nodorothyparker

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.

One of the things I liked about the first season was that the Nest, Union of Hope, what have you, seemed to be exactly what they were billed as. No philosophizing cannibals, no bored murderous middle managers. No one died cheap deaths unnecessarily for shock. Just mostly everyone, save Madame Really Bad Guy's storm troopers, trying to do their best with a bit of French flair. Now we're told all of that was shit and everybody on both sides is bad to the point of World War II-style machine gunning in the woods or plotting to sacrifice children for reasons that don't even seem to add up beyond not wanting the other side to have hope/not wanting followers to lose hope. It sucks because this show's portrayal of the original outbreak last season was easily one of the best the franchise has ever pulled off. I was initially happy to see more of that with Genet's back story. Her comment that in the beginning they worried more about protecting the art than people interspersed with scenes of her husband being locked out of the museum to be torn apart felt like the on the nose kind of commentary this franchise loves in giving us the answer of whatever happened to the Mona Lisa. Once again, we're shown that the worst of the worst people we've met over the franchise were small time middling sorts like gym teachers, office workers, or janitors pre ZA who made the most of the collapse of the world. I also initially thought that this was why Genet seemed so interested in Carol from the start, that as someone who had also previously been mostly invisible that like was recognizing like. Sure, they're already halfway through a six-episode season and we don't have the screentime left for the kind of indulgent character study the mother show used to wallow in every mid season or so, but there was potential there. There's also the mostly unexplored subplot of just how wrong Carol's instincts about people seem to be on this side of the Atlantic. She's long been pretty sure of herself in her abilities to fly under the radar and do and say what needed to be done to outplay and outlast, but with the exception of Ash in the beginning, she's been pretty terrible at reading or anticipating people. But no, we immediately ramp up to 11 throwing her into what looks like another massacre that will likely require plot armor to survive.

It's like they took everything that made the first season feel so fresh and different and set it on fire. So pointless nihilism and cruelty it is. Genet is making Saviors-era Negan look almost reasonable and nuanced.

I'm half expecting this too. Otherwise, the whole just wander in and surrender your gun plan seems a whole lot dumber than Carol can usually be counted on being. But then this is the same woman who set off on foot alone to a strange city with no more apparent plan to find Daryl than wait for some rando bad guys to show up and tail them to see if they lead anywhere. The French story with Le Kid Jesus is really dragging. So am I understanding correctly that the entirety of their big important ceremony is to deliberately let the most special of special snowflake kids get bitten to see if he's immune to the zombie virus? If he dies, it's going to be pretty hard to continue their cult. "Whoops, sorry guys. I know we gathered you all here to put all your faith and hope in this one kid. But doesn't he make a pretty zombie?" And if he doesn't, then what? Do they also have lab facilities behind all the religious iconography and the know-how to be able to translate that into something usable without immediately losing him to Le Madame Really Bad Guy? Great, Daryl. I've mostly enjoyed how grown up the relationship with Isabelle was compared to all the cartoonish yet strangely chaste fangirling of the mother show. But now you've set off all the death knells to ringing for her.

It's kind of a major design flaw that every time the generator goes out your gate immediately pops open enough to let a whole herd inside the compound. But I realize this is yet another in-universe example of someone who was managing well enough until one of our crew showed up just in time for everything to go to hell, just as I understand that they needed to torch this guy's current entire setup to make almost literally flying blind across the Atlantic in a small rickety-looking plane on what would be a needle in a haystack search even if it wasn't based on a lie seem like a plausible thing to do. I'm happy to have Carol back on my TV even if I'm still not sure how well she's going to integrate with the French crew or aesthetic. Ash seems like a fundamentally decent guy if a little too eager to take a stranger at her word. Maybe it would be different at the end of the world when most everything you ever cared about is gone anyway, but it never ceases to amaze how people in this world so easily latch onto total strangers with even the vaguest of ideas or promises. Carol bald-faced lying to the guy about Sophia feels like something that should bite her in the ass hard at a date to be named later assuming she doesn't get him killed right away. Maybe I'm just realizing I'm not terribly interested in watching another potentially interesting character be introduced and then sacrificed an episode later as a conveyance to get the lead from point to another. And yes, Ones Who Live, I'm still looking at you. Daryl's scenes felt mostly like an afterthought in a show named after him.

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