish, and Trisha Biggar’s plaids look as though they have been slept in. Bear McCreary, who scored the parent series, returns, and his fiddle and pipes do the same work they did there. Nothing about the look of it is cheap.
What got at us, and we did not expect it, was Slater in the hall while the men settle her future. She says almost nothing. The camera stays on her while the clan talks over her head, and Slater lets you see her counting the exits. It is the one stretch where the show trusts a face to do the work, and it made us wish it did so more often.
The other half is set two centuries on, around the First World War. Julia Moriston Beauchamp (Hermione Corfield) and Henry Beauchamp (Jeremy Irvine) fall in love by letter, which is a hard thing to put on screen, and the show does not find a way. We get voices over handwriting and two attractive people looking at the middle distance. Then the two strands are arranged to rhyme with each other, and with the original, so neatly that the pattern shows through the story. Corfield and Irvine are perfectly decent. They are given the least to do.
The script is the real weakness, and it is on both sides of the divide. People announce who they are and whom they are related to, and then somebody else repeats it. Murtagh Fitzgibbons Fraser (Rory Alexander) and Ned Gowan (Conor MacNeill), younger versions of characters the original audience already knows, are introduced with the care of a museum label. Four editors, Alanah Jones, Hibah Schweitzer, Michael O’Halloran and Leah Tuscano, cut between the centuries at a rate that sometimes leaves the Highland scenes just as they get going. We were bored during the letters, and then irritated, because we could see the better show waiting in the next scene.
It is a 15 and earns it the way the original did: the sex is frank and unhurried and shot to be tender, and the show believes in love without embarrassment. That belief is its real virtue. It is also why the exposition grates, because a series this sincere should not need to keep explaining its own family tree.
If you know Outlander, the Highland half is worth your evenings and the rest is a long drive north. If you do not, start with the original, where the surprises are surprises rather than homework.
