Outlander tests fans’ patience with a baffling new twist

Outlander fans can spot a trick from a mile (or an ocean) away. After 10 years and seven seasons, we have been conditioned to demand one thing before ever accepting that any beloved character in the Starz series is truly dead: a body. If someone dies unexpectedly, off-screen or unceremoniously, show us the body or consider us skeptical. As such, alarm bells should start ringing at the end of tonight’s episode, “Brotherly Love,” when a messenger brings news that the ship ferrying Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) to America has been lost at sea. Lower the flags because James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser is dead.

The show goes all in on this turn of events, letting a devastated Lord John Grey (David Berry), a friend of Jamie’s who has long harbored a not-so-subtle crush on him, break the news to Claire (Caitriona Balfe) as they both succumb to fits of shock. “I would feel it in my heart if his had stopped,” Claire pleads. “Mine would stop too.” She then writhes in her bed, the images of Jamie’s profoundly romantic declarations about love from seasons past echoing in her head. (Who doesn’t love a dramatic montage?). Again though, fans are smarter than this. They know they should probably reserve their own tears for evidence more concrete than some 18th-century scuttlebutt that a ship sank in the middle of the ocean. The Frasers have weathered worse things than some random nautical nightmare. (And they already literally survived a shipwreck at the end of season three, so Jamie has experience!)

But as Claire once again prepares to reacquaint herself with the five stages of grief, she gets even more distressing news. Her activities in this episode, specifically aiding a spy network working with the Continental Army, have put an arrest warrant on her head. The only way to throw the British off their bloodlust for capturing Washington spies is for Lord John, a respected former officer for the Redcoats, to marry her. His rather generous proposal of safety (he is, after all, a gay man) isn’t as compelling as he thinks for a heartbroken Claire, who suggests that maybe she is okay with letting the British finish the job that so, so, so many people have failed before and execute her. If she doesn’t have Jamie, why live? But John warns her that spies aren’t single targets. If she is convicted, everyone she knows—Ian (John Bell), Rachel (Izzy Meikle-Small), Denzell (Joey Phillips)—will all be investigated accordingly as potential co-conspirators. The episode ends with Claire pondering whether she wants to hastily marry the man who is in love with her “dead” husband in order to avoid being hanged by the British for conspiring to win the American Revolution. But that’s just another day in the life of a Fraser.

Given the implications of Jamie’s demise, regardless of how preposterous, this should probably be the sole focus of the episode. But Outlander has always been an overachiever that packs any given episode to the gills with story, a fact that has never been more true now that the show is racing toward the finish line. These eight episodes will be followed by an eighth and final season of 10 installments. Eighteen episodes sounds like plenty of time to wrap things up, except the show still has roughly two and a half of Diana Gabaldon’s brick-sized books to eat through before it signs off. To cover everything it needs to, the show is shifting into story overdrive, and this episode is a sterling example of the narrative whiplash that viewers are bound to experience in the coming weeks.

Elsewhere, Ian finally gets the nerve to ask Rachel to be with him, but they first have to settle the lingering and ever-confusing matter of Arch Bug’s (Hugh Ross) vendetta against Ian for accidentally killing his wife back at Fraser’s Ridge. Ian has been looking over his shoulder ever since, and Arch has apparently been stalking Ian from Wilmington to Saratoga and now to Philadelphia. Arch snatches Rachel from the stables with the intent to kill her in front of Ian and make him live with the sight of her death forever. While Ian tries to subdue the old man, Rachel, ever the Quaker, demands he not kill Arch, which makes maintaining the upper hand in a knife fight rather difficult. Eventually, Rachel’s other suitor, Lord John’s Redcoat son William (Charles Vandervaart), arrives and has no qualms about drawing his pistol and taking care of business. Following the scuffle, Rachel all but begs Ian to tell her, in English this time and not Mohawk, how he feels. He’s been spending too much time with Claire and Jamie, so of course he musters the most beautiful profession of love you’ll hear this week: “The world is turning upside down, and yet you are the only constant thing. The only thing that binds me to the earth.”

Suddenly, William’s chance in this love triangle evaporates for Rachel, who pretty much melts under the weight of Ian’s words. But poor Ian needed this win. In the cold open of the episode, Jamie and Jenny (Kristin Atherton) sit at the bedside of his father, the elder Ian (Steven Cree), back in Scotland as he dies from the consumption we saw him fighting in the premiere. Declaring his love for Rachel is the whole reason the elder Ian sent his son away in his final days, so putting to rest the Arch Bug revenge story and, in turn, Ian’s hesitation to get close to Rachel out of fear for her safety feels like the right step forward for our young Scottish Mohawk.

But back to Claire and Lord John. Their strikingly abrupt new storyline is bound to be divisive among viewers who haven’t already read the books. To play devil’s advocate for a moment, you could make the case that this was the nature of life in the 18th century. One day you’re getting beaten up by your ex-wife in the Scottish Highlands and the next you are fish food in the ocean. And yet, no matter the practicality of it all, it’s hard not to have grown desensitized to the roadblocks Gabaldon and the series continue to put in front of the Frasers. In a time of revolution and family tragedy, it is okay if Claire and John are just the boring couple in a healthy relationship. They deserve it! Outlander has never lacked drama, but as the show chews through the rest of Gabaldon’s source material, it’s starting to feel as if lost-at-sea twists and the like have less bite.

Maybe the only thing that would leave a mark these days is if the show actually did kill off its leading man 17 episodes before the end with something as mundane as bad weather. But don’t hold your breath on that. Jamie will probably be back to brooding on your television soon enough.

Stray observations 

• • Let’s not forget Roger (Robert Rankin), who is still searching for his son Jemmy in 1740 Scotland. In what feels like a storyline made specifically to appease fans who miss the early Scotland-bound days of Outlander, Roger’s run in with blood-magic practitioner Gellis (Lotte Verbeek) also puts him face to face with Dougal MacKenzie (Graham McTavish), who comes bearing news of the strange traveler seen nearby. Dougal hands Roger some charms left by this stranger, and Roger immediately recognizes them as his dad’s military tags from World War II, during which the pilot mysteriously disappeared without a trace. Looks like we know what side of the family Roger gets his time-traveling gene from!
• • We’ve seen Claire perform all manner of surgery in this show, but there was something remarkably stomach-turning about her handling of Lord John’s nephew Henry’s intestine as if she was working the kink out of a link of sausage. Thank god she has mastered the art of ether in the 1700s.
• • Outlander has never bothered with the monotony of travel time, but Claire acknowledging that her and Ian’s journey from Scotland took five weeks thanks to good winds is a little clue at just how quickly the show is moving through time between episodes.
• • In the cold open, we see a young Jamie and Ian learn to fight, with the latter’s father telling him that he needs to always protect his chief’s weak side—and Jamie’s is his left. This may only matter for all of us genre nerds out there, but did anyone else find it distracting that Ian’s last words to Jamie were “on your left”? It is a sweet sentiment, for sure. But it is also the exact same phrase of brotherly love shared between Captain America and Sam Wilson in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s a timeless turn of phrase if nothing else.