Caitriona Balfe gets to slip into some spectacular embroidered gowns in the new season of Starz’s Outlander.
More impressive, that’s not how she steals the show.
She steals Outlander, whose second season launches Saturday (4/9) at 9 p.m. ET, with her acting, as she turns Claire Randall Fraser into a woman of striking will and force.
For those who didn’t watch the first season or read the Diana Gabaldon books on which the series is based, Claire Randall is a World War II nurse who in late 1945 is hoping to return to a peaceful life with her academic but loving husband Frank (Tobias Menzies).
On a visit to Inverness, Claire is unexpectedly hurtled through time to 18th century Scotland, where she has a full memory of her 1945 life and no idea how to get back to it.
Also, as a foundling in Scotland, she becomes the object of considerable suspicion. Eventually she falls in with a clan that includes Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan), and after a “will they/won’t they” dance, they decide they will.
While the first season ended with Claire making her big effort to return to the 20th century, the truth is that by then she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to throw Jamie over for Frank.
Season 2 opens with Claire confronting and not really resolving the unusual dilemma of being simultaneously married to two different men in two different centuries. With that as backdrop, the season then slams into its storyline, which sends Jamie and Claire to Paris.
Their mission is to persuade the Jacobites, who want to lead a Scottish rebellion against the ruling British, that their mission is doomed. Claire knows this is what will happen from the history she has read in the future, but persuading the contemporary Jacobites is another challenge altogether.
The forcefulness Claire began to develop soon after her arrival in Scotland has only grown as the series has gone along, and she, more than Jamie, is now propelling their move to change history.
She also gets in trouble by using her nursing skills to diagnose a pair of seamen with smallpox.
By the Parisian law of the day, that meant the ship on which they arrived must be burned along with all its cargo. This leads ship owner Le Comte St. Germain – the name of an actual person that has been used countless times in fiction – to swear vengeance on Claire.
On the purely visual side, Claire and Jamie’s infiltration of the Jacobite movement gets them invited to all sorts of high-class affairs, which is where the gowns come in.
That gorgeous eye candy gives viewers a brief respite between crises, as the intrigue quickly becomes dense and dangerous.
Outlander has its soap elements, to be sure, and they could easily steer Claire into melodrama and caricature. But Balfe never lets that happen. Her passion and fury feel as natural and genuine as her affection for Jamie and the complex mixture of loyalty and guilt that she feels for Frank.
While period romances aren’t that hard to find on TV these days, Outlander is one you could learn to love.