STARZ dropped the Season 2 trailer for “Outlander: Blood of My Blood” this morning, and it does something the first season never quite dared. It stops pretending the two love stories are running in parallel and starts pulling both of them apart. One hundred and thirteen seconds, two centuries, four people who all want the same thing, and a card at the end that reads SEASON PREMIERE FRI SEP 18. If you came to this prequel for the romance, the trailer has bad news about the romance.
It opens gently and then gets its knife out fast. A STARZ card over a Highland glen in mist, and then Ellen MacKenzie (Harriet Slater) in a dark room saying “We have to go.” A man’s back is to us. “They’re looking for me, not you.” Then Brian Fraser (Jamie Roy) has her hand in his and tells her “I’ll die before I let them take you,” and she answers “That’s what I’m afraid of,” which is the entire season in eight words. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Outlander: Blood of My Blood” Season 2, including where the Jacobite Rising leaves Brian and Ellen and what has happened to Henry Beauchamp.
It stops pretending the two love stories are running in parallel and starts pulling both of them apart. One hundred and thirteen seconds, two centuries, four people who all want the same thing.”
The next cut is an army. Ranks of Jacobites standing in fog with their colours up, held just long enough to register as hundreds of men rather than a dozen and a smoke machine. Over it, a voice tells Ellen “You have a war to fight.” There is a beat on a single figure alone on a green hill under a bruised sky, and then Ellen answers, “So do I.” That exchange is the load-bearing beam of the whole eighteenth century half. Brian goes to fight for Lord Lovat. Ellen stays to hold the MacKenzies together. They are not being separated by circumstance, they are choosing different jobs, and the trailer is careful to let her have the last word about it.
Then a title card, gold on black: RETURN TO THE WORLD OF OUTLANDER. It fades over an overhead shot of standing stones in grass, which is the franchise clearing its throat, and the trailer swings two hundred years forward. Julia (Hermione Corfield) and Henry Beauchamp (Jeremy Irvine) are out in the open in twentieth century coats. “We came through the stones by accident,” one of them says. “We’ve been trying to get back ever since.” There is an aerial of a body crumpled among the stones and a hand reaching out to touch one, and if you have watched a minute of this franchise you already know what that gesture costs.
Here is where the trailer stops being a trailer and starts being cruel. Julia, now in period dress, says “Henry somehow went through without me and the baby.” Somebody shouts her name. And then the cut everybody is going to be posting about: two hands reaching for each other across a pale room, fingers open, close enough that you brace for the touch, and they never touch. It is held over three separate shots. The camera does not help them. Whatever the mechanics of this season turn out to be, the show has just told you in pictures that Henry and Julia are on opposite sides of something that does not care how close they get.
What follows answers where he landed. Henry is on a bed with his wrists strapped down, hauling against the restraints, and the line under it is “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m not supposed to be here.” He says it twice because nobody believes him the first time. Then an empty institutional ward with the curtains drawn, and a close look at a piece of early electrical apparatus, coils and wires and a hand cranking it. A man who says he fell through time, in a building that exists to disagree with him. There is no version of that where the treatment is kind.
The eighteenth century half comes back with a full scale battle and does not skimp. Redcoats in ranks with Union colours and artillery, an overhead of a volley going off, Highlanders with targes up and mouths open, and one nasty piece of close work where a redcoat and a Highlander go down together. Somewhere inside it, Brian says “We can’t marry until the rebellion is ended,” and Ellen answers “This is the path we chose. The only life that’s ours.” The show has decided the Rising is not a backdrop this year. It is the thing standing between them, and it has a body count.
The strongest single image in the trailer arrives at fifty two seconds and it is not a battle shot, it is what is left after one. Brian is standing in the middle of a burning field, unarmed, filthy, looking straight down the lens while men move behind him. Over it: “It takes more courage to lay down a blade, than to raise it.” That is a bold line to put in a Jacobite trailer, and putting it over a man who has plainly just used one is either very good writing or a promise the season has to keep. We will find out on the eighteenth.
Then the two halves finally rhyme, and this is the bit that suggests somebody thought hard about the edit. A man in a twentieth century uniform, eyes shut, in a curved white room, saying “In the war, I knew men who lost limbs.” Cut to Julia outdoors, crying, and the line lands on her: “That’s what this is like.” A phantom limb. The show is telling you what it thinks time travel actually is, and it is not an adventure. It is an amputation you keep feeling.
The last thirty seconds are a montage that moves fast and still finds room to worry you. Tony Curran’s Lord Lovat close in firelight, looking exactly as trustworthy as that family has ever looked. A bloodied, bearded man staring down the camera. “I’ll see her safe,” somebody promises. “Till my last breath.” A roar of “For the cause!” over ranks moving in fog. Then fireworks, a crowd in twenties dress craning up at them, Henry and Julia kissing, a Georgian ballroom mid bow, and Julia alone at dusk watching a ruin. “Whatever comes, I’ll find you,” she says, and the card comes up: OUTLANDER: BLOOD OF MY BLOOD, SEASON PREMIERE, FRI SEP 18.
What the trailer will not tell you is which promise the season intends to break. Four people say some version of I will come back for you, and the structure of this franchise means at least one of them is wrong. Season 1 got 87% on Rotten Tomatoes largely on the strength of two courtships; Season 2 has taken both couples and put a war between one pair and two centuries between the other. That is a harder show to love and a much more interesting one to watch, and it is a real risk for a prequel whose main draw was that you already knew these people got their happy ending. Or thought you did.
What Do You Think? Is separating both couples the right call for a prequel, or does it cost the show the warmth that made Season 1 work? Do you read the two hands that never touch as a scene from the season or as an edit built for the trailer? And now that Henry is in an asylum being told his own life is a delusion, do you trust this show to get him out?
Catch up properly: every “Outlander” episode in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Outlander timeline.
See you on the next binge!
