This is the problem with Outlander, really: It always feels like just a TV show. Rooting Randall’s torture of Jamie in the undeniable facts of physical — their nude bodies streaked with blood and spit and tears and sweat and lube — may have alleviated this fact, or obscured it if you want to be less charitable about it, by creating a sense of terrible intimacy. But who are they, really? Randall’s a one-dimensional sadist and Jamie’s a heroic hunk with more scars than facial expressions. The take-no-prisoners treatment of rape in all its horror, the sociopolitical ramifications of its emphasis on masculinity or recovery — neither factor matters all that much if the characters are ciphers, their story stays so predictably linear, and music and voiceovers tell you exactly how to feel about all of it at all times. Grading it all on a curve because the sex scenes are strong, or this sexual assault sequence was strong in an entirely different way, does no one any favors.

I reviewed last night’s Outlander finale, an ambitious failure, for the New York Observer.

There’s a quote attributed to Star Wars impresario George Lucas via his ex-wife, Oscar-winning editor Marcia, that speaks directly to what you and I and everyone who watched Outlander this week subjected ourselves to. As Peter Biskind tells it in his classic history of American cinema in the ‘70s, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, “Emotionally involving the audience is easy,” George is said to have remarked. “Anybody can do it blindfolded, get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.” No kittens, I’m happy to report, were harmed in the making of “Wentworth Prison,” this week’s installment. But what happened was just as lopsidedly sadistic and nakedly manipulative, the only difference being that the target wasn’t a housecat, but a character with all the three-dimensionality and disposition of one. Like an episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys directed by Hostel auteur Eli Roth, “Wentworth Prison,” tonight’s installment of Outlander, is an experiment designed to see how badly cheese can bleed.

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There’s no sense in pulling punches here: It’s infuriating to be asked to suffer through the extended torture and humiliation of characters who, at every other juncture save perhaps their creatively choreographed sex scenes, are trotted around like action figures and posed like romance-novel covers. Outlander’s insistence that Jamie Fraser as a character, or Sam Heughan as the actor playing him, possesses the smoldering and unpredictable charisma required for him to make sense as the anchor of a crazy centuries-spanning love is as wholly unsupported by the on-screen evidence as the show’s claim that he has red hair. (It’s brown! We can all see it!) The man doing the humiliating and torturing has no shades of grey (ironically), no characteristics that make him feel human, or even just interesting as a complete black-hat villain. The less said about the legion of interchangeable dudes in beards and kilts, the better. Only Claire herself stands out, which makes watching her cry for this cipher a surefire way to undermine her power, and a genuinely maddening act of “emotionally involving the audience” by the Lucas definition. Dump her into a pile of corpses, make a mute goon sexually assault her, subject her to whatever indignity you can come up with in lieu of creating characters who equal her depth — it’s not going to suddenly make the show worth taking seriously. Quite the opposite! Calling Outlander soft porn has never been a fair critique. Now it’s torture porn, too, though. And it’ll leave you limp.

I reviewed this week’s Outlander for the New York Observer. Turns out torture and sexual violence aren’t a shortcut to seriousness.

If I’m spending more time on plot recap than usual, it’s because the plot here is this episode’s distinguishing feature, for better and for worse. Outlander is built on a herky-jerky rhythm of reveals and reversals — people are captured and freed, threats are made and rescinded, people fight and make up, over and over and over. Since those plot points so rarely rise above the level of cliché, a storyline that takes things this far in the direction of the unusual and unexpected deserves spotlighting, if not outright praise. The problem is that only on a show this frustrating would a raunchy 18th-century rewrite of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” be seen as a bold storytelling maneuver, instead of what its in-world performers intend it to be: a novelty act.

I reviewed this weekend’s odd episode of Outlander for the New York Observer.

