nodorothyparker

As obtuse as Caroline Bingley could be, she realized that Lizzy as an "headstrong obstinate girl" would dig her heels in defending Wickham if she threw a little obvious snobbery about him her way. Caroline knew that something had happened between Wickham and Darcy to earn Darcy's eternal ire even if she didn't know what and she probably did think it made her look better in comparison to be seen trying to warn the poor simple dear about Wickham while Lizzy was all but spitting in Darcy's face defending and taking up for Wickham every chance she got. But Lizzy is actually pretty easy to goad on this point in the first half of the story, making Wickham a continual argument in any budding designs Caroline thinks Darcy might have on Lizzie and making Lizzie look to Darcy like a foolish poor judge of character. Caroline pointedly asks Lizzy about Wickham in Darcy's presence more than once just to get a reaction from her.

She's actually put out a number of excerpts from book 10 on that same Facebook page (which is why I look in periodically because I'm such a spoiler whore), so I'm inclined to believe her when she says she has made some progress on it. But that post is also followed by a separate post of a Master Raymond book excerpt and she readily admits she doesn't write in a straight line and flits between whatever stories she's thinking about at any given moment, so there's that. I'm apparently one of about three people in her readership who doesn't give even a fraction of a shit about Master Raymond. I just don't and I'm going to be annoyed if we have to sit through nonsense about him in the show's final stretch.

From Gabaldon's Facebook page. Long winded, as you might expect of an author whose last couple of books weighed in at 900-plus pages each, but she sounds frankly annoyed the show has put her in the position of having to address the Faith question. She is pretty clear that the show is on its own here and whatever happened to Baby Faith is not and won't be book material.

And yet they end up collecting multiple stray children along the way and spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with the antics of fifty eleven precocious grandchildren and all the assorted drudgery of raising said grandchildren. All the goings on with dirty diapers and breastfeeding and potty training in Fiery Cross alone is enough to nearly break some readers. The Faith is alive! thing is just an idle musing by Claire in the most recent book after seeing Fanny and Jane's mother's locket, which does have Faith engraved on it. But at least there, there's a sort of basis for her thinking. Roger and Bree have just returned to the ridge with a story about another book-only time traveler they met in 1739 who had miraculous healing powers in his hands. And she's just resurrected a baby they believed was dead with a similar power in her hands that she can't really explain but makes her start thinking about what she'd seen Master Raymond do and her own dead baby and what he might have done there. Even then, it's maybe a chapter or so of what-ifs in a more than 900 page book before conceding how utterly far fetched the whole thing is. A supposed stillbirth remembering a lullaby however many years later to pass on to her own children is a show-only thing.

Gabaldon has made a point of saying that the show ending would be different from the series ending, I always thought at least partially because she was very aware of the backlash over how Game of Thrones flamed out. But now she seems to be conceding in different social media discussions that the whatever happened to Baby Faith story is based on something she had talked about doing even if she's now quick to say she doesn't think the show did it very well. Almost everything I've seen this morning written about the finale with interviews with the actors and Matt Roberts is telling us this is going to be a continuing story in season 8, even if there doesn't seem to be much there to go on.

