TV Review: OUTLANDER: Season 5, Episode 4: The Company We Keep [Starz]

Outlander The Company We Keep Review

Outlander: Season 5, Episode 4: The Company We Keep shows that not everything goes as planned or how people hope that they will in a given situation. Outlander, like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, is masterful at productively defying expectations.

Roger Wakefield MacKenzie (Richard Rankin)’s doomed militia leadership role is an illustration of this in The Company We Keep.

Captain Mackenzie

Roger hopes that his first military command will go well and that he will be what his men and any encountered situation needs.

Roger isn’t but it’s not Roger’s failure. It’s Jamie’s fault. Roger MacKenzie had no business being second in command of a militia or any other type of military unit. He has zero military training. He’s never been to any type of military Boot Camp or Officer’s Training School. He doesn’t know the first thing about leading men into combat. James “Jamie” MacKenzie Fraser (Sam Heughan) knew all of this and still placed him in a second-in-command position.

Jamie set Roger up to fail from the beginning with a total lack of preparation. Jamie didn’t bother to train Roger in: sword-fighting, fast-loading a musket, military tactics, authority presentation, hand-to-hand combat, knife fighting, etc.

The end result of Jamie’s multiple errors in judgement is Jamie sending Roger away, temporarily banishing his own bad decision-making from his sight.

Jamie’s hasty promotion of Roger MacKenzie could have gotten men killed.

Budding Love

Alicia Brown (Anna Burnett) and Isaiah Morton (Jon Tarcy)’s love story, though perceived as something else in the beginning in The Company We Keep, is a variation of the two chief and on-going love stories in Outlander.

In its initial presentation, the Alicia / Isaiah love story is a hoodwink: the viewer is presented with an unworthy, married chad, Isaiah, and an impetuous, love-sick girl, Alicia.

The viewer has seen or read this particular story thousands of times – it begins as a mistake and ends as a mistake. It rarely works out in a fruitful, positive way. Alicia and Isaiah’s storyline is the exception. Through Isiah’s impassioned words, those present realize that Isaiah’s type of affection for Alicia is the type of love that caused some of them to travel across time and to risk everything, most-notably their lives, for a perceived soul-mate.

Isaiah’s type of love for Alicia is an unexpected reveal, casting a new light on Alicia’s earlier actions in The Company We Keep. Would Clare or Brianna have acted much differently in Alicia’s place if they had been her age and met Jamie and Roger, respectively, and fallen madly in love? Would they have been able to governor their passions and their hormones? Everyone in that room knows the answers to those questions, which is why they share a mutual look when confronted with a similar query.

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