Is it just me or is Bree thriving in the 20th century? No, this recap has not been hijacked, but it’s so sweet of you to assume so. Sorry, but credit where credit’s due, folks, and this week’s credit is due to one Mrs. Brianna MacKenzie. Maybe all she needed was to ditch the corset. This week, as she and Roger continue to renovate Lallybroch — a renovation that is taking much longer and is much more expensive than planned — she doesn’t take shit from anyone, and you love to see it. Or I do, anyway.
Not one single person has decided to drop some exposition as to how Bree and Roger pulled their shit together when they landed back in the future, but they apparently had enough money to buy a decrepit Scottish manor and to finance extensive renovations, at least for a little while, but now they’re out of money. Bree decides to get herself a job as a plant inspector at the local dam and faces rampant misogyny in her interview, which is nauseating but also maybe a little comforting to our time traveler to know that even though 200 years may have passed, some things never change. I did clap when Bree calmly asked her interviewer, who flat out says the position isn’t really suited for a woman, “What aspects of plant inspection require a penis?,†and then again, when he notes the rough men she’d be working with and she responds, “You hire the type of men who would assault a woman?†That interviewer cannot form words but does eventually hire her. Claire would be proud.
You’d think her husband would be proud, too, since the MacKenzies need the money and it’s a kick-ass job for Bree to get regardless of their current situation, but no. Roger’s visceral reaction to the news is to start whining about how he isn’t the breadwinner in the family and he should be because he is a man and he promised Bree’s parents, more patriarchal bullshit, etc. Plus this is all tied into Roger’s crisis of faith, brought on by the fact that he believes Claire and Jamie surviving the fire means he and Bree changed the past, so he’s extra whiny about it. Roger needs to get a grip ASAP. It’s really rich coming from the guy who seemingly has zero paying jobs and hasn’t made any move to get one. I’m not saying renovating the house and writing the Time Travel for Dummies book for Jemmy isn’t important, but someone needs to make some cash money, baby, and if you’re not going to go after the Jacobite gold (Roger figures out the musket ball is actually gold and related to the whole gold situation), someone needs to be working. Let Bree live is what I’m saying. Eventually, Roger apologizes and does tell Bree he’s proud, but it’s quite begrudgingly!!
Aside from Roger being physically unable not to be an ass, there are some other things happening at Lallybroch 2.0 that require some investigation: Jemmy is apparently seeing some weird shit going on. Jemmy has already demonstrated some strange gifts — there’s the time travel, obviously, as well as his almost telepathic connection with his sister — so Roger and Bree don’t exactly know what to make of it when Jemmy starts blaming missing snacks on a nuckelavee living in their house. The nuckelavee is a horselike demon from stories told by people in the Northern Isles of Scotland and, after a cute li’l Google search, seems like no joke. Jemmy tells his parents that a nuckelavee threatened to eat Mandy if he didn’t bring it food, and that seems like a weird thing to lie about. Maybe it’s not a nuckelavee per se, but it does seem like something or someone is haunting Lallybroch.
Speaking of being haunted by spirits, who should Claire bump into while she, Jamie, and Ian are hanging out in Wilmington before their big journey to Scotland but Tom Christie? Now, you might be like, Didn’t Tom Christie trade his life for Claire’s and confess to killing Malva and shouldn’t he be like dead dead by now? You’re right! He should be! But he is very much alive and … kissing Claire right on the mouth for an extended period of time? It’s wild. The thing is he, too, is so shocked to see Claire, who he believed had died in the fire at Fraser’s Ridge, that he can’t help but plant one on the love of his life (barf) when he sees her alive and well. I have to say, I love that later we get a scene in which Jamie asks Claire how she is after being kissed by a man without her consent (the answer: She doesn’t feel great about it!). Jamie is ahead of his time. He’s ahead of Roger’s time, too!
After that awkward kiss, Tom explains that thanks to his reading and writing skills, the governor actually started using him as a secretary for a while, and by the time the real secretary arrived, there wasn’t anyone left for Tom to be turned over to because of all the rebelling and such. Tom is off the hook for his daughter’s murder. He also explains his shock at seeing Claire: He was told by others that she and Jamie died in the fire — he even wrote up an obituary for them. So the mystery of the incorrect obituary has been solved, and that’s nice for us! Someone should definitely tell Roger so he can stop spinning out about it.
