nodorothyparker

Fanny hasn't appeared at this point in the book either. We don't meet her until William does in the British army camp after everything has already happened. The actor playing William has name dropped both sisters in interviews, so we can assume she's coming.

The show version of this is a bit different in the books. Book Roger also bids Jerry goodbye and tells him he loves him as he goes through. Book Buck asks why he did that, with the answer being that Roger knows he never made it back, that that's all he'll ever have with his dad. There's no wondering if he made it or if his memories might change. But book Roger is really big into predestination in that he believes everything is already laid out to happen as it does. It's been forever and a day since I read "A Leaf on the Wind of All Hallows" but I think that's what that brief black and white flash of Jerry with a little boy was supposed to be. There, Jerry popped back into his own timeline just in time to see the air raid that killed Roger's mother, saved Roger, and then I think we're supposed to think he was killed too. I'm really at the point I just want the show to wrap up the alternative Bree and Roger timelines and get them back with the main cast. I've enjoyed them more onscreen than I ever did on the page, but they don't really seem to lead anywhere that really matters in the main story and Sophie Skelton is just too weak an actor to carry this when she doesn't have stronger actors to support her and fill up the screen. I also still don't really buy Ian the Mohawk warrior and Rachel the conveniently situational but otherwise devoutly pacifist Quaker as a couple as much as I might find each of them perfectly fine characters on their own. The entire romance has been so rushed and undeveloped that giving them extended love scenes in a season and series that's rapidly ticking down doesn't really do much for me. Nice that Jamie's gotten over his ire at Lord John enough to play house in his house, even if he's choosing to sleep in the same bed Claire shared with Lord John and then complaining about it. But since Fergus and Marsali and their Philadelphia printshop aren't in this version of the story, I guess they have to put him and Claire somewhere.

The show's not doing a very good job of making any of this clear. I more or less know because I really like this section of the books, but I'm not sure I'd have any idea otherwise. The party in the book is a different society event than the Grey house party but it otherwise plays out pretty much the same. Claire remarks there that she's lived in Lord John's house for about a month at that point. The date on the chapter is about two months after the date of Jamie's last letter telling them he's about to set sail. Jamie returns in the next chapter, which isn't dated and never specifies how long it's been since the party. It takes Jamie and Jenny a bit to get to Philadelphia because they can't immediately get another ship after the Euterpe sails without them. There is a war on, after all. They eventually do get passage on another ship but it lands somewhere in the south and then they have to figure out travel from there to Philadelphia. As Jamie was just in France and mentions having met with various French supporters, and this is about the point where the French entered the war, I assumed the letters he was carrying were about that.

I was really struck by this too. I know one of the common opinions among many bookreaders is that William is a tiresome brat in this section of the story, but seeing it so well done onscreen really puts a lot of his anger into perspective. I've always been a bit bugged that book Jamie drops this huge A bomb on him and then as far as William's concerned disappears for chapters until he has to go take William by the scruff of the neck to call him off Ian. And then he's fairly cold about it. There's no look, I get you're damn furious with me but don't take it out on Ian or anyone else. Yes, you have a right to be angry. But I'm here when you're ready to hear the real story on all this. William gets none of that. Jamie literally pops up out of nowhere, threatens him to make him back down (which Book William was on the verge of doing anyway as he was cooling down and starting to think rationally), and then disappears again. I do realize William probably isn't in a place to really hear it in that moment and Jamie's long been so closed off on the subject of the son he couldn't claim that it probably doesn't occur to him, but the cat's out of the bag now and it might have gone a long way in taking some of the fire out of the situation. In the most recent book, Jamie is both handwringing that William has been floundering so badly and that's why he never should have found out and and at another point that he really hopes William gets over his anger at him while he's still alive to see it. All I could think when I read it was you really haven't made much effort toward him since you dumped this grenade on him and then left him to figure it out, what did you expect? Claire and Brianna have each been more proactive toward William than he has.

