Outlander Episode 8: Both Sides Now

We switch a lot between 1743 and 1945, checking in with Frank and how he’s handling this disappearance of his wife. Basically: about as well as you’d expect. It’s been six weeks, he’s a familiar face to the Inverness police, and they keep telling him that it’s plainly obvious that Claire has run off with this Highlander dude he saw that one night. So go home, get drunk, and move on.

He’s been staying with Reverend Wakefield, and Mrs Graham (Wakefield’s housekeeper) finally says to Frank look, she went up to those standing stones, yes? Standing stones mark a place where weird shit happens.  I think weird shit happened. We also meet cookiemonger Roger Wakefield, the reverend adopted 6 year old son. He’s adorbs. 

In the mean time, Claire is in a total sex-haze with Jamie, who is delighted at the revelations of sex. They also meet Hugh Munroe, a beggar friend of Jamie’s who was tortured at the hands of Turks and has his tongue ripped out. He communicates with a beautiful sign language and I just want a show of Hugh going about his day. He gives Claire a piece of amber with a dragonfly in it as a wedding present. Hugh tells Jamie that there’s an English deserter who might be able to clear this whole ”wanted for murder” business. 

While camping one night, the party gets attacked by a neighboring clan. Jamie gives Claire his dirk, and they have a merry old time fighting off the attackers (Ned Gowan is particularly thrilled to have a Thrilling Adventure Hour). The next morning, Claire confesses that she dropped the dirk, which would have done her no good, since she doesn’t know how to use it. Rupert takes great pleasure in teaching her how to use a Chekhov’s Sgian-dhu (small knife) and where to stab a man so he’ll die. 

This being a high adventure story, she and Jamie sneak off to go bang in some bushes, and are come upon by two English deserters. They attempt to rape Claire, and she stabs him in the back and kills him, while Jamie is being held at gunpoint by the second. This shakes Claire out of her honeymoon/sex haze, and she has many feels, such guilt over cheating on Frank. 

Frank, in the meantime, has gone “fuck it” and is about to head off to Oxford, leaving Claire’s carefully packed suitcase behind, and instead drives to the stones. Because what if. What if Mrs. Graham is right.

The men go on to meet Jamie’s possible witness, and they leave Claire with Skinny Willie (that wasn’t INTENDED as dirty when I wrote it, but we’ll just let that stay there). Claire is grumpy, but then realizes she’s in eyesight of Craigh na dun. She takes off at a run, while Frank is running up the hill 200 years later (and seriously, this sequence is just so well done). They start hollering, and the stones allow an echo to get through, and JUST as Claire is about to touch the stone, she’s grabbed by English soldiers and taken to Fort William.

Black Jack is delighted to have his toy back. Claire tries to bluff her way out of the room, and it almost works, but Black Jack trips her up with the Duke of Sandringham’s marital status. He ties her up, tells hapless Private Hawkins, “Don’t come in this room, no matter what you hear” and cuts her bodice lacing. He has her bent over the table, knife to her nipple, when Jamie appears in the window with a gun, says, “I’ll thank you take your hands off my wife.” 

Black Jack has this incredible expression of “I WAS NOT EXPECTING THIS PLOT TWIST THIS IS AMAZING WHAT’LL HAPPEN NEXT?” And we cut to black, pondering that very question for the next SEVEN MONTHS. 

Elyse: I'm clutching my nipples. I'm having sympathy pains.

RHG: I DO NOT WANT THIS TO BE DONE UNTIL APRIL. THIS IS NOT OKAY.

Checking in with Frank was brilliant. I know there are certain people out there in the internets who are really angry about this, but knowing who this guy is that she’s trying to get back to, as opposed to “why on earth would she leave Jamie and his magic dick behind for this guy who’s kind of a dillhole” (even though- book spoilers- his dillhole-ness doesn’t happen until later, so I don’t really understand this argument.) 

Frank is the hero of his own story, and sadly, his story is a tragi-mystery without a happy ending. His wife vanished, and everyone in Inverness, save Mrs Graham, thinks she decamped with a random Highlander, leaving behind literally everything. People are trying to take advantage of him, and think he’s crazy for holding on to hope, and when he drives past Crag na Dun, he’s got one straw. And it’s one he doesn’t even thinks really exists. I feel bad for the guy. But the scene with Frank and Claire and the stones and the echoes – my god. 

