Maplander
Main Title Button: someone arranging the troops around Culloden Moor, bringing history closer to its inevitable conclusion. It also sort of looks like someone has put a bunch of birthday brownies on an old sketch. This whole photo would make a WONDERFUL choice of festive cake for the Scot in your life.
Bleaklander
The troops are beleaguered and exhausted. They're five months into a retreat, hungry, dirty, dejected, and demoralized, because nobody can decide what to do next. Again. It's a wonder they don't have more deserters. They are ALSO now only three days from Culloden, and Claire, Jamie, and Murtagh are feeling that particular axe over their heads. Foreknowledge is foreanguish.
Patchlander
Rupert and Ross are, indeed, trying to fill the bromance void in each other's lives. Mostly by complaining about the war -- namely, all the suffering they're doing in the name of not ACTUALLY doing much fighting -- in a helpfully expository fashion. Rupert has settled nicely into his patch. I hope somehow it's revealed that while Claire failed miserably at changing the course of Culloden, she succeeded in reinventing the history of piracy.
Kiltlander
The Bonnie Prince, meanwhile, suffers little hardship. He's tucked up by the fire in his kicky knee socks and kilt, listening to Jamie complain about how Culloden Moor is a terrible place to wage war: As a wide-open space, it gives the British and their more advanced weaponry every advantage. Jamie's suggestion is to break the army into small factions and disperse them, confusing the British troops while also hopefully giving the lads some rest and awaiting a shipment of French gold that could put some life back into the rebellion. Then they can circle back around at a location of THEIR topographical choosing which better suits their style. This is a completely reasonable plan... and so of course the prince rejects it, because a) he is precisely the kind of idiot who confuses patience for cowardice; and b) he's got no idea what he's doing so he's just convinced himself that he's doing God's will and therefore God will rearrange the chess pieces so that they get England in checkmate. NOBODY in the room seems to agree with him, but a few of them seem not-entirely-displeased that Jamie's influence once again has not borne fruit.
Coiflander
Jamie's hair, by the by, has looked better. This is kind of how mine looks if I towel dry it but then wait a fraction too long before applying the anti-frizz and brushing it out. I understand Jamie's hair pain. The poor lad just needs Claire to pop into the 1940s and bring back a care package of stuff from Boots (which DID exist then).
Sicklander
Colum, who has to be helped inside while rasping, has also seen better days. Claire immediately tucks him in to bed while they await Dougal's return from Whatever Mighty Exploring He's Doing. Of note is that Colum echoes earlier sentiments -- from both Dougal and Claire -- that Jamie was cunning and wise to praise Dougal just enough to keep him happy and feeling respected, yet also cast him out far enough that he won't be a power threat. They're even having similar problems with curl formation. They're totally the same.
Deathlander
Alex Randall is perhaps the MOST in need of a quick pop through the stones. (Yes, I realize the stones don't work that way; it's just a shame Claire can't use them like a station wagon, and load up on goodies.) On a visit to Inverness to stock up on medical supplies, Claire runs into Slightly Less Terrible Mary, who -- she usefully explains -- had been left with relatives after the beheading of the Duke of Sandringham. (No word AT ALL on how they got back out of a house surrounded by redcoats, or what they did with the bodies, which must surely be rotting with the most mighty of stenches.) Mary is picking up laudanum for the treatment of one Alex Randall, whom she met anew and ran off with; he's taken a turn for the worse, and Mary is icy with Claire because she knows all about Claire's interference in Paris and IS NOT HAVING IT. Way to show some spine, Slightly Less Terrible Mary. She's behaving with a shred of moxie and a glint of defiance. She might be upgraded to Marginally Tolerable Mary.
Enemylander
Anyway, naturally, they're being bankrolled by Black Jack Randall -- who shows up to check on his bro, and is none too happy to see Claire there making a poultice to ease his chest pain. (Marginally Tolerable Mary accepts Claire's apology about Paris, because Claire's medical skills are useful.) Claire is so horrified she basically stops helping altogether and flees the place. She does not, sadly, think to stop and say, "Last I saw you, Captain Randall, you had a sword jabbed into your privates. Did it heal, or are you indeed half the man you once were?"
Creeplander
Here's the thing I'm realizing about Tobias Menzies: When he's Black Jack, there's something about his eyes that wigs me out, and you can see it here well in this photo. It's almost like.... his irises are abnormally large, or his pupils are super dilated, or something. It's subtle but freaky, and I never notice it when he's being Frank Randall. I wonder if they monkey with him at all in post, or if it's just that in certain camera angles he can really squeeze out the evil.
