Outlander: Between Two Fires (5x02)

Interesting! This episode is setting up a lot of the major plot arcs for the season, and it's doing so in a way that deviates from the books in several key respects.

Cons:

This is probably a nitpick, but I have to say it. In the books, whenever anyone wants to come to the Ridge, or leave the Ridge to go elsewhere, it's somewhat of a whole production. Travel is slow, being away from home is tricky. But in the show, people seem to be visiting Fraser's Ridge like it's the suburbs or something. This is especially the case with Fergus and Marsali. I thought they were living in Wilmington? Are they staying with Jamie and Claire right now? Or are they just frequent visitors? It feels like something the show really needs to nail down in a concrete sense, or else we run into problems with the whole Fergus and Marsali story-line.

It's odd to have Jamie away from the Ridge to "hunt Murtagh" along with Lieutenant Knox. It's one thing to have Murtagh alive in the TV show. It's another to have him such an important figure in the Regulator militia that he's worth a specific manhunt. The consequence of this is that Jamie wanders around with Knox, has an experience that tells him the Regulators mean business, and then leaves to go muster up a militia of his own. The whole excursion served only to motivate Jamie to action, but it seemed like in the first episode, he'd been pretty motivated to follow through on his promise to Tryon, no matter how much he didn't like it. So why go through all of this again?

Pros:

One thing I will say for Jamie's story-line is that it outlines the stakes for the audience very clearly. I might not be thrilled with how it slots in to the story in terms of pacing, but when it comes to theme, I see why they included it here. Jamie is nominally loyal to the crown at the moment, because he took an oath and because he has foreknowledge of when the best time is to jump ship. But Murtagh and the Regulators are not wrong about the way people are being treated, and we as the audience, along with key characters in the story, know the larger trajectory of history here. In the moment, if this weren't historical fiction, who should we root for? The scrappy underdog, of course. And then we see exactly what that scrappy underdog is willing to do. It's a little bit horrifying. But on the flip side, Knox executes a man without a trial. But on the flip of the flip side, was Jamie right to let the other men go, to stop them from being hanged?

Jamie's stated goal is to prevent as many deaths as he can. How is that a sustainable position? It's an interesting dilemma for his character. Unlike with Culloden, he has years to plan his own strategy, and to know when to declare for the winning side. Could he possibly end up regretting his leniency now, despite his personal feeling? I like the complexity here.

Roger's subplot is another place where there is some small deviation from the books, but I really like where it's going so far. Brianna takes him out shooting, and it turns out he sucks at it. This ends up increasing his anxieties about his role here in the 18th century. It's clear from talking to Bree that she wants to stay there with her family, but Roger isn't sure yet. He hasn't found the thing that will make him worthy in Jamie's eyes, or that will allow him to provide for his family. At the same time, we see Roger as a natural performer, singing songs to baby Jemmy and also singing at a funeral, gifting his voice to a community in grief. As I mentioned before, Roger's arc with Jamie, their relationship finding its footing, is one of the most compelling parts of his entire character for me. So I'm excited to see that play out.

And then there's Claire, stuck trying to give medical advice in a world where people aren't going to respect her opinions as a woman. I like this as a central conflict for her character, and it also poses interesting questions about her role as a time traveler, too. She decides to use a man's name (Dr. Rawlings) to create pamphlets with some common-sense medical advice, but she also decides to start creating penicillin with moldy bread. Brianna questions this, worried that the invention of antibiotics over a century early might cause history to change radically.

There is certainly a tension here, and it's interesting that Brianna is the one to raise this concern. She came back into the past to change it, to warn her parents about a fire that would kill them. And Claire knows from experience that there's very little she can do to change history. But also, that history is changed constantly by their presence, and that attempting to avoid stepping on the butterfly is a futile task. Claire is a doctor. She will do what she can to save people, even though everyone she saves is someone that wouldn't have been saved if she hadn't been there to do it at the right time. It's twisty, and I can see why Brianna would be concerned. At the same time, I sympathize with Claire's philosophy, which seems to be that she can't actually live her life worrying about the butterfly effect. Where does it stop? She has changed so many lives already, and if she maybe kept someone alive who was supposed to die, how could she have behaved differently?

I love, love, love the idea of Marsali being Claire's student of medicine. It's such a fun twist for her character, and actually feels like a very natural progression from what we know about her. Her scene with Claire, where she's horrified by the "defiled corpse," was my favorite moment of the whole episode. She and Claire have such a hard-won friendship, and their kinship as mother-and-daughter-in-law is something I find a lot more touching than Claire's relationship with Brianna, truth be told. As I keep saying, I'll be curious to see where this goes, because Marsali is sort of filling in a role that went to a different character in the books, and not until book six. So what does this mean for that story-line? I'll be curious to see!

That's all I've got for the time being. This season is off to a pretty strong start, setting up lots of plot threads and asking some interesting questions with far-reaching implications. Could have used another Lord John sighting, though. I'll never get enough of that guy.

8/10