There are only three sure things in this world: you’re born, you die, and somewhere in between you’re betrayed by an Irishman. It’s the circle of life, and it’s what “The Watch,” this week’s episode of Outlander, is all about. And as is too often the case when universal themes are addressed, the specifics wind up mattering very little. If you’ve seen a complicated labor, a botched raid, or feckless Fenian in any TV show or movie before, nothing done with them here will cover new ground.

The birth storyline is the most perfunctory of the three. The moment Jamie’s very pregnant sister Jenny cries out in pain, you know you can kiss at least fifteen minutes of screentime devoted to a woman screaming, another woman saying “push!”, a baby crying, and a mother weeping tears of joy goodbye. To the show’s credit, a couple of scenes in the otherwise standard sequence stand out: The closeup of Claire’s hands on Jenny’s belly as she attempts to palpate the baby out of breech position provides a tactile, physical link between the Miracle Of Birth and the flesh that produces it, while Jenny’s speech about how it feels to be pregnant — featuring a lengthy comparison to the sensation of vaginal intercourse and delivered with her body’s curves silhouetted through her translucent gown — directly connects conception and delivery. But there are no surprises otherwise — certainly not the biggest potential surprise of all: an easy, happy labor, which remains all but unseen on television — and the crosscutting between Claire and Jenny during the birth and their husbands Jamie and Ian en route to an appointment with a redcoat ambush is a shopworn cliché.

I reviewed this week’s Outlander for the New York Observer.

With so much story that’s either rote or nonsensical, the early exchange in which Claire explains airplanes to her awestruck husband stands out, for all the right reasons. What would a time traveller from 200 years into the future tell the man she loves about the world to come? Here’s the thing: I have no idea! That’s an exciting feeling! Stories should head into the great unknown wherever possible. Instead of a boring family feud and superfluous Black Jack flashbacks, we could have had an episode in which the two of them talk about electricity, The Wizard of Oz, indoor plumbing—or on a far more serious note, the World Wars, the atom bomb, the endless struggles and successes and setbacks that the oppressed will experience long after the Jacobite Rising is a distant memory. If only Outlander were as interested in pushing the envelope in its main characters’ heads as it has been in their beds.

I reviewed the latest dire episode of Outlander for the New York Observer.

…at every opportunity, the show takes the low road, populating the trial with one-dimensional enemies and mindless hordes fit only for the audience’s contempt. The judges and prosecutor are straight out of Old Fashioned Asshole central casting. Laoghaire MacKenzie, the star witness, enters the courtroom to the sound of an ominous gong, just in case you wondered if she was a bad guy. But if you missed that bit because you were in the bathroom or something, don’t worry: Later, she actually tells Claire “I shall dance upon your ashes.” If she had a mustache, she’d twirl the shit out of it. Then there’s the fanatical priest, who fakes a change of heart about Claire so complete that everyone’s convinced it was witchcraft—instead of what it was, which is an unnecessarily complicated plot twist with a whopping 15-second payoff. The guy looks and sounds like the parish’s personal Pinhead. There are no surprises here, no nuances, so sense that anyone’s doing anything for any reason other than “this is this kind of story, and that’s what that kind of person does in this kind of story.”

I reviewed this week’s Outlander, as frustrating a show as ever, for the New York Observer.

A partial inventory of things that made me say “This is exactly why the good Lord gave us pay-cable period pieces” on tonight’s episode of Outlander:

