S07.E10: Brotherly Love

[nodorothyparker]

Quote

Claire and Ian arrive in Philadelphia to help the ailing Henry Grey; Roger and Buck receive an unexpected clue in their search for Jemmy.

 

[Jodithgrace]

It amuses me how often bigamy happens in these books. First Claire marries Jamie while being (technically) married to Frank. Then Jamie marries Laoghaire while still being married (technically) to Claire. Now Claire is marrying Lord John while…well you know.

As Roger runs to and fro collecting ancestors, I’ve forgotten where Jem actually is. He’s not in the past at all, am I right? Is he under the dam, in those tunnels? 

[nodorothyparker]

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.

Edited Saturday at 06:59 PM by nodorothyparker

[Jodithgrace]

Yes, I was surprised when Jenny decided not to go with Jamie, but I don’t recall her being involved in major story lines in the later books, so I guess it’s fine. Maybe the new actress playing Jenny didn’t want that big of a commitment. 

[GHScorpiosRule]

I finally got around to watching this and OMGEE, did Steven Cree break my heart!😭😭😭😭 I’m going to miss his Ian.

I don’t think we saw his passing in the buik. And then the flashbacks to young Jaime! I ken he’s no’ dead, but oh my heart.

Rollo!!!! So many deviations from the buik sae Rollo

survive!

Roger’s internal thoughts and reactions had me 😂😂😂😂😂

Oh, hello Dougal!

And let me just add-again-I can’t stand the way the singer performs the opening credits and with those last lines as if she’s gasping her final breaths. Gimme season one credits!

[Haleth]

The singer was Sinead O’Connor, wasn’t she?  Yeah, I dislike her take on the song.

Jenny saying “yeah, no, maybe later” was a surprise but makes sense with so little time to cover a bloated book.  There are already too many superfluous characters.

[GHScorpiosRule]

8 hours ago, Haleth said:

The singer was Sinead O’Connor, wasn’t she?

Right! I remember people saying that Sinead would be singing the opening credits now. But I really hate her rendition.