So much of this episode is lifted straight off the page yet still managed to burn through a good chunk of the first third of book eight without a lot of the meandering and "well, huh" overexplaining Gabaldon is so prone to in these big long later books. Book Jamie knows Lord John married Claire and why because he first went to Fergus and Marsali who are also in Philadelphia and they filled him in on the whole dead and lost at sea thing and oh yeah, she's at Lord John's. But since Fergus and Marsali seem to have vanished into the ether show wise, I guess we're to assume he heard about the Euterpe and connected the dots from there. This episode was really a tour de force for David Berry finally being given more to do than look sadly longing and benevolent as he supports whatever the Frasers are up to this week and Charles Vandervaart in getting to show that he was cast for more than just his plausibly looking like he could be the product of Jamie and Geneva. Some of Berry's line readings were killing me as he was nailing just how absurd yet how very dangerous he finds the situation he's now in. It was also a nice reminder that for as very British cultured aristocrat almost to the point of foppish Lord John can sometimes be, he had also been a very capable longtime soldier. Both book and show Lord John are very aware that he provoked Jamie's reaction but did it anyway because he'd just experienced this hugely traumatic loss and propping up Claire and by extension the Frasers and Fraser hangers on and needed acknowledgement of that rather than immediately reverting back to the usual unrequited feelings and raising Jamie's kid for him and thanks for playing, Lord John. I know it's a lot to come back to and he's got a lot on his plate at the moment, but Jamie is frankly the real asshole in all this. He beats the hell out of his friend who has been cleaning up after him almost as long as they've known each other before abandoning him and drops this huge lifetime secret on William and is immediately out the door with barely more than a so sorry about that. And then doesn't really give him another thought until he has to go call him off Ian. He's spent five books up to this point alternatively pining and compartmentalizing over this kid but can't spare a moment in all his running hither and yon to really consider that he's just blown that kid's entire identity and place in the world apart or worry if he's okay. William's doing plenty of raging and lashing out everyone and generally acting like a raw nerve but I appreciate that the show added his line to Claire about how everyone in his life has lied to him because it's really the entire crux of the matter and something that's only articulated on the page in dribs and drabs over hundreds of pages. Everyone lied to him. In a system of peerage where everything about your identity is set at birth due to the circumstances of that birth, everything he's ever known to be true about himself is a lie. Jamie isn't really much better to Claire, acting like he thinks she and Lord John cheated on him and not that they were both figuratively bleeding out over him, even if it ends with them inappropriately going at it on his "good friend's" dining room table. The introduction of Jane and the actress playing her was terrific.

IIRC, Lord John does offer to "comfort" her again at some point afterward, resulting in what may have been an implied handjob written so euphemistically it could have been something or maybe not. But I'm pretty sure their marriage went on for weeks? or maybe longer? Long enough for Claire to be known about Philadelphia as Lady John, long enough for her to develop a real relationship with William as his stepmother to make matters with the two fathers reveal even more confusing, and long enough for her to have moved past the drunken wanting to kill herself phase to mulling taking any number of precious stones she has access to and trying to go back to her own time. The show declaration to Ian that she wants to stay to see the revolution through is a show-only creation. She's definitely considering it on the page to go be with Bree but figuring out the logistics of traveling by herself to the nearest stones she knows of in North Carolina plus the general inertia and stasis she seems stuck in means she hasn't really gotten around to doing much to make it happen before Jamie shows back up alive. Richardson is more or less telling the truth. He's going to end up being a spy and turncoat to both sides as he doesn't really care about the revolution beyond what he thinks needs to happen to achieve his big secret time traveler plan to change history that he spends so much time monologuing to John about in the most recent book. That the show made a point of having him so baldly tell Claire that much while namedropping Lord John's brother Hal and his unwitting role in the plan makes me think we're going to get some truncated version of that plot as we head into the final episodes even if Gabaldon hasn't written a resolution for it yet. The preview shot of Lord John in the eye patch and that the next episode is titled Carnal Knowledge, I think, pretty much tells us they're doing at least some of that story bit from the opening of Heart's Blood.

