Tag: Season

This article centers on Season 3, Episode 9 of Outlander. If you’re not yet caught up with the show, be warned: Spoilers abound.

When we last saw the Frasers, Claire was helplessly shouting, “come back!” to the tall ship absconding with young Ian. It was supposed to be a heart-wrenching moment, but it was also kind of funny because Claire, girl, they cannot hear you. They are miles away, and it’s windy. Come on!

This week, Jamie and Claire take to the sea on a ship called The Artemis to find young Ian, who, they deduce, is on his way to Jamaica to be sold for “up to thirty pounds.” Conveniently, Jamie assembles a small crew to go on this new adventure—Willoughby, Fergus, and his kinsmen Lesley and Hayes. But there’s a twist: Fergus has brought along Marsali, Laoghaire’s daughter, to whom he is handfasted and madly in love.

Jamie is none too pleased about his stepdaughter being on board and set to marry Fergus, so he decides he has to protect her virtue. He and Fergus will room together, and Claire and Marsali will room together. Claire is not happy with this arrangement because, as she tells Jamie, they’ve been apart for 20 years. Subtext: We have a lot of missed sex to make up for. Finally, Claire is making sense!

There are some other things going on during all of this—sailors are really superstitious and believe a woman on the ship is bad luck, redheads are bad luck, and not touching the ship’s horseshoe before setting sail is bad luck. When a sailor is injured, the men believe it’s because someone didn’t touch the ship’s horseshoe and a low-level panic begins spreading through the crew. And in the early days of the voyage, Jamie is very seasick.

Claire is the ship’s surgeon, of course, and will be looking after the men as needed. She mends minor wounds and makes tea for Jamie to get over his seasickness, which he does, but not because of the tea. Turns out, Willoughby knows acupuncture and uses it on Jamie, who has been hiding it so as not to wound his Harvard-educated, accomplished surgeon wife’s pride.

During a dinner with the captain, one Jamie is too sick to attend, the captain tries to impart to Claire the importance of gaining the men’s trust by believing their superstitions. This scene’s highlight is when the captain tells Claire that she and Marsali should be walking around with their breasts free to the open air because, as he explains, “A woman’s bare breasts calm an angry sea.” Of course they do.

As they ready for bed, Claire and Marsali have a minor word scuffle that ends with Marsali declaring that she still thinks Claire is a whore. She is about as pleasant as her mother. Fergus and Jamie also have a conversation about honesty, and Jamie refuses to give the young couple his blessing until Fergus comes clean about all the women he’s been with. It’s kind of a strange request because, if, as Fergus claims, he has been faithful to Marsali since they began courting, who cares about his previous assignations? Jamie’s resistance to Marsali and Fergus’s relationship makes absolutely no sense. It becomes even more bewildering later in the episode, when Fergus tells Marsali his romantic history and Jamie still refuses to relent despite Claire’s entreaties. Almost every week there are these grating reminders that Jamie is kind of a misogynist—a sexy misogynist, to be sure, but full of old-fashioned ideas about women that he should be disabused of, given his thoroughly modern wife and, of course, common sense.

In a quiet moment, Claire finds Willoughby writing a poem on the ship’s deck, and he shares that he’s writing his life story. Claire asks if she can hear his story, but he says he cannot until he’s ready to let it go.

As everyone on the ship falls into a routine, things seem to be going well—until the winds disappear and all hell breaks loose. Days turn into weeks of just sitting on the water, with no land in sight. The ship’s fresh water goes bad. The men become convinced that someone didn’t touch the horseshoe at the beginning of the voyage.

Claire and Jamie, though, continue finding their way back to each other, and their interactions are the one thing that hold this episode together. One night, they are blissfully alone on the deck, looking up at the moon, and Claire talks about reading Goodnight Moon to Brianna as a baby. She laments that she misses her daughter, but fortunately her husband is there with his strong arms and rock hard chest to console her. Unfortunately, they don’t take this opportunity to bless us with some hot sex.

