SCOTLAND sails through the global imagination – but as per usual, on mystic clouds of wonder, whisking us back to a mournful, defeated past.

The American fantasy series Outlander – whose production base is a warehouse in Cumbernauld – was prosaically in the news this week. They were celebrating the scores of young Scots who had been apprenticed during the making of the second series. Their duties, including assistant directing, costuming and carpenting, have given them career leads for their futures in the TV and film industry.

On that level – even if the show’s basic premise is Druid-driven time-travel in Scotland between 1946 and 1743 – who could argue with the US TV machine landing solidly in Cumbernauld, and building film-making capacity here?

If it can somehow help build the case for a dedicated and fully competitive Scottish film studio, then let the unicorns prance and the Highland beefcake stride nakedly across the Trossachs, at least until the sound stage’s first breeze-block is laid.

But please allow a cultural critic some freedom to examine, with alarmed fascination, those enduring stories of Scotland that end up attracting the world’s attention.

Outlander, based on the still-continuing series of historical-fantasy novels by US author Diana Gabaldon, might look at the outset like another standard expedition into Scotch mist. The basic premise – a feisty English nurse, freshly demobbed from the Second World War, is magically transported to pre-Culloden Scotland via a standing stone circle, and gets embroiled with Jamie, a Highland resistance fighter and his clan – seems to have put Brigadoon and Highlander in the blender.

In all three series, a tartan-wreathed, communal and heroic Scotland of the past sits silently alongside the humdrum of modern life, accessible via some sudden mystical or spiritual shift. As I wrote a few weeks ago about VisitScotland’s new #scotspirit campaign, there’s clearly tourist gold in them there magically-perceived hills and glens. Though I still worry, long-term, that it’s a cheap win – further confirming our political and economic infantilisation in the eyes of the world.

But as the nation-brand consultant Simon Anholt notes, when it comes to the general perception of any other country’s national characteristics, we all operate at the level of a seven year-old, in terms of what meanings instantly come to mind. So – short of the redefining thunderclap of nation-state independence – we seem to be stuck with these heather-green-and-tartan tropes of an endlessly historic Scotland.

But if one must work this peaty seam, Outlander is actually a fascinating and rich sample. I sat down over the last few days to watch most of series one on my partner’s Amazon Prime web account – it is (mysteriously) as yet unavailable on Freeview or even cable/satellite TV. There are some elements, throbbing their way through the endless feasting, jousting and thrusting, which actually feel like they’re addressing contemporary concerns.

Firstly, what is it with physical bodies – stroked, broken and penetrated – and these sprawling mystical-historical dramas? Outlander has already been described as a Game of Thrones for people who also like sex, swords and gore, except a bit slower and more soft-focussed.

As someone who reaches for his working raygun whenever he catches glimpse of a Targaryen dragon flapping in for a visit, I can’t claim to be a Game of Thrones devotee. What I have seen seems to combine the corporate drama of Dallas (switch castles for boardrooms) with the gratuitous nakedry of Bob Guccione’s Caligula – along with a repertoire of skull-crushing, crossbow torture and castration that comes from the bottom shelf of the online video store.

Outlander at least paces itself, and embeds its body-excess in interesting contexts. It’s intriguing that the show’s hero, Claire Randall, is set up from the beginning as war-traumatised. The opening scenes show her as a field-nurse in France in 1945, soaked in the blood of a patient whose shattered thigh looks utterly irretrievable. Claire comes to Scotland with her dull, scholarly husband Frank, both of them trying to restart a marriage, after five years facing or consigning others to death.

The only way that Claire can really survive when transported to the Highlands is to continue as a nurse and healer – though she is stalked throughout by a coldly rapacious Redcoat captain, “Black Jack” Randall, who turns out to be her modern husband’s ancestor (and disconcertingly bears his features).

Claire seems to spend a lot of time either gazing at, or repairing the wounds of, the splendid body of her Highland protector Jamie. But – not giving away any spoilers – her dull husband’s psychotic ancestor ends up perpetrating a violation of Jamie’s broken body, which is about as heterodox as one could imagine for the 18th century. To which Claire, as ever, responds with healing and tough love.

Is all this feminist, in that Claire’s agency among the patriarchal men of clan society – and her strange, sado-lustful relationship with the body of her chosen one – are both given full rein? Maybe. Though to be a nurse perpetually repairing the wounds of male warriors seems basically passive.

Outlander, along with many other current fantasy gore fests on TV and film, seems more incoherently traumatised than all that. These historical shows exist in a contemporary image-world where real atrocity is easily captured at the end of a cameraphone, and just as easily accessed on the web, even if the nightly news bulletins only hint at the full horror.

Do these mist-wreathed, fictional settings allow us all to gaze directly, and safely, at the vulnerability of broken human bodies? Bodies that we know – in reality, right now, beyond the screen – are being blown, shot or chopped to pieces, in our world of endless and asymmetrical wars? How else can we cope with the endemic, ambient violence of our times, other than by transforming it into escapist entertainment?

At least this analysis takes Outlander off the conveyor belt of saleable, dumbed-down Scottishness, and puts it into a more universal realm – that is, what gratifications audiences get out of pop-culture formats and genres.

But even as a Scottish mythology, Outlander sticks pretty respectably to the texture and detail of the Jacobite era. It’s a delight to hear considerable stretches of the dialogue conducted in non-subtitled Gaelic – for global audiences, no doubt a marker of otherness and authenticity (though I’d like to hear what the Gaeltacht makes of it).

Was Cameron right to have met with Sony executives to encourage them not to put Outlander on mainstream TV during the #indyref? Well, you would be, if you thought that a rendering of English soldiers as sexually violent sadists might have given impetus to the flowery, inclusive pluralism of the Yes campaign. For myself, I hae ma doots.

However, as the second series gets ready to roll, shifting the action mostly to France, there seems to be a plot afoot whereby the protagonists, aware of future history, will try to “stop Culloden happening ... so we can prevent the end of the Highland way of life”.

I defer to the historians on the counterfactual of Culloden being averted. Would the prohibition on Highland language, structures and customs have been quite so severe had the battle been avoided? How much steam was there ever in a Franco-Scottish takeover of the Union?

If such temporal liberties provide an excuse for more decorous hump-thump-and-grump, then those who love their event TV will be more than happy. But sometimes you have to be an “outlander” to the general consensus of Netflix-and-chill. Crowdfunder for an Iain M. Banks claymation space opera, anyone?