They're zipping along pretty quickly now but Rachel and Ian are still like watching two near strangers try to sell me on how scintillating it is to watch paint dry. I'm one who likes the weirdo Claire-Lord John hookup, if mostly for the conversation afterward. Lord John disappears for such long stretches in the main series that you never really get much sense of what his life is really like beyond Jamie Jamie Jamie William Jamie. David Berry hasn't always been given a lot to work with but he was so very solid here and he was achingly good in the carriage scene laying some hard truths on Claire, namely that it's all well and good to think love should conquer all and people should be willing to fight for it but she's never had to come at it as a person who had to love in secret to avoid a criminal or even hanging offense. David Berry has given interviews saying something to the effect that this is where we see that John is more than just Jamie's lapdog, whatever that means, so here's hoping even in this speedreader version of the story we're finally going to see some of the prickly edges of the Jamie-John relationship that the show has mostly sanded off. It's never going to not bug a bit how cavalierly everyone has treated the whole William is Jamie's secret son bombshell on the show but for once it led to something that actually made sense: the show obviously couldn't use the book scene reveal as-is with William finally seeing Jamie dead on and realizing hey, we look just like each other, why exactly is that. The actor plausibly looks like the product of Jamie and Geneva but isn't enough of a dead ringer for it. So here it comes about because once again John refers to him as Jamie's son but Jamie has carelessly left the door open for William to overhear. Loved loved loved Claire's big grin at the end because not only is Jamie not dead but after however long of tedious dinner parties, double agents, and playing the dutiful "wife" we've immediately switched gears back to the usual Outlander Danger! and Drama! and even a fake kidnapping for good measure. Still enjoying Roger and Buck's accidental tripping through the wrong wayback more than I expected but it's starting to feel like a wild good chase. Which is how it ends up mostly feeling on the page too, so maybe that's what they're aiming for.

Yep. Jem is locked in a tunnel under the dam. So it looks like they're going to burn through the back third of book seven in this and the next episode while also inserting a good chunk of Roger's plot from book eight. I'll admit I'm enjoying Roger's accidental tripping into the wrong wayback a lot more than I did in the books and I think it's largely on Rik Rankin's ability to really sell that he knows just how trippy and absurd this all is but is going to gamely forge ahead anyway since he's come this far. I just wish I didn't feel like it's going to prove every bit as much of an unconnected time waster here as it did on the page. Roger isn't willing to try to change even the worst bits of known history for fear of the butterfly effect and in the end the greatest hits of already dead characters don't really figure into the larger plot beyond a couple of 'well, huh" moments. But Lotte Verbeek is luminous and looks like she's having a ball revisiting Geillis, so that's something. Jamie's "death" and Claire reacting to it went about as well as it probably could have given the increasingly compressed timeline where even the most casual viewer surely has to know they wouldn't just kill their leading man so unceremoniously offscreen with a season and change to go. In hindsight, I'm surprised they bothered to include the Arch Bug story at all. It's so truncated here it barely manages to register but then Ian and Rachel are so undeveloped as a couple because of the time constraint that they feel more like a list checkoff than anything else. At least the show managed to note that Rachel as a pacifist Quaker accepting decidedly nonpacifist Ian doesn't really make any more sense here than on the page but whatever. They make heart eyes at each other so it's all good. Jenny deciding she's NOT going to America with Jamie felt like the show acknowledging hey, we've only got a limited amount of time left to wrap this up and while adding her back into the main cast for the last two books is one of the more organic bits of color in a series that seems hellbent on bringing back every last character anyway, her presence in America doesn't really affect anything enough to try to shoehorn her in.

Young Ian and Claire leave to go back to colonies in the book pretty much as they did here. Book Claire is initially going back to operate on one of Fergus and Marsali's kids but then Lord John and his nephew pop up as well since they're all right there. The show is combining those two things, probably because there's so much more dramatic fallout thrusting Claire into Lord John and William's orbit. Book John actually had been writing letters chasing them around for months looking for help because as unlikely as it may sound there were cases of people who could and did linger for extended periods of time from gunshot wounds if they didn't die right away. The nephew had gotten enough medical care of the day to still be alive but no one had been able to dig all the bullets out and patch him up enough to actually recover. Jenny will surprise everyone by deciding to leave with Jamie after Ian Senior dies because she's just done with everything. The misdirect comes when they book passage on a ship that for some reason leaves without them and then is lost at sea. Jennie and Jamie then book passage on another ship and show up later in Philadelphia not having any idea that everyone believed they'd gone down with the first ship. Drama ensues.