Jack, whose only shred of humanity is lying in a boarding house coughing himself inside-out, all but begs Claire for her help in easing Alex's pain as he dies. She agrees, in return for information about where the English troops are, and Black Jack... completely complies. He flips faster than a diver off the 10m platform.
Psychedlander
Jamie does not know what excites him more: the prospect of killing Black Jack, or the intel that the troops will be celebrating General Cumberland's 25th (!!) birthday two nights hence, which would make a wonderful and moving time to spring upon them and murder them as they glug their ales. Blood AND mead will be spilled.
Confessionslander
Colum, meanwhile, is about ready to swan-dive off this mortal coil. He asks Claire to assist his suicide as humanely as possible, which she sassily points out is supposedly a sin. "What's one more sin to a sinner?" he rasps. As a treat to her, I guess, he tells her that her friend Geillis Duncan -- the one who was tried with Claire as a witch, and burnt; Geillis also implied to Claire that she might have popped through the stones herself -- was not executed until AFTER she bore Dougal's illegitimate child. The baby is being raised by a childless family, unbeknownst to Dougal. Claire is so thrilled to hear that something of her friend remains (ignoring of course that the burning itself was still brutal and shitty) that she gives Colum a vial of yellow jasmine. Claire is now a certified traveling apothecary, it seems. And she's always got something fatal in her arsenal.
Successionlander
Colum announces that he's here to finish some clan business before he dies: naming his son, Hamish, as his successor. But given that Hamish is a tot, he needs a stable guardian... and for that, Colum chooses Jamie. Because while he knows Jamie may rally Clan MacKenzie around the Jacobite cause in which Colum does not believe, he does know that Jamie won't risk any lives without due cause -- unlike Dougal, whom believes would be so driven by blood and vengeance that he would be careless with their men's lives. He sees no shred of good nor trustworthiness in his brother. Dougal is gutted, betrayed: Jamie reluctantly accepts the guardianship, even though he knows he's walking his own men into a battle they likely can't win.
Twistlander
And now, the twist many saw coming: Mildly Tolerable Mary is pregnant with Alex Randall's child, and teeters back into being only Slightly Less Irritating because she refuses to acknowledge that Alex is knocking on Heaven's door with a battering ram. She's upset, though. I get it. But he's turning every linen in the place red with blood and lung tissue. There's even a really cool scene where Claire uses a scroll of paper as an inhaler tube, placing it over Alex's nose and mouth, then smoking a pipe of medicine and then exhaling the vapors into the tube so that he's forced to inhale them.
But it will only delay the inevitable, and so Alex announces that he wants Jack and Mary to wed so that his child will be protected. Jack thinks this is NONSENSE, but then Alex says something that's quite the opposite from what Colum did: He tells Jack that while he isn't blind to the darkness within, he also knows the person who lived in the light, and believes that person would never let down his wife and child. He is clinging to what good he can see in his brother, even if it's illusive (or even elusive), whereas Colum flatly refuses to see positives in Dougal and writes him off as spent.
Ragelander
Black Jack is not amused. He has no interest in participating and would rather support Mary as his brother's widow than as his own wife. Also, he's got his Creeper Lamps turned up to 11 again.
Bestlander
Murtagh, because he is hewn from the bark of the Awesome Tree, tells Claire he would like to marry Mary. Not because he loves her, or even is attracted to her, or wants to bother with a wife. But he's so grossed out by the idea of consigning her to a life with a violent monster that he'd prefer to protect her himself, and learn to like her. It's actually super heroic the way he delivers it, because Murtagh is flawless. Claire points out, though, that they're days away from a probable massacre and that Mary's chances in life are the best if she's the widow of Captain Randall than of a highlander or a dead... whatever Alex is. Beat poet, let's say.
Smuglander
And THEN Claire goes to find Black Jack in a tavern, and reminds him of her "prophecy": the date of his death. Which is in t-minus three days. She repeats her insistence that this reality puts Mary in the best chance of being guaranteed status, given that Jack's promises to provide for her as his sister-in-law mean nothing once he's been chopped into tiny bits on Culloden Moor.
Coldlander
Jack, though, isn't without a card to play. He coldly purrs that he knows, intimately, the sound Jamie makes when he is tumbling over the brink (a rough paraphrase). And that he regrets none of it: the brutality, the fear, and of course the ill-gotten pleasure and release. Claire can barely contain her disgust, and tears of contempt leak out Caitriona Balfe's eyes as Jack points out that he is not the sort of person anyone should want to sic on a waif such as Slightly Less Terrible Mary.