Gabaldon doesn't seem very happy with the maybe Faith lived as Jane and Fanny's mother thread on Facebook, but she is the one who wrote Claire speculating about it in Bees on the basis of a miniature in a locket labeled Faith before eventually and reluctantly conceding that it sounded pretty far fetched even for the Outlander universe. It comes there after they think maybe Claire resurrected a dead baby of some minor characters that makes her start contemplating Faith and Master Raymond and what his powers might have been, so who knows? It's just a really odd season ender for what's really a pretty minor thread in that book. It also makes me laugh that the show apparently went to the trouble to get the same actor from all the way back in season 2 for about 30 more seconds of Master Raymond being cryptic and mysterious for the sake of being cryptic and mysterious. Beyond that, this episode steamrolled through so much of the back of the eighth book that very little had time to resonate at all. Roger and Bree are treating the dangers of time travel with all the seriousness of trying to figure out which movie to go see, where their book counterparts eventually land on going to Claire and Jamie mostly because they don't believe there's anyone in 1980 they can all focus on hard enough to get there. Plus the whole Rob Cameron thing. Claire's on death's door, no wait, she's fine. Brian Fraser briefly gets to meet his descendants without knowing his descendants, check. Rollo dies and Ian cries, check. Jamie and John don't exactly leave things on a friendly everything's good now note so Jamie will still be bitching about Claire and John well into the next book, check. William and Jamie's scenes were also so truncated that beyond the brief mention of Brianna, it was nigh impossible to convey any sense that this is where William starts to really consider that there's a whole blood family beyond just Jamie after years of insisting it didn't matter at all that the Greys as the only living family he knew he had were of no biological relation. This is also where the seeds are laid for him to start to appreciate that Jamie was more than just a groom and maybe actually somebody worth knowing, but there's really none of that here.

Same. The trailer looked like an absolute hot mess that had nothing to do with the, you know, books it's supposedly based on and I really just don't have the mental energy or fortitude to sit through another round of this unless I can be assured that it's gotten better or at least finally makes some modicum of sense. I loved at least the first book in the series too much for that.

I chalked the Roquefort cheese thing up to the shorthand that's happening with compressing so much of the books. Book Claire does tell Denny to pack the wound with Roquefort because it's pretty much that or nothing. They've already burned through most of their medicinal supplies treating the wounded and nobody's had time to be cultivating a new batch of home-brewed penicillin. So they take their chances with what they've got. I'll admit here that much like Jamie's big lost at sea! no wait, there he is moment, Claire's random shooting doesn't really move me as much as the show might want it to. We know neither of them is really going to die in an unfinished series, so both events come off as rather maudlin and time wasting and are mostly interesting only for their fallout. But even there, the biggest result of Claire being shot is Jamie's melodramatic resignation and the next book clarifies that he was given command of a group whose enlistment was up literally in the next day or two anyway and bad form of resigning aside, he probably wasn't going to have anyone to command much longer after that in any case. So no one really cares all that much. It's mostly treated as an irritation in Bees as the war primarily moves south that rebel leadership treats Jamie with a certain amount of skepticism as an unreliable ally because of it. William's story is heavily compressed as on the page it was more of a long chain of no good very bad events that went sideways on him instead of an outright hostage taking, but the show did a nice job combining book John and Hal's separate talks with him afterward that again hit on his angst of identity while throwing in a few good words for Jamie and laying the groundwork for William to finally start to see that he's a whole lot more than just a groom or a traitor. Not sure how Buck thinks it's going to work bouncing around in the stones playing messenger, but kudos to Diarmaid Murtagh for making me care so much more about Buck onscreen than I ever did on the page. His "you're all my sons" was really moving coming from a man who thanks to time travel has now had the chance to meet multiple generations of his progeny and sees himself more useful as something of a shepherd for those generations than trying to get back to being a failed embittered husband whose own timeline has him dying this same year anyway. He and Roger toasting the mention of Alamance knowing that's what set all this in motion in the first place was a nice touch. Anyone who's had small children can sympathize with Bree as Mandy bolts headlong away from her at the most inopportune moment, but it's still funny that now all they can do is try to chase her through the stones and hope they somehow end up in the right place.

This is what Frank and young Bree were looking at. I admit it took me a bit to realize what I was seeing because I initially just thought it was an illustration of Molly Pitcher that book Claire is thinking about from that battle, wondering if she'll also meet her at some point that day. It is very close to a well known Currier and Ives print of Molly Pitcher.

