Outlander Season 4, Episodes 9 & 10

Good lawd, life has been getting in the way of my Outlander blogging! It’s all good though. We had a really nice Christmas and then spent about 5 fun days in Walnut Creek for New Years. We had a great time but I was ready to get back into our normal routine. I am a creature of habit if nothing else and being without any sort of schedule for 2 weeks, and yet still having to get some work done, was pretty insane. At a certain point I just gave up and accepted being behind on it all… including Outlander.

I watched Episode 9 almost a week late, on my computer, in the dark, alone, which probably made me a little more emotional than usual, which explains why I cried a buttload of times during the episode. From Brianna’s & Jaime’s meeting to Brianna’s confession to Claire that she was raped, it was a heavy one. The funny thing is, a week+ later I can’t really remember much about the episode other than those two scenes and the O’Henry like misunderstanding of an ending. The book describes this scene as a fight but in the show, it’s a one-sided beatdown by Jaime and poor Roger is left on the brink of death.

Episode 10 is called “To Tell the Truth” but it should be called “Fallout.” After almost 4 full seasons of Jaime being generally heroic in all ways, he comes down to Earth in a big way. Not only was he all too happy to jump to Lizzy’s false conclusion that Roger was Bri’s rapist, he also played judge, jury and executioner without talking to Claire or Brianna. In addition, he exercised some really questionable parenting skills by physically overpowering Brianna to show her that she couldn’t have stopped Bonnet even if she had fought him. What?! I can’t even… And on top of all that, he expresses some very 18^th century views on Brianna’s rape and pregnancy as a problem that needs to be solved by an arranged marriage with someone who will remove her scarlet A and legitimize her unborn child.

It’s all of these things together that make this a really engaging episode. Jaime hasn’t just let Claire and Brianna down; he’s let us down too, and that’s just weird. This isn’t Sopranos or Breaking Bad and being disappointed in Jaime just feels wrong. At the same time, it’s kind of refreshing and keeps the season from feeling one-note.

The other thing I like about this episode is that we see a lot of Roger. Any non-book-readers out there might be interested to know that Roger is actually a huge character in the series from this book onward. In many ways he becomes a mirror for Jaime and the book clearly holds him in high regard. For some reason the showrunners didn’t capture this yet and Roger has come off as a big old dolt so far. It’s disappointing because I love book Roger but have pretty much hated show Roger so far. This was the first episode where we see some of the grit and boldness that makes Roger such a badass in the books.

I can’t wait for Episode 11 tomorrow!