Outlander chews through a life’s worth of drama

In the heart of this week’s episode of Starz’s Outlander, entitled “A Hundredweight Of Stones,” Claire (Caitriona Balfe) lays naked in bed with Lord John Grey (David Berry) and talks about his sex life in the 18th century as a closeted gay man. If you happened to dip out of last week’s episode early, this scene and everything that preceded it probably felt like a fever dream—or like you had somehow missed an entire season of story. But fret not, you only missed about 20 minutes, during which Claire goes from being the wife of Jamie Fraser (Sam Hueghan) to being his widow who is wanted for treason and espionage and finally to being the new wife of Lord John, with whom she shared a now-blurry wedding night of sobbing, drinking, screaming, and, ultimately, fucking as a means of grieving Jamie.

The devil may work hard, as the saying goes, but the writers for Outlander are working harder to chew through the source material of author Diana Gabaldon’s books as they barrel toward an eighth and final season with hundreds of pages of story still left to adapt. I talked about it last week, but Outlander is in narrative hyperdrive, and this whirlwind episode is yet another example of how densely packed its final stretch is going to be. That being said, this quiet, post-coital moment between Claire and Lord John is one of the finer ones of the show’s recent run and serves as a long-overdue spotlight on the dutiful friend of Jamie, whose crush on the Highlander has long kept him at an emotional arm’s length to the story. But here, he is given a tender, vulnerable platform to speak about a life of love relegated to the shadows. Claire gently pokes and prods at his need for secrecy out of genuine curiosity and a selfish want to understand the man with whom she now shares a name.

He is, in many ways, an enigma to her. Lord John is the man who has raised William Ransom (Charles Vandervaart), the illegitimate son that Jamie sired while she went back to the future for 20 years. He is the man to whom Jamie once offered his body in a moment of desperation because he knew Lord John was in love with him. And now, the former Loyalist officer and his reputation among Britain’s army is the only thing keeping Claire from being arrested by the Redcoats. Asking him about his lovers and if he gets lonely feels invasive, but these are the kinds of pillow-talk topics she has never been afraid to broach with Jamie, and it makes this scene feel intimate in a way we have never seen Lord John and, certainly, Claire with another man other than Frank (Tobias Menzies).

But the moment gets swallowed up by the breakneck speed of the episode because not only is there is a painful-to-watch wedding at the outset, but Claire and Lord John have to learn to live together, when she is in an ocean of grief that has her questioning whether she wants to live at all (especially in the scene when she takes a scalpel to her arm before choosing whiskey instead). She is not all that appreciative of Lord John’s wildly generous gesture to literally save her neck by marrying the person who has long enjoyed the one thing he could never truly have. Furthermore, these unpleasant circumstances also expose Claire’s blind spots as a woman out of her time. One of the reasons she questions Lord John in bed is because she doesn’t understand the life of someone other than a wealthy, educated, white straight woman. Lord John has no choice but to settle for less than her ideal of love with Jamie in his encounters with Manoke the cook at his Mount Josian plantation. 

Perhaps the strongest moment of the episode is when Lord John calls Claire out for her biases, after she calls him a bigot for rejecting his nephew Henry’s plan to marry Mercy Woodcock (Gloria Obianyo), a freed Black woman who has been caring for him post-surgery. Lord John tells Claire that she might think her progressiveness from the future makes her morally superior in the past, but he doesn’t have the luxury of knowing firsthand that interracial and queer relationships will one day be accepted. All he is certain of are the dangers they face in his own time: “I know what it is, madam, to have your love be a crime and live in fear of discovery and of violence. I will not allow Henry or Mrs. Woodcock to risk imprisonment or worse.”

It is a turning point for an often stubborn Claire, who relinquishes some of her hesitation to her new title as Lady John Grey and ends up leaning into her status as a Loyalist’s wife. One might think she would high tail it back to the future where her daughter Brianne (Sophie Skelton) and grandchildren live, but she tells Ian (John Bell) that she intends to finish her and Jamie’s part in the founding of America. Of course, it’s lucky that she doesn’t go back through stones in the final scene of the episode when Jamie comes barging into the Grey household looking for his wife. He actually missed the ship that sank, and because his luggage was on board they too believed he was among the waterlogged.

But now Jamie is back, and his arrival is marked by a huge gaffe on his, Lord John and Claire’s part. Whereas they normally check to see if anyone is listening when they casually mention Jamie is William’s real father, the chaotic moment lets one reference slip through, and William happens to be on the other side of the door to hear that bombshell. He gets ready to storm off when Jamie approaches him, but Redcoats have arrived to arrest his real father as a Patriot. So Jamie takes Lord John hostage and flees, leaving behind a completely shell-shocked but unmistakably happy Claire.

Outlander has sometimes spent years working up to a major event or a storyline. Think about how all of season six somehow still didn’t even get to the start of the American Revolution. But the fact that we got a wedding, mourning sex, accusations of bigotry, a society debut, a resurrection, and a paternal bombshell all in one episode is wild. We might all need to start heeding the advice of one Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek, who suggested people pack eyedrops for her movie The Crows Have Eyes III: The Crowening because it’s densely packed with exposition. The crows might have some competition with Outlander. 

Stray observations

• • Completely separate from everything happening with Claire and Lord John, Ian and Rachel (Izzy Meikle-Small) finally get on the same page about their love. It is a long time coming for Ian, who just lost his father in the last episode and is now processing the loss of his father figure. Claire’s grief is undeniable, but Ian’s assessment of the afterlife may be even more heartbreaking: “It’s a comfort to think that Jamie is there keeping my da company.”
• • If you can believe it, there is still stuff happening in the 1980s, where Brianne is waiting for Roger (Robert Rankin) to come home with their kidnapped son, Jemmy. However, Bri gets a surprise when the kidnapper, Rob Cameron (Chris Fulton), shows up in her kitchen, having faked his passage to the past to get rid of Roger and force Bri to take him and Jem to America in search of Scottish gold. 
• • In the bedroom scene with Claire and Lord John, we get wonderful insight into his life. But the fact that Claire even causally judges his liaison with Manoke, the cook at Mount Josiah, is brazen of the woman who has time traveled back and forth through the centuries for a blonde, buff Highlander.
• • Oh, I almost forgot: Roger’s search in the past for his son has surprisingly turned up a clue that his father, a pilot who went missing during WWII, may have found himself in 18th century Scotland. They discover his jacket on a territorial countryman. I’ll dig into that next week!