The one problem I still have with the Outlander Season 4 premiere
The Outlander Season 4 premiere remains one of my least favorite episodes
We all have our favorite and least favorite episodes of Outlander. For me, the Outlander Season 4 premiere remains one of my least favorite episodes.
To get ready for today’s two-year anniversary of the first airing of the episode, I rewatched it again. Even my least favorite episodes have something good about them. There are a lot of Claire and Jamie moments that I adore, and meeting Rollo is definitely a highlight as a dog person.
However, there’s one thing that remains problematic for me. It’s all about the choice of song at the very end of the episode.
America the Beautiful takes me out of the episode
The first time I watched the episode was at NYCC 2018. A few things had gone wrong that day so I was in a bad mood, and I didn’t really enjoy the episode as much as I hoped I would.
But I thought maybe it was just my mood. So, I watched it again when it aired on STARZ. The ending was still problematic. My husband watched it with me this time and he also found it problematic.
Now, I completely understand what the EPs were going for with the choice of track over the events on the screen. That isn’t something that is problematic. It’s a stylized choice that sometimes does and doesn’t work.
The problem for me comes down to the time period of the song. It was a 20th-century song played over events set in the 18th-century. My husband first thought something had clashed with the technology, that something had gone somewhere. He thought something had started playing in the background that wasn’t supposed to be there.
And that is something I completely understood. It’s how I felt the first time watching it at NYCC 2018. The use of the track took me out of the episode. It didn’t fit the time period of the events on the screen and made me completely disconnect to everything that was happening.
Bear McCreary is so brilliant at composing music, that I wished he could have done something for this. Maybe he could have brought an 18th-century sound to America the Beautiful to make it fit.
Because of the use of a modern song, the ending didn’t give me the powerful moment that it was supposed to. There was all this buildup and it fell flat for me. Even after multiple viewings, I still don’t connect to this episode.
Next. 5 best moments from the Outlander Season 4 premiere. dark
Did the America the Beautiful moment work for you on the Outlander Season 4 premiere? Share your thoughts in the comments below.