The opening credits to season seven of Outlander have felt heavier than most other renditions thanks to Sinéad O’Connor’s haunting, breathy take on “The Skye Boat Song,†but the song and O’Connor’s vocals certainly felt doubly loaded with emotion after learning of the singer’s passing this week, didn’t it?
The extra weight the opening credits have had this entire season has served the series well; It’s been a weighty season. I don’t mean that what Claire and Jamie have faced in season seven so far has been more harrowing than other traumatic events in their past — let’s be real, Claire and Jamie’s Traumatic Event Scale is so far above normal that it applies only to them … and maybe Meredith Grey. Still, there’s been a heaviness and bleakness throughout this season because of what Claire knows is coming. Time travel seems fun and all when you’re getting railed by an other-worldly level of hot highlander from the 1700s, but it’s a real downer when you’re aware that a major upheaval is coming and a whole lot of people are going to die because of it.
Claire knows that the Continental Army comes out on top here, but she also knows it’s not a victory without some real carnage, and she has no idea if that carnage includes her own husband, who very much enjoys getting into the middle of a crisis. All of Claire’s actions this half of the season have felt informed by this anxiety. The woman has been on edge, to say the very least. Remember when she burst into tears as they left Fraser’s Ridge? Or how she unraveled after her brief stint as a prisoner of the British Army? Claire is a woman on the verge, and now what she’s been dreading all this time has arrived — she has to watch as Jamie heads off into battle.
We’ve arrived at the first Battle of Saratoga in September 1777, and Jamie, now a part of Daniel Morgan’s rifle corps, is in the thick of it. That rushed good-bye between Jamie and Claire? Heartbreaking! It all happens so quickly, and you can see the terror on Claire’s face as she watches Jamie head out. That cute little cliffhanger that shows Jamie unconscious on the battlefield gets an A for effort, but it is not fooling anyone. We all know Jamie’s not dying today — we still have a season and a half before this series wraps up! Still, CaitrÃona Balfe and Sam Heughan really sell the fear here.
This portion of our time in Saratoga, however, is mostly focused on William’s first experience with an actual battle. William’s been getting a lot of screen time this season, and honestly, up to this point, he’s been a bit of a snoozefest. I have hope this is about to change, however, since the naive and idealistic kid gets a strong dose of reality, and it seems as though he’s questioning everything by the end of it.
From the beginning, William’s been all about teaching the rebels a lesson with violence, and yet the dude had not taken part in any of it — it was all theoretical violence. He’s actually so pumped about getting his war on that when Captain Richardson gives him orders to deliver messages away from the battlefield, thus missing the entire thing, William goes around his superior to Simon Fraser and basically begs him to override Richardson and let William stay. He wants to fight. The difference between William and Fraser — one fresh-faced and one weary-souled — is palpable in this conversation. Fraser agrees to help William stay and fight, but you can see on his face that he knows, especially since he’s privy to the info that they won’t be receiving the reinforcements they had believed they would, William is signing up for, at worst, death, at best, some real trauma.
It doesn’t take long for William’s idealized version of battle to come crashing down around him. He stands at the ready with his men, his friend Hammond next to him, both nervously chatting as they watch the Continental Army arrive. William even blurts out that he has feelings for a woman named Rachel (!!). But there is no official charge or organized fighting — suddenly Hammond gets shot in the head by a rifle (what are the odds it was Jamie who fired this shot??) and falls to the ground. William stares in horror, and it takes Simon Fraser demanding William get his head in the game to snap him out of it.
After the bloody battle, William reams out a group of soldiers complaining as they bury their fallen soldiers and begins digging alongside them. He’s appalled when he hears General Burgoyne and the other leaders toasting to victory when William knows they just barely held their ground and the body count was higher than expected. William finally got the taste of war that he so desperately wanted, and it turned out to be more unappetizing than he could’ve imagined. Fraser finds William fuming after the dust settles and reminds him that every man who enters battle comes out changed. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if William’s will be a change for the better or the worse.
