Yeah, we got to get it right. But the subject matter — Caitriona [Balfe] and I have never done anything like this before, so it was a bit of a learning curve. We were lucky that the director, Anna Foerster, was good. We did a lot of rehearsals. We discussed how we wanted it to work. When you watch the episode there is a progression in the way that Jamie and Claire get to know each other. Their relationship grows quite quickly so by the end of the episode, you can see that they’re basically making love, it’s not just consummating the marriage. Their friendship and their relationship is really bonded, but is also left in a place where Claire is reminded of her husband, Frank, back in the future. That leaves a wonderful discord at the end of the episode.

Caitriona Balfe stars as Claire, a nurse who, in the aftermath of the Second World War, goes on a second honeymoon with her historically minded husband, hoping to rekindle a marriage that has been strained by years of wartime separation. In the Scottish Highlands, she finds herself transported, via witchcraft, to an era when brawny laddies are fighting the redcoats—and nobody knows about disinfectant or germs. (Between “The Knick,” “Outlander,” and “Call the Midwife,” cable television these days is practically an advertisement for Obamacare.) As Jamie, who leans very close to Claire during all their conversations, Sam Heughan helpfully fills the shirtless-male-redhead slot left empty by “Homeland” and “Dexter,” so that the couple’s protracted game of Scottish footsie flares with convincing eroticism. Yet this love affair has gravity, too, because it’s woven into a tragedy: Claire is embedded among Jacobite rebels, a culture that she knows is on the losing side of history, doomed to be crushed by the English. With each episode, the series intensifies, invoking interesting parallels with modern political issues—about nations whose enmity is so ancient that it feels indelible, links between wartime violence and sadomasochism, and the ethical questions raised by conflicts of unequal foes.

The show has sumptuous cinematography and gorgeous period costumes: everything is lushly green, or covered with mud, and, for anyone interested in details of the era, there are fascinating sequences set in the castle where Claire is trapped, suspected of being an English spy. Instead of panicking, she uses her nursing skills to make herself invaluable. The ensemble is full of great characters, including one of her husband’s ancestors, the vicious English officer Black Jack (Tobias Menzies, who also plays Claire’s husband, Frank); a hilariously witchy Lotte Verbeek, as a trophy wife who advocates that Claire adopt feminine wiles to survive this violent, patriarchal universe; and Graham McTavish, as a Scottish elder who begins as Claire’s enemy but becomes her ally. Claire is a satisfying character—alternately sharp and naïve, cunning and impassioned—but, then, she’s a fantasy herself: a feisty avatar for female viewers, in much the same way that brilliant male characters have operated on so many adult cable shows, both good ones (“Mad Men”) and bad (“Californication”). The female perspective is a welcome change, particularly in a cable landscape that finds every possible excuse for a middle-aged male detective to interrogate a teen-age stripper in her dressing room. But the show is more than tit for tat: it’s sheer pleasure, no guilt allowed.

We always talk about how Claire’s a very intelligent woman, and yet she goes into this very dubious mission blindly. Emotionally, she has this guilt with Frank, and that has disastrous consequences for their relationship. She asks something huge of Jamie that nobody in their right mind should ask.