Outlander Season 4, Episode 7

Lindsay's and my Outlander/whiskey fan club of two.

Brace yourselves; this was the first episode of Outlander that featured neither Jaime nor Claire in the entire episode! The. Entire. Episode.

What’s insane is that I didn’t even notice that until after the show during the crazy stupid “Inside the Episode vignette.” I have really mixed feelings about this episode but I think it’s saying something (good?) that I didn’t even notice Claire and Jaime were missing.

This episode is all Brianna with a dash of good old Rog’ and some sprinklings of Frank here and there. Oh, Frank. Frank! Dear God, I love Frank! He has gotten the real short end of the stick in the show until tonight. Up to this point TV Frank has come off as a real dick, while Book Frank always came off as far more balanced. Did he philander, drink too much and rub it all in Claire’s face? Sure. But you see a far more nuanced picture in the book; one where Claire, in a real “sorry not sorry” move decades before that was a thing, rejected and pushed Frank away because he wasn’t Jaime and Frank played the role of the rube because that was the only thing he knew how to do in the face of said rejection.  Tonight was the first episode where we see that more nuanced Frank and it was so wonderful.

In a diversion from the book, we see Frank in the 60’s using his magical historian powers to hunt down his love rival Jaime, only to find an obituary (THE OBITUARY) of not only Jaime but Claire… which tells him that his wife will be leaving him at some point soon to take a death-defying journey to the past to be with Jaime instead of him.  This is a soul-crushing, stupefying revelation which sends Frank into a drunken spiral that results in him almost telling Brianna the truth about Claire and her biological father, Jaime. But he doesn’t… because he is a good father who puts his child before himself. 

It’s this foundation of always giving Brianna what she needs to grow that propels her to follow Claire and Jaime into the past. For book geeks, we will learn in about 4 books from now that Frank had a feeling Brianna would follow them someday and that’s why he took her camping all the time and taught her lots of pioneer woman, pre-electricity tricks of the trade and cool hunting and self-defense moves, so she would be able to survive in the past.

Aside from awakening the Frank-o-phile within, this episode puzzled me (and Linds) with the Leoghaire storyline. I could be mis-remembering (I’m re-reading Drums of Autumn but am not far enough along yet), but I’m fairly certain Leoghaire makes no further appearances in the books. I don’t mind diversions from the book when they work (Murtaugh!), but this just didn’t. I liked where I thought it was going (I thought Brianna and Leoghaire would cross paths but not learn each others’ identities) but hated where it ended up (with Leoghaire threatening Brianna and pulling the same evil moves that she pulled on Claire 20 years before).

This brings me to one big weakness of Outlander – the tendency to paint certain characters like Leoghaire and Stephen Bonnet as so one-note.  Could anyone really be that horrible?!  

Although I have to say that little Irish Stephen Bonnet is growing on me. I hated his character in the book (and not in a “love to hate” way, like with Captain Randall) and in the first episode of this season but for some reason he grew on me this episode. Maybe it was the throwing children overboard?  I keed… that was not cool, man.  But the actor who plays him seems to be coming into his own and is making me like him more than I want to.  Until next time...