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Kilt Drops: 0
Previously on Outlander: Pee-soaked wool, barroom brawls, and English soldiers – just your average Highland road trip!
The episode picks up right where the previous one left off: with the English soldier asking Claire if she was with Clan Mackenzie of her own volition. She says she is, but they still take her to see the general, anyway. Dougal accompanies her, but after the mincing general mocks Dougal’s accent, his kilt, and his manners, he leaves for the tavern downstairs.
This episode centers around Black Jack Randall and his sociopathic cruelty. He’s making power plays left and right, and for her part, Claire dances around them. From Randall’s rapturous look on his face as he recounts beating Jamie to the unblinking way in which he punches Claire in the stomach, he makes Dougal look like a mewling kitten.
Randall is on Claire’s scent here, doggedly pursuing her as a Scottish sympathizer. Did Mrs. Beauchamp Among The Savages share a bed with Dougal, he taunts, prompting a dressing-down from Claire that makes every redcoat in the room look at her with suspicion.
Claire is saved by the bell – or amputated arm, as it were. When a solider is brought in with a wounded arm, Claire bustles downstairs to oversee a gruesome amputation. None of this is as skin-crawlingly creepy, however, as the next scene: Randall casually threatening a soldier with the same razor that Claire used to shave her husband’s face two hundred years later.
This is just the precursor to an interrogation that has Claire lying like a rug, pretending that she followed a soldier to Scotland during a torrid affair, only to find that he was a “whoremonger” who attacked her. She breaks out the alligator tears and puts on a convincing “sir, you have insulted me” performance, but Randall is unmoved.
But one suspects that anyone who describes whipping someone as forming a “true” connection between him and his victim, who describes the experience as setting his stomach aflutter and his legs shaking, will not be easily moved by anything less than pure violence.
When Dougal bursts into the room to intervene, Randall lets Claire go with the warning that she is to return the next day, or Dougal will be harboring a fugitive.
And then, what we’ve all been waiting for: Dougal announces that Claire doesn’t have to go back to Randall – if she becomes a Scot. By marriage.
“Doesn’t it bother you that I’m not a virgin?” Claire asks Jamie.
“As long as it doesn’t bother you that I am,” he responds, and grins. “Reckon one of us should ken what they’re doing.”
Kilt Drops: 0
Unless you count Randall nearly orgasming as he tells Claire about the “beautiful masterpiece” of scars across Jamie’s back.
Sasse-WHAT?
- Claire, stop sympathizing with the sociopath. It only gets you punched in the stomach.
- Heh heh heh, “grinding your corn” is my new favorite euphemism.
Next episode: it’s the wedding! And there had better be all manner of kilt drops.