So that was a whole lot of speedreading through all the various loose ends in Scotland. Kristin Atherton's reading of Jenny is a whole lot broader than the very very book specific Jenny we got from Laura Donnelly but I frankly would have been surprised if it wasn't. It's got to be tough picking up a role of a character we only see intermittently years apart in a long running series and have to hit several big character moments right out of the gate. Considering that her role going forward will be mostly reacting to things out of her own limited space, she should be fine. Laoghaire is Laoghaire. That's about all that can be said there. The show did gamely try to hit the point that Jamie wasn't exactly the poor put upon innocent in their brief marriage of the damned whatever else Jamie and Claire may like to tell themselves, even with the speedreader version of their final settlement. He used her as a placeholder and never cared enough to try beyond that. But either way, that's checked off. At least they finally did the big time travel reveal onscreen instead of the usual oh I told them about it both book and show tend toward just off screen or off page. The Murrays didn't really react much to what has to sound like a barking mad sort of thing to characters who haven't been playing along but it probably helps that Jamie and Young Ian who have now lived with her for years are sitting right there and so clearly believe this to be true. Kind of like with the Buck storyline last season, that they all come from a culture full of stories about fairies and disappearing for 200 years doesn't hurt either, and as as Jenny says, it explains a lot of things about Claire that she'd previously had to accept some pretty flimsy sounding excuses for. The doors opening first to Brian Frasier and then Geillis were nicely done, especially in building to the first fakeout of expecting Jamie to open the Lallybroch door to Roger. I can mostly think the storyline of accidentally wandering into the 1739 wayback is mostly a dud on the page in that it doesn't really advance the larger story or accomplish much beyond a few "huh, well then" character moments and still be interested to see what they do with it.

For bookwalkers:

Good gods, what a mess. While I did sort of like the moment of everybody just giving up as they realized the object they'd been fighting and killing over for two seasons was gone and permanently beyond their reach, the entire last 2.5 episodes of one leader obsessing over getting their hands on Le Kid Jesus, getting killed, and then another person stepping up to insist no, we're still doing this and everyone of their uniformed baddies just shrugging and following along with guns drawn was just too tedious for words. Not once as the B and then C and then D list baddies stepped up did anyone ever really articulate what they planned to do with the kid if they managed to find him or how having him was going to make the ZA any appreciable amount better for anyone. Something something something symbol of something, I think. While I'm happy Ash and Le Kid Jesus are out, it did make me laugh to think of these two landing a freaking plane near the Commonwealth, presuming they can even find it, and going "Uh, Carol and Daryl sent us. They're in France. Yes, France. Yes, I know how that sounds but we had to leave them there and they'll be figuring out their own way home somehow. Can we see Judith now?" Both actors did well with what they had to work with, and I think I honestly would have minded less following that story instead of another round of Carol and Daryl get every last other person around them killed but keep on keeping on. Hallucinating on literal batshit underneath the English Channel with glowing walkers felt like it could be an interesting set piece and I remember thinking had it not been tacked onto the end of this mostly nonsensical season, maybe I wouldn't have minded it so much. But it just went on forever and ended in the usual result of whoops, everybody we started out this trek with is dead and now we're walking to England. See you next season, everybody!

