Hello, and welcome back to the Thank God I Live in the Twenty-First Century Appreciation Hour. Or, as Starz insists on calling it, Outlander. Here be your recap, lassies. (Sorry, I promise I won’t do that again.)
I’d like to begin by confessing that I’ve been wholly won over by this Celtic Woman-style theme song. Any day now I’m going to drag out my Loreena McKennitt CDs from my senior year of high school and so will I fritter away the last of my coolness points.
This week’s episode begins right where we left off last week, with Claire and the dudes of Clan MacKenzie riding into the muddy courtyard of Castle Leoch. (Which you might better remember as Castle TV Cunnalingus.) This episode is another ride on the exposition shuttle before we can transfer to the main plot, but that’s OK, because at least this time it was a bunch of historical details. As various MacKenzie functionaries greet the returning soldiers, Claire stares around wide-eyed, watching people make baskets and engage in other ye old pre-Amazon tasks.
And then we meet Mistress Fitzgibbons, a.k.a. Missus Fitz, who apparently runs the show at Castle Leoch. She is none too sure about shabby Claire in her dirty shift but perks up when she realizes that our almost-modern-day heroine has some healing skills. Although, I must admit, when she asked “Do you mean to say you know what to do for that?” regarding inflamed wounds, I thought they were going to catapult us into a witchcraft plot very, very early in the show. But blissfully it looks like we’ll get a little more character development first.
Also, those arm-warmer things she’s rocking look pretty fantastic. Can I get some of those on Etsy, do you reckon?
So Missus Fitz bundles Jamie and Claire off to a convenient fireplace and supplies them with boiled garlic and whatever else passed for an antiseptic back before modern medicine. (If you’re a medical professional playing some sort of bacterial-themed drinking game, bottoms up.) And then the show gives the people what they want: Firelight flickering lovingly over Jamie’s substantial muscles.
Oh, and some backstory, if you’re into that. Jamie’s back is badly scarred, thanks to floggings at the hand of (you guessed it) Black Jack Randall. See, one day Black Jack and his soldiers rolled up to Jamie’s family farm to collect a new levy, and the men began harassing Jamie’s sister. Jamie tries to stop the rape, Black Jack intervenes only to escalate the whole situation—making it apparent that he’s a total sadist and not the fun kind—the Jamie gets flogged and his sister is raped anyway. Plus Jamie is hied off to Fort William, for “obstruction.”
“He wanted to send a message—this is what you get when you fight back against the English.” Yikes. If we’ve got any historical scholars in the house, I’d be very curious to hear anything you’ve got re: Scotland, England, and sexual violence. Obviously occupiers are often a nasty bunch, but I’d be interested to know whether this feels like a historically accurate turn of events or a blatant plot device.
Jamie’s woman-protecting bona fides having been established, we’re back to his bare chest. He grins, tells Claire her husband is a lucky man and she remembers oh, right, I’m a couple of centuries away from my beloved husband, who is probably very worried: “Fears would prey on him. Perhaps I was abducted. Perhaps I was dead. Or perhaps, worst of all, I had left him for another man.” HMMM.
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