Tensions come to a boil when the men decide that someone has to be thrown overboard to balance the scales of superstition. One of Jamie’s men, Hayes, is identified as the man who didn’t touch the horseshoe. When they try to grab him, he climbs up to the ship’s mast, panicked, ready to jump into the ocean to pacify the men. Jamie climbs up after Hayes and says all the right things to get Hayes back down in a wildly drawn-out scene where Hayes almost falls and Jamie holds on tight and blah blah blah.

While all this drama is happening, Willoughby sees a bird flying low. As Hayes makes it back to the ship’s deck, the men still calling for him to be thrown overboard, Willoughby starts ringing the ship’s bell and telling the story of his life. This is probably the best scene in the episode, one I do not want to sully with my own words. In summary, he was going to serve an emperor’s wife in China, but he would have to become a eunuch. He goes on to explain that he fell in love with all women, “the taste of their breasts like apricots, the scent of her navel in the winter,” and other such loveliness. Rather than give up all that, he fled to another country, where basically white people are super racist and terrible. “By not surrendering my manhood, I have lost all else,” Willoughby says.

As sad and beautiful as his story is, the men have calmed down. Willoughby throws the pages of his story into the air and the wind carries them away, forcing the men to see that they have wind and their journey can continue. The day is saved and sure, we could talk about how clichéd it is for the one person of color on board to have the right brand of magical wisdom to save the day, but I suppose the struggle can stand down for this episode.

With the wind comes the rain, so the ship’s water supplies are once again replenished. Now that everyone is in a good mood again, Jamie and Claire finally take the opportunity to have some hot sex below decks. It starts with some kissing in a corridor, then they are in a chamber, kissing and panting and moaning. Claire urges Jamie to hurry up, which he does, and soon their bodies are conjoining and Claire is holding on to a rope (that could have been put to interesting use…) and all is right with the world for about 30 seconds. Afterward, they lie together and Jamie compliments Claire’s gray hair with some pretty lines about how “the way the light hits it like a piece of silver in midnight.” They also agree that whatever else they have going on, they are still awesome at sex.

Nearly every week, at this point in the episode, something ludicrous happens to make the drama even more dramatic—and this week is no exception. The Artemis is followed by a British Man o War that signals for them to drop anchor so they can be boarded. At first, Jamie worries that they are going to press men into service and that he, as a British subject, could be one of them. Before the British arrive, he makes Claire promise to continue on to Jamaica to find young Ian. But the British aren’t looking for men. They have been overtaken by a plague, and they come to The Artemis looking for a surgeon. OF COURSE!

After the acting captain explains the symptoms his men are showing, Claire determines they have a typhoid outbreak. She has already been inoculated, so she offers to go over to the British ship and help them. Jamie objects, chivalry and all that, but Claire ignores him, as she always does, because of her oath that always seems to get her into trouble. Once on the Man o War, Claire descends into the nastiest place imaginable—the men are puking and shitting themselves and covered in gross. Claire can hardly breathe. She examines one guy, confirms her diagnosis, and then, in the captain’s quarters, tells him how to save the rest of his men.

Being the good doctor she is, Claire offers to help him get started on bringing the men to the deck and washing them and so on. The captain thanks her and says he is sending word to The Artemis that she will be just a bit longer, but he’s obviously lying. As Claire goes to the galley for boiled water, the ship starts moving—and fast. Claire runs to the deck, and the captain explains that he needs her to save his men. He has indeed sent word to The Artemis, but telling them that they can all rendezvous in Jamaica. It’s just so maddeningly absurd. I’m all for a show with a lively plot, but it makes no sense that Claire and Jamie are always dealing with the most dramatic nonsense imaginable.

This is one of those episodes where there are several small intrigues that seem designed mostly to kill time, and then there is one big intrigue that kills common sense. There’s so much filler in this show, especially this episode. It’s strange given how dense the Outlander books (still haven’t read them) are. Perhaps this week’s excuse is that the ship is a tightly contained space and only so much can happen. I don’t know. Suffice it to say, this episode’s name, “The Doldrums,” is quite apt.

Related: This New ‘Outlander’ Trailer Teases All the Sex Still to Come This Season

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