Outlander: Blood of My Blood review: This spinoff is unintentionally hilarious – UK Times

Outlander – the time-travel bodice ripper that has given Scottish tourism its most prominent platform in the US since Mel Gibson donned a kilt in anger in Braveheart – has finally got its own spin-off. Blood of My Blood on MGM+ has everything that fans of the original will have wanted – tastefully steamy lovemaking (much of it outdoors), scheming Highland clans and a soundtrack with enough bagpipes to fuel 10 years of Hogmanay.

But will anyone else want to watch? It’s hard to say. Outlander, which will go into its eighth season next year, is such a bizarrely specific series – aimed at people who enjoy Game of Thrones-type historical fantasy, Fifty Shades of Grey-style naughtiness, and glorified Highlands advertorials. If you fall into that demographic, it’s manna from the streaming gods. If not… well, there’s only so many times you can hear characters say lines such as “My my, a sassenach – and a fiery one!” – as someone proclaims early in Blood of My Blood – without gagging on your shortbread.

Blood of My Blood is actually a prequel that tells the romantic origin tales of the parents of the loved-up couple in the original Outlander (adapted from the bestselling Diana Gabaldon novels). In 18th-century Scotland, we meet Harriet Slater as Ellen MacKenzie – mother of Outlander’s hunk-in-a-kilt Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) – and her soon-to-be-love interest Brian Fraser (Jamie Roy). Meanwhile, in First World War-era London, Hermione Corfield plays Julia Moriston, eventual mother of Outlander’s Claire Randall (Caitríona Balfe).

She works in the war office, processing letters from soldiers at the front line, which is how she comes upon a missive from Henry Beauchamp (Jeremy Irvine), who finds life in the trenches overwhelming. They strike up a correspondence, and when he’s home on leave, they are soon striking up a lot more than that.

But their story takes a backseat in the first of two episodes of this series (a second season is already green-lit). The focus is initially on Ellen, who is grieving for the death of her father, a Laird of the highlands (Peter Mullan). In a flashback, her father tells her to conduct herself like the royalty she is. Or, as the script puts it, “your bodice and your skirt tell us what’s expected of you as a lassie”.

What he means is that she is to be prim and respectable – and that she should do her best to prevent a falling out between her power-hungry brothers (Sam Retford and Séamus McLean Ross), both of whom believe they should lead their father’s people. What her dear old dad probably didn’t have in mind was his daughter having a meet-cute by the river with Brian – the hot heir to a clan the MacKenzies regard as their sworn enemies.

As with Outlander, these two stories intersect via the unlikely mechanism of a portal through time and space contained within a stone circle. There are other surprises, and an observant viewer may be shocked to see the 20th-century characters enter the action slightly earlier than expected (keep your eyes peeled).

Beyond such occasional twists, however, Blood of My Blood isn’t a successor to Outlander so much as a remix. Everyone is preposterously attractive – except for the villains, who are all mingers. There are lots of spicy shenanigans under the open skies, and you do worry about the ardent lovers parking on a stray nettle or rolling over an unsuspecting badger.

As with Outlander, we also get the cringe factor of American producers trying to turn 18th-century Scotland into Game of Thrones with sporrans. Characters are constantly addressing each other as “my bonny wee lass” or pouting dramatically from beneath shawls. Whatever the Scottish version of Blarney is, Blood of My Blood lays it on with a shinty stick, resulting in a series ripe with blood and thunder (and pasty bums) but which too often plumbs the depths of unintentional hilarity.

‘Outlander: Blood of My Blood’ will premiere on Saturday 9 August in the UK on MGM+