I also really liked how the attempted rape was done- horrifying without being graphic, and more about Claire’s perception of events than about the audience being voyeurs about the actual thing that’s happening. Does that make sense? And Claire’s “I’m going into shock, this is shock that is happening to me right now” was perfect. I also really REALLY enjoyed the “lets teach Claire how to fight” scene, especially for Claire’s “DID YOU JUST” glare at Rupert. 

I keep wanting to go back to Frank though- I realized last night that he’s the BORING kind of historian. He’s got facts and dates and “this happened because of this and this was a result of that” but he’s got no imagination. He wants the tidy big picture, not the messy business of how people LIVED and WHY they did what they did. He just cares that the big events happened. Which is one reason he’s so annoyingly logical about shit. You know these types of people. I know these types of people. These types drive me crazy because they want to logic everything to death in tidy little boxes and you can’t DO that with history because history is people and people illogic themselves all the time. ALL. THE. TIME. Why else would people keep trying to invade Russia in the winter? 

I am totally delighted by Black Jack’s grin when he sees who it is that Claire married. Tobias is a genius and I want to bake the casting people a batch of bars as a reward. 

Elyse:  This episode didn't work as well for me. I think I was inundated by the rapey-ness.

I didn't like the disjointed way they filmed the attempted rape scene and Claire's shock. I could understand that Claire was dissociating without the camera seizures.

I did like the flashbacks (forwards?) to Frank though. The lengths he's going to to find Claire and the anger he feels at everyone's insistence that she ran off made him a very sympathetic character.

And OMG the Reverend. “She probably got washed down the river and has been living in a cave for 7 weeks eating lichen!” Although the Reverend and Frank's murder board was impressive. And little baby Roger!

Getting to see the Blackjack come out on Frank in the alley fight was interesting and I think important for the audience.

The Blackjack scene was just… Yuck. His joy at getting to rape and torture her. Her nipple! I'm still cringing.

Mostly I just need it to be April now, thanks.

Carrie:  Believe it or not, I didn’t see this episode, for various logistical reasons that make me weep. Here are some handy phrases I supplied my reviewing sisters with in my absence:

1. Love the clothes! Elyse, please knit me that ______.
2. Oooh, Scottish scenery!
3. That Black Jack, what a rascal. Seriously – I hate him.
4. Wow, what a plot twist! I didn't see that coming! This changes everything!
5. I love that line when _____ says ______.
6. Dougal, you are gross.

Did they apply? I’ve peeked at other plot summaries, and it sounds like at least some of them did. Although I suppose I can no longer even jokingly describe Black Jack as a rascal (it was mockery, I swear) and now must describe him as “Scumbag”.

I can’t speak to the issue of rape in this episode with much authority, because I didn’t see it, but I do have Thoughts. I have felt throughout that rape is over-used in the show. Poor Claire can’t walk down a hall without having to hit a guy with a chair. With something like this, a little goes a long way, and we are already well aware of how dependant Claire is. It’s her dependency that’s scary – she relies on the clan to protect her not from rape, but from starvation and death by exposure (to weather – although Claire has plenty of secrets that she can’t exposes as well). If the show runners want to build a sense of danger while Claire is under the care of the MacKenzie clan, here’s some other things they could highlight:

Claire has no money, right? None at all? Let’s talk about that.

What happens to people accused of being English spies?

What happens to people who run afoul of religious leaders because they are great at curing bizarre diseases? Why yes, I do know the answer!

As far as rape goes in this episode, one of the things Claire has a hard time grasping is that she is in the middle of a war. The show has been playing with the tension between “I’m in a romantic fantasy” and “I’m in a hellish war zone of deprivation and violence”. It sounds like “The Wedding” explored the idea of romantic fantasy and this episode blew it out of the water and reminded Claire that she’s not in shiny happy land. It is a horrible truth that rape has always been, and continues to be, a weapon in war – a way that one side tries to demoralize the other. I suspect, without having seen it, that the rape scenes were handled well, but I think the show as a whole would be stronger if it didn’t constantly default to the threat of rape as a way of showing that Claire is vulnerable.

Here’s Angelina Jolie talking about rape as war crime. It’s a youtube link – don’t read the comments.

 

RHG: And thus ends our coverage of Outlander until next April! Other tv events we’ll be covering in the future: Death Comes to Pemberley in November, and at the very least, Carrie and I will be covering Marvel’s Agent Carter.

We'll leave you with this.  Because we care.