Like I said, that’s some heavy shit going down in 1777, but don’t think you’re getting any kind of reprieve in 1980. Like Claire, Bree’s had a sadness and heaviness cast over her for the entirety of the season thanks to the loss of her parents, or however you want to phrase the idea of leaving your parents behind 200 years in the past. She’s a Sad Girl. Unfortunately, it’s only going to get worse.
Roger, thankfully, wastes no time introducing our new time-traveling guest Buck MacKenzie to his wife. We get to hear Buck’s story of how he came to be in 1980: In 1778, he and his family returned to Scotland and, more specifically, to Inverness, where he was suddenly plagued with an overwhelming noise that sounded like a hive of bees. When he went to investigate, he found the stones at Craigh na Dun and suddenly found himself plopped into the future. Confused, obviously, Buck’s only lifeline happened to be spotting Roger shopping in Inverness one day. He followed him to Lallybroch. Bree’s much angrier and more suspicious of this guy — why didn’t he just try going back through the stones, she questions — than Roger, the person Buck almost had killed. In fact, it seems like Roger takes an immediate liking to him. Well, not immediately; he did punch him in the face at first. But still, once Roger hears about Buck’s own son, who Jemmy is actually named after, and sees Buck’s reaction to learning that the two of them are related, Roger warms up to the guy. It’s why Roger can’t bring himself to tell Buck that, according to the MacKenzie family tree, Buck dies in 1778 — the year he traveled from. This means that, if correct, either Buck never returns to his family and they believed he died, or he does return and dies soon after. Neither is great, and Roger waits until Buck’s settled down a bit before he gives him the news.
As if Roger and Bree aren’t juggling enough at the moment, Rob Cameron shows up unannounced for that dinner Roger promised. Roger and Bree hide Buck away and proceed to sit through a dinner that is kind of nice, if not long-winded. They just cannot get Rob, who tells them the sob story about losing his son in his divorce because his ex-wife had the means to hire an expensive lawyer, to go home. By the end of the evening, Rob invites Jemmy to have a playdate and sleepover with Rob’s nephew in the coming days. It’s only after agreeing to it that Roger and Bree can get Rob out of there so that they can deal with the Buck situation.
Buck’s “apology†for the whole hanging thing, no big deal, isn’t great — he blames it on “the times,†and it feels a little half-hearted, but Roger seems cool with it? It’s wild, but what do I know? I only have the images of Roger’s near-death experience burned into my brain. Buck does seem to have Roger’s back now, which is something? When Bree is forced to take Buck to work with her, he immediately spots some red flags when he meets Rob, who Buck thinks has the hots (or rather, “a hot eyeâ€) for Brianna. Roger brushes it off but does tell Bree about it and then the two, horny from jealousy (aw, just like Bree’s parents, how cute), proceed to have pretty steamy sex timed perfectly to the drum solo of “In the Air Tonight.†What a real win for all of us, honestly.
It’s followed by a terrible loss, though, because Outlander understands the necessity of a cold shower every once and a while. Roger and Bree have obviously been distracted by Buck’s arrival. Otherwise, they probably would’ve questioned Rob’s unbridled enthusiasm to know more about them or noticed that the chest in Roger’s office with all of Jamie and Claire’s letters from the past looked like it had been messed with. They do not question nor notice these things. So, by the time Mandy wakes up screaming and tells her parents that she can’t feel her connection with Jemmy anymore, it’s already too late. Bree and Roger try to assure their daughter that Jem is just at a sleepover, but the more she describes what she feels and has seen, they begin to take it seriously.
It’s Rob Cameron. When Bree calls Rob’s sister, she learns that there was never a playdate or sleepover, and, even more alarming, Rob and his car are gone. Roger starts putting it all together and realizes that it must have been Rob reading the letters, that Rob was putting on a show when he “assumed†Roger’s journal was some work-in-progress novel, that Rob has been playing them all. He also correctly assumes that Rob must want to try out the whole time travel thing for some reason — he prays Rob skipped over the whole “Geillis Duncan uses a blood sacrifice to time travel†section of his time-travel handbook. Roger and Buck race to Craigh na Dun in hopes of stopping whatever Rob has planned, but when they get there, all they find is Jemmy’s scarf near the stones. It’s too late: Rob and Jemmy have traveled and Roger has no idea where or when they are.