This was a pretty well done episode once you get past the whole wait, why are all these people still willing to get themselves killed over this one kid who very clearly does NOT want to be part of your cult after you've already gotten most of your cult killed over him? I mean, really, they've mostly wiped themselves out and very plainly moved on from the whole peaceful nonviolence they were preaching and the kid obviously can't survive a walker bite to be your new messiah, so what's the point? Some vague concept of "hope?" The thing that made this episode so interesting is something that's been talked about over the run of various shows in the franchise: That as the remnants of Rick's wrecking crew they've left a pretty long trail of bodies and destruction behind them while they keep on keeping on and if they weren't the people we've been following all the way along, we might not be so quick to recognize them as "the good guys." This episode really felt like it was leaning into that idea and that even Daryl and Carol weren't fully sure of the answer. This, after they of course blithely assumed Le Kid Jesus would be jumping at the chance to chuck every last thing familiar to him to go to America with near strangers, where everything would be better and possible for a real childhood. As if Carol and Daryl don't both know all too well how lethal ZA America has been to kids not named Judith too. Carol talked about Ash as if he was another kid to be smoothed over and reasoned with and not a grown man who'd seen his entire post ZA life go up in flames to almost literally fly blind across the ocean on the basis of a lie. And she and Daryl just assumed without even talking to him that of course he'd be just fine with everything to fly whoever they decided to bring along for the ride. It never once seemed to cross either of their minds that he might pull a Cartman screw you guys, I'm going home alone after all your bullshit. Ash has been a great addition, so hopefully he survives to stick around for whatever adventure they end up in next. He deserves to be more than just a plot conveyance. I could almost understand Carol's initial thinking that he didn't really need the details, that dead Sophia is still dead Sophia and what difference did it really make, especially in the wake of Ash saying that the trip had actually been good for him in finally getting him unstuck to start living again. Carol's confession read more like a unburdening to make herself feel better than because it was the right thing to do, and I briefly wondered if she would have done it if Daryl wasn't now a part of their entourage and probably would tell him at some point if she didn't. The actor did a tremendous job of turning on a dime after the reveal and letting us see just how big the betrayal felt to him, and Carol just standing there and taking it felt very in character with her history. I weirdly find myself rooting for Codrone to make it. His talk with Le Kid Jesus about what anger and fear do to people was lovely.

I knew Isabelle was dead woman walking the moment they announced Carol would be joining the series after all. The franchise clearly doesn't want to pair Carol and Daryl off with each other like that, which is fine, but won't let either of them truly pair off with anyone else either. And no, Carol's marriage to Ezekiel of the pretty eyes doesn't really count because it happened almost entirely off screen and when they went their separate ways after the time skip he almost immediately zeroed in on Daryl as the third wheel of their marriage, even if he wasn't the cause of the breakup. Daryl's one and only confirmed relationship happened entirely in flashback after the mother show went to some pains to establish that she was Very Very Bad. It's a shame. Isabelle was an interesting character and Clémence Poésy a lovely actress. But what was almost worse was how deeply emotionally manipulative the whole thing felt. She died just as Carol finally joined the main storyline and then the writing seemed afraid to not throw longtime shippers a bone with Didi mistaking Carol for Isabelle and waxing about how "Laurent" knew they were in love with each other. So much of that dialogue could have legitimately applied to Carol if you didn't know you were supposed to know differently. But for all of that, it was like Isabelle ceased to matter at all as Carol immediately set to yanking every available heartstring to remind Daryl of what was waiting for him on the other side of the Atlantic, how could you have gotten sucked into caring about any of these people at all? It's weird. I love Carol. She's long been one of my favorite TV characters and I'm genuinely happy to have her back on my TV. But I also strongly suspected that bringing her onto this show's canvas would absolutely destroy what was so refreshingly different about it. And I wasn't wrong about that. Elsewhere, Losang makes even less sense after all this. What is the motivation now? The two sides of the fight that saw amped zombies thrown at people after punching holes in their walls shrugging and deciding to team up is also a big headscratcher. Might it have been worth even 30 seconds of asking what they stood to gain in joining the hunt for Le Kid Jesus? What has been the point of any of this, really? Theo and Didi's neighborhood was a hoot. I've really loved this show's use of French history to offer shading on how the ZA is different there than America. If you live long enough you're going to see various armies come through. Sell what you can to live another day. But if you're going to get pissed off at being called a Nazi, maybe don't be machine gunning panicky people in the woods.