Claire, though, reminds him that he's going to die so she doesn't have to worry about him hurting Mary in the long term. And that maybe, if he lives, the part of him that loved Alex can extend clemency to his love and his child. It's a grotesque pact she's making, but she's doing it to protect the bloodline that leads to Frank, in what she perceives as the most win-win of all situations. And yet you can see some falter in her resolve, because the very battle she believes leads to Jack's inevitable death -- and thus makes marrying him to Mary a safe gamble -- is also the battle she had hoped to stop, and now hopes to change.
Weddinglander
And so, as Mary weeps and Alex watches beatifically, Mary and Jack are wed. And shortly thereafter, Alex rasps his last, and the best thing happens: The show diverges from the books, where (I read in an interview with Tobias Menzies) Jack broke down in tears. Instead, Jack gulps and then slowly becomes glazed with a violent grief that SO MUCH better fits his character than tears. And he BEATS THE SHIT out of poor Alex's dead body. The reason I think this is the best is, it's just such a smart departure. Alex was the shred of good Jack clung to in his life; the only person he went out of his way for in a POSITIVE sense. And so this reaction really does seem in line with Jack being devastated. And of course by treating Alex's body this way -- like any old highlander he'd whipped before -- he also, I think, aimed to break Alex's special hold over him and therefore disempower the grief. It was just a creepy and layered character moment that I thought perfectly fit this pig we've come to know.
Huglander
We don't see the body; we just see Jack's fists flying and Claire holding a horrified Mary, who -- not knowing her husband's likely fate -- is probably about to wish she'd married that nice, boring loyalist Mr. Granger.
Contrastlander
And in another beautiful play on opposites, while Alex gets to see his fondest desire happen, Dougal gets nothing. The actor is WONDERFUL in this scene. He walks in and starts talking to Colum, drunkenly, and then OF COURSE just as he starts pouring out his heart about all the love and betrayal and hurt, we cut back to a lifeless Colum. Dougal peers down and sees that Colum had drunk the vial of poison. Whether he did it before Dougal arrived, or just as Dougal started talking -- a final act of spite, to CONSCIOUSLY deny his brother that catharsis -- we don't know. Dougal brokenly hugs him, cries over him, and then torturedly taps his head while lamenting that all the things that remain unsaid will be trapped in there forever. The gimmick is nothing new, but it was well-deployed, and in clever opposition to the other storyline.
Teamlander
Jamie is as skeeved as anyone else by letting Mary end up with Black Jack. But Claire vehemently swears that if Black Jack doesn't die as scheduled, she will help Jamie bleed him herself -- just as she promised in Paris. Jamie is like, "OH MY GOD MARRIAGE IS THE BEEEEST."
Joylander
Jamie FINALLY gets some success with the generals: He tells them about Cumberland's party, and the prince agrees to an attack. But instead of letting his general lead one half of the army and Jamie lead the other -- meeting in the middle for the ambush -- the Prince wants to lead the second column. And he thinks it would be a hilarious gag to bring a bottle of booze and hand it to the captured General as a birthday present. It's the first smile we've seen out of him in an eternity, and his joy -- and God's Will Etc. -- mean nobody can talk him out of co-leading the other column of men. And as usual, nothing requiring Prince Charlie to have capability will end well.
Lostlander
Indeed, Jamie and his general arrive on the spot, but they get word that the prince's troops got LOST and so gave up and turned back. Jamie begs to do the ambush anyway, on the theory that the strength of surprise will makeup for their lack of manpower, but the general disagrees and they turn back. Murtagh bitterly vocalizes that this may have sealed their fate, and made history a reality. Jamie's last best chance is gone. CULLODEN AWAITS.
And the thing is... It's been a rough season, I think, albeit peppered with good moments and universally well-acted. But my instinct when the premiere aired was that TELLING us Culloden didn't work RIGHT in the first 30 seconds of the season made this less of a ride. Because as much as we non-book-readers might have suspected Gabaldon didn't totally alter history, it might have been nice to hold out hope that maybe they changed it SLIGHTLY and the battle happened elsewhere but ended the same way, or... I don't know. But dramatically, it was a bit unsatisfying to have that sewn up and then slog through 12 episodes of prescribed misery and repeated failure.
Still, the final 90 minutes await next week, so we will at LEAST get to find out -- I assume -- how dire Jamie's prospects really were when Claire zipped back through the stones. Culloden was only a part of the story, and as much as it's clearly not possible to have no more Jamie in this show, it WILL hopefully still be fun getting to how and why he sticks around. ONWARD TO THE FINALE.