The scene between Claire and Tom doesn’t do a ton aside from the obituary wrap-up. It does give Claire a chance to be awkward when Tom brings up Allan disappearing from Fraser’s Ridge and then again, as Tom goes on and on about how much he loves Claire. He calls her “a most uncomfortable woman,†which should definitely be on a shirt. While my initial reaction to all of this Tom stuff was, Do we really need this?, I had a change of heart once we got to the scene in which Claire and Jamie get all horny over Jamie being a little jealous of Tom. At that point, I was like, Oh God, yes. We definitely did need that. Thank you for your service, Tom Christie.
Alas, things are about to get decidedly less sexy for Claire and Jamie. Jamie’s plans to pop over to Scotland while the Revolutionary War happens get royally screwed up when Jamie runs into his old pal from the Sons of Liberty, who basically strong-arms him into joining the Continental Army. Jamie’s getting shipped off to Fort Ticonderoga to be a colonel! Obviously, Claire’s going with him — they’ll need doctors — and Ian refuses to go to Scotland without them, so he decides to offer his services to the cause as a sort of liaison with different Native tribes. You just knew Jamie was never going to get out of participating in this war!
We are obviously setting things up for Jamie and William to cross paths on the battlefield at some point, right? Well, it might take William a little longer than he thought to get closer to some action. That’s right: Little Willy is all grown up and getting his own story lines this season. Much of his story in a Most Uncomfortable Woman is working to show us what kind of person William is and just how much like his father he has grown up to be. Do we need an extended scene of William watching another British officer burning a sex worker alive because he believes she has smallpox? I mean, I’d go with “no,†but that’s just me. Still, this moment is clearly there to show us that William will not stand for this kind of unjust violence and that he’s brave enough to stand up to an entire group of his colleagues. Those traits certainly get the attention of Captain Richardson, who offers William a supersecret messenger — BUT DEFINITELY NOT A SPY — mission to deliver three letters to allies in the South before sending him up to New York to join the British troops up there. Since William is unbelievably horny for some rebellion-crushing, he takes the gig even though he’ll have to travel through the Great Dismal Swamp to do it.
The Great Dismal lives up to its name: It’s not long before a snake spooks William’s horse (do snakes just smell that sweet, sweet Fraser blood or something?), tossing him from it. The horse bolts and William gets a disgusting wound from a small tree branch that impales his arm. Luckily for him, Ian — off on his Continental Army mission — appears in the swamp. Outlander is such a small world it’s insane — but also, I’m going with it. Anyway, when Ian learns William’s name, he, of course, is going to help his (secret) cousin. As William’s wound grows more and more infected, Ian winds up finding a nearby Quaker doctor and his sister to help. Yes, it’s true: The Hunters have finally arrived — book-readers can rejoice. There’s instant eye contact when Ian and Rachel first get a look at each other, and their interest only grows as Rachel and her brother, Denny, tend to William. Ian seems impressed when Rachel has zero time for William’s insistence that he’d rather die than have his arm amputated (sounds familiar, doesn’t it?). Things don’t escalate to that, but still — Rachel proves to be just as smart, capable, and logical as her brother with the fancy title. Rachel seems impressed with Ian’s compassion and generosity when he sits with William all night as he heals and then leaves him money to buy a new horse as well as his rosary for comfort. Ian has to take off, but these two are already googly-eyed for each other. Will Ian and Rachel become the next hot couple on this show? Maybe!
But Ian may have a little competition: William definitely seems interested in Rachel too, and he’s sticking around a bit longer. As he recuperates, he gets to know more about Rachel and Denny and learns that Denny is very much pro-independence. He’s so pro-independence, in fact, that he was kicked out of their Quaker meeting for resisting allying with the British, and he and Rachel are days away from heading off to join the efforts of the Continental Army. William tries to keep his cool, but we all know hating rebels is pretty much William’s only hobby. But it turns out that the Hunters know a few people William needs to find for his mission, so he offers to travel with them on their journey. Will spending time with some colonists help William have a change of heart, or will this turn out to be a disaster for everyone?