People gray and age at different rates. I'm six weeks older than my husband and I've been dyeing for years. His hair is still pretty much the same color it was when we met more than 20 years ago. But the real answer has always been that the show is only going to let its leads age so far. It is still TV. They both still have to look reasonably good. Percy's real name is Wainwright but he was calling himself Beauchamp because of an advantageous marriage he made. Yes, he's both Lord John's former stepbrother AND former lover. (It's complicated in the books, but Claire and Jamie both pick up on this without Lord John spelling it out for them.) Without bogging down in all the frankly tedious details, Percy is an opportunist who has his finger in a lot of pies and isn't really loyal to anyone but does at least appear to still have some genuine feeling for Lord John, even if he's screwed him over in the past. Rob Cameron read Roger's guide to time travel and later Jamie's letters talking about the hidden Jacobite gold. He kidnapped Jem to try to force him to tell where the gold is and set the whole fakeout that sent Roger and Buck back through the stones into motion. I don't think the show has explained that one of his two accomplices we saw, Mike Callahan, has been working on the renovations to Lollybroch and thus has had access to the house but it did make a point of name dropping him this episode and showed very briefly that he's the same guy calling himself Richardson in the colonial timeline. The books make it clear that Claire really lucked out hooking up with Jamie when she accidentally went through the stones, all the great sex and one true love stuff aside. She was provided for and protected while she figured it out and luckily had a usable skill set and knowledge. We're presented with numerous time travelers like Wendigo Donner who went through and promptly got themselves in trouble or killed because they didn't know what they were doing. We're told Roger's father has been stealing food from local villagers because he didn't know what had happened or how to fix it, which is why the locals were after him and Roger didn't really have time to tell him much. All the wacky hijinks with time travel aside, it really doesn't amount to much on the page either.

I read that as they were re-establishing who the Greys, Hal Grey in particular, are as far as why Richardson is so specifically targeting them. Telling us where Lord John got his alias just felt like a bonus thrown in. We haven't seen Hal onscreen since he briefly appeared at Helwater all the way back in season 3. I don't know if we're supposed to think Hal is still in England three years after that scene is set when his book counterpart is actively running military campaigns in America when he's not periodically running back to London as Duke of Pardloe to make influential speeches about the war in the House of Lords or if it even particularly matters. Richardson believes Hal has enough sway in British government to keep support for the war going until the Americans can be defeated. Hal is, after all, the same guy who executed all the Jacobite leaders after Culloden excepting Jamie.

The show is compressing the crap out of the books but it's also pretty faithful to the last three (7-9) books in that they're very much ensemble pieces instead of just Jamie and Claire's story. They're both 60ish now and so much of it is about children and grandchildren and all of these lives that either existed at all or became intertwined because of time travel and our core pair. I'm mostly just relieved that the show seems to be making the final approach to wrapping the 1980 story to get Bree and Roger back into the main storyline. Much of it has been better than expected, mostly I think due to the actors playing Roger and Buck being able to sell the weirdness of it all, but it's run its course. Bonus to the show confirming that the very very minor character of Mike Callahan in his blink and you'll miss it cameo at the Lollybroch shootout is indeed our final time traveling big bad Ezekiel Richardson. Gabaldon herself wrote this episode, which has to be a bit weird for her in setting up the resolution to this final story that she hasn't written yet in the books. I sort of remember her being kind of smug when the disaster of the Game of Thrones final seasons passed those books, basically saying at the time that they still had several books to adapt and that she would definitely have an ending. And now here we are. Jamie is finally slightly less assy this episode but still pretty dismissive of the mess he left Lord John in. He also seems pretty comfortable continuing to play house in John's house and entertaining what John would have considered a pack of traitors there with no regard to how it may look to John's British cohorts. Jamie might as well be peeing on the walls of the Philadelphia house to mark his territory in hanging the colonial flag over John's mantle and you could see that that wasn't lost on him. The dinner with Washington and Lafayette was pretty clunky, as if the show felt like it needed some of the revolution's greatest hits cameos even it didn't really amount to much. I love how much of Jane's story the show is managing to keep intact even with all the condensing it has to do. Even in her limited time, she's such a catalyst for Jamie and William's relationship going forward and brings Fanny into the Fraser family fold. I've always liked on the page that Claire and Rachel both intrinsically get how nonexistent Jane's options really were. The actress also has tremendous chemistry with Charles Vandervaart, who continues to do great work as someone nearly stewing himself alive while trying to do anything else.

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!