We see that same confused moment of pleasure on actor Sam Heughan's face in the scene. “I roused to him, Claire,” he confesses with dread in the novel, terrified of his body’s biological and adrenaline-filled betrayal that he worries indicates a deeper moral transgression from which he can never recover. Readers of Diana Gabaldon’s books know that these are the same feelings that lead Jamie to want to die afterward. Jamie’s violation unfolded entirely from his perspective, and the audience watched as he worked through a series of conflicting emotions. Jamie became a survivor, while Sansa (from what we’ve seen of the season up until this point) remained a victim. Comparisons between Sansa’s rape on GoT and Jamie’s on Outlander will undoubtedly be numerous because of the way in which the two series depicted the assaults.Ī lot of people are going to dwell on the fact that Jamie is a man, but the key difference between his and Sansa’s experiences comes down to perspective and aftermath. When Sansa was raped by her new husband, Ramsay Bolton, the camera cut away to Theon/Reek, further robbing Sansa of power by erasing her perspective. We’ve grown accustomed to seeing it play out, and that’s one of the reasons viewers were so upset about Sansa Stark’s wedding night rape on Game of Thrones. Not only that, sexual violence no longer takes place offscreen or is merely implied. “Has the Golden Age of TV Been Replaced by the Age of Rape and Torture?” author Sarah Selter asked in a piece she wrote for Flavorwire earlier this month. Sexual assault has been used as a way to advance storylines and increase dramatic stakes in a lot of series this year.

The way Outlander dealt with Jamie Fraser’s repeated rape and brutalization at the hands of Black Jack Randall was a turning point in the portrayal of the emotional aftermath of sexual violence on television. It was horrifying to watch, and that was the very moment I knew the show wouldn’t shy away from the sexual torture that follows these events in the novel.Īnd it didn't. To seal the deal, Randall nailed Jamie’s hand to a table. But Jamie ends up offering himself (and his body) to Randall so that she could escape. In the penultimate episode from May 16, Claire Fraser broke into Wentworth Prison and tried to rescue her husband, Jamie, from the sadistic Black Jack Randall. As someone who’s read Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels, I knew exactly what was coming in the season 1 finale of the TV show, which aired last night on Starz.

Does jamie kill black jack randall