• Opening the episode with a full minute and a half of simulated cunnilingus

• Fart jokes

• Half-naked pagan sex-magic rituals

• Morbid Game of Thrones–style magic baby abandonment

• A duel at ten paces devolving into a bloody swordfight over “yo mama” jokes

• Simon Callow in stockings

If it’s entertainment value you’re after, you could do a whole lot worse than “By the Pricking of My Thumbs,” this week’s installment in the ongoing unstuck-in-time adventures of Claire Beecham. Let’s start with the sexy stuff, because hey, if the show can do it, why can’t we? Unmoored from the overhyped wedding-night episode and the baffling tone-deafness of last week’s sex-and-violence cocktail, Jaime and Claire’s chemistry is at last free to just kind of establish itself as its own thing. And from Claire’s high-pitched sighs of pleasure, to Jaime’s refusal to answer the door until they’re finished, to the non-TV-standard positioning of their bodies at the beginning of the scene, that chemistry burns hot. But once you’ve finished fanning yourself, you realize it communicated character, too. Jaime goes down on Claire with the same earnest eagerness and insistence with which he does pretty much everything in life; Claire is relaxed and languid on the receiving end, comfortable and confident in her own skin, just as she is in virtually every situation she encounters. By all means, Outlander, keep ripping those bodices if you’re gonna find that kind of quiet insight underneath.

I reviewed this week’s Outlander, now with 100% more Simon Callow, for the New York Observer.

Bad as “The Reckoning” was — and it was bad, alright — this episode merely illustrated problems Outlander has displayed for most of its first surprise-hit season. And many of those weaknesses lie precisely where supporters of the show locate its strengths. This makes for a hugely frustrating, even confusing viewing experience. How can a show that supposedly gets so much right go so wrong?

Granted, not everything’s a misfire. It genuinely is pretty great that Claire’s enthusiasm for sex is depicted as, you know, fun. In the immortal words of Maude Lebowski, sex can be a natural, zesty enterprise, but too often highly sexed people are depicted only as sluts, freaks, addicts, or predators. Don Draper, Theon Greyjoy, and Elizabeth Jennings are all well and good, but characters like Claire Beecham, Ilana Wexler on Broad City, and Martha Hanson on The Americans treat sex as a central and important part of their lives not out of compulsion or self-destruction, but due to the simple fact that fucking is a fucking awesome way to spend your time, like reading or brunch. Just as some people use their library cards or drink mimosas more often than others, there are folks who build perfectly normal, happy lives around frequent orgasm opportunities, and there shouldn’t be shame in that.

Similarly, there’s nothing inherently wrong, or even odd, about BDSM, an integral part of the make-up sex Claire and her Scottish husband Jamie have after that horrible long day finally ends. You don’t need dress up, lash out, or invest millions of dollars in a private playpen called the Red Room of Pain to employ power dynamics and extreme sensations in your sex life. Nor does emotional, psychological, or sexual trauma of any kind necessarily preclude you from exploring this aspect of sexuality. On the contrary, consensual and safe sadomasochism can help its practitioners take difficult, destructive parts of their lives and harness their power in a positive way. As a very wise person once told me, we think about these things, we talk about these things — why can’t we fuck about these things? Think of it as psychosexual judo, where you’re using the weight and momentum of your opponent — in this case, your own bad experiences and emotions — to win. BDSM can help people earn a black belt against their own suffering.

Moreover, I’m even open to the idea that Outlander, as a romantic fantasy, can get away with behavior we wouldn’t accept in real life. Such an acknowledgement always seemed strangely absent from the great debate about 50 Shades of Grey. Discussing issues of consent, abuse, and stalking as if Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele were real people instead of characters in a work of pornography doesn’t make sense. In fantasies, we can think about and get off on doing things, and having things done to us, that we’d never want to actually experience. 50 Shades is just such a fantasy. Safewords and restraining orders are as out of place there as a physics lesson in a flying dream.

So the problem with Outlander isn’t in addressing these complex, adult issues. Rather it’s in wedging them into a show that otherwise displays all the sophistication of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. (Posh medical expert journeys to the frontier and falls for a long-haired he-man? The parallels are seriously uncanny.) Quick: Name a difficult or demanding moral or ideological topic the show addresses when the characters have their clothes on. Ye ken as well as I that there’s no such animal, sassenach. And no, “Black Jack Randall is really fucked up” doesn’t count; tone down the gore and the gleeful sociopathy and he’s just one of those Army guys who chased the A-Team. A show with ideas as wafer-thin as Outlander’s simply can’t handle heavier fare.

Spanks but no spanks: I reviewed the return of Outlander, which is not good, for the New York Observer. Covering the show this season is going to be…interesting.