Outlander: Do No Harm (4x02)

I honestly had some pretty big issues with this episode, although I also admit that this type of story is very difficult to tell, and I'm not sure I have the answers as to how to tell it better.

Cons:

Okay. Outlander needs to confront the realities of slavery to tell the story it's trying to tell. I'm not sure the best way to go about that, but I am sure that this episode falls short of that goal. First of all, this story screams "white savior" to me. There are a few moments, that I will address below, that were actually pretty good, but the overall theme here is that Claire is disgusted with slavery and she decides to brashly interfere to save a young man who was sentenced to death for attacking a white overseer. Sure, her instinct to help is totally warranted and makes sense. But Claire's overblown compassion and concern for Rufus and for the other slaves is the focus of the episode, while the actual slave characters have virtually no say in what happens to them, whether Jocasta or Claire is the one pulling the strings.

Also, Jocasta is a complicated character, sure, but the show doesn't go quite far enough in condemning her for being a slave owner. They can't be sympathetic to someone who owns 152 people, and yet here they're trying to play some sort of middle ground. Jocasta doesn't separate families! Jocasta views some of her slaves as friends! Even Claire standing up to her isn't enough to reach equilibrium, here. Jamie, for his part, feels like he's just anti-slavery because Claire is. He has some generic sort of statements about how he doesn't like it either, but mostly he's just riding on Claire's coattails here.

Even Ian, in his conversations with new character John Quincy Meyers, portrays some troubling racism, although in his case it's towards the Native Americans. Again, this is a difficult line to walk, and book readers will know that Ian's journey takes him to some interesting places in regards to the nearby tribes. Here, we get this charming idea that "the natives really aren't that different from the Scottish tribes" because both are persecuted minorities whose land is controlled and culture is crushed by the British. That's a very... I mean, it's a nice thought, but it's also kind of patronizing? And Ian's fascination with the "Indians" comes across a little bit icky to me. Part of that is of course Meyers talking about how their women love hairy men, which jumped us straight into fetish territory.

Setting aside the social issues that this episode raises, I also want to say that this episode didn't feel as detail-oriented and complex as many of the others. We focus on some details of River Run, sure, but in the books the place feels real to me. It feels lived in. I remember that party scene being incredibly long and involving a lot of shenanigans, and here it's a couple of minutes, and some more white people being racist so Claire can glare disapprovingly. I think this is the product of a) less time in a television format to tell the story, and b) the episode's decision to focus primarily on the issue of slavery. Again, I really, really, don't know what the alternative should have been. If this episode had included slavery as a small footnote and then largely ignored it, I would have been pretty livid about that as well. I'm aware that I'm describing a problem without offering a solution, but... I guess this is a situation where you know a good episode when you see it. I've seen media do a good job of portraying this sort of moral situation, and I didn't feel that here.

Pros:

This episode did look stunning, though. River Run is amazing. The costumes are great as always. I don't generally spend a ton of time dwelling on those sorts of details, but I did want to give them a shout out here.

Jamie's dilemma about accepting River Run from his aunt was necessarily minimized by the larger story going on here, but I do hope we have time to explore that a little bit more in next week's episodes. For Jamie and Claire, owning slaves is a pretty insurmountable obstacle to being able to run the estate. But Jamie also has other feelings about the idea of owning land and being something of a "laird." He gave up Lallybroch for the protection of his family, but I think there's a part of Jamie that belongs in a leadership position, and he's struggling with family obligations, his own wishes to be able to support his family, the moral issues of slavery and the extremely harsh local law, and various other aspects. Maybe we'll get to see some of Jamie's thoughts on these subjects in the coming weeks.

For the most part, the new characters were amazing. Aunt Jocasta, while perhaps shown in too sympathetic a light here, was still excellently portrayed. Her blindness, her forthrightness, her genuine affection for Jamie, and her manipulative mind, were all shown off. I feel like you get a sense of who she is as a character within five minutes of knowing her, which is great.

Ulysses gets MVP for me for new characters, and it's here that I want to discuss the one moment in the episode that I felt handled the slavery situation very well. Claire has just saved Rufus' life, and Ulysses basically chastises her for it. He tells her that she's just made it so much worse for the rest of them. See, Ulysses seems to be perfectly content throughout the episode. He lives a life of slavery, but also a life of relative comfort. But in this moment, there's a crack in the mask. He all but tells Claire that he has learned to keep his head down in order to survive, and Claire's arrival has messed things up for him and for the other slaves at River Run. For Claire, who is genuinely trying to help, even though she has no appreciation for what's really going on, to be confronted and chastised like this, really added some depth to the situation. You can feel how trapped Claire is in that moment. If she tries to insist that she knows what's best, then she's speaking over the realities and the voices of the slaves, and that's really the last thing she has the right to be doing. But she knows in her bones, as does everyone who is watching the episode now, that the situation is horrific and slavery is a moral evil. How does she stand by and do nothing? I think a greater focus on Ulysses, Phaedre, and the other slaves would have helped this episode a great deal.

John Quincy Meyers is great. Yes, his conversation with Ian about the native tribes in the area was kind of gross, but he seems like just the affable, likable man we know from the books, and I'm hoping we get lots more of him. I'm also weirdly pleased that the whole skunk incident made it in to the show!

Okay, I'll stop there. I don't know how this episode could have done things right, but I know that I what I just saw, wasn't it.

6/10