Kathryn VanArendonk

They have accurately diagnosed why we were all here.

Yeah.

My hesitations about the sillier elements of Outlander are more to do with plotting things that happened, particularly in the last season, where characters who you were pretty sure were dead turned out are not dead for reasons.

And I love a person you thought was dead came back.

This is not snobbery on my part.

This is not a sort of resistance to pulpy plotting.

I think that sometimes Outlander can fall victim to just wanting to do stuff because it seems... because somebody had the idea.

And then...

those characters don't mean anything or they're not fully, they're not ever able to fully integrate them into the core of what is compelling about the show.

It's something that I think is going to be even a continuing question about how to do romance on television because the genre, the structure of the genre is kind of antithetically opposed to the long running serial structures that TV has to maintain.

You, in a romance, have two people.

They have tension.

They are together.

They are broken apart.

Eventually, you have a happy ending.

And like a mystery plot where you are saying, who did it?

There's a body.

And you're sort of holding off the end as long as you possibly can and just sort of tap dancing in the middle to keep that ending away.

romance plots have to do all this kind of shenanigan stuff in the middle where it's like, not just between your couple, but you got to fill that time with all of their kids and their time travel cousins and a random guy who showed up.

And sometimes the show is really successful at making you care about those things.