Outlander: A Hundred Thousand Angels (7x16)

Do you ever cry for ten thousand years over the death of a fictional wolf on a TV show? RIP Rollo...

Cons:

Okay, I will say... the Faith thing is dumb? I don't know, y'all. Maybe this is going to happen in the books too but from what I remember about the book version, Claire has this fantasy about maybe Faith lived but it's all pretty vague and unsubstantiated and it's not really true. I really hate the implication that it might be literal here. And like, what are we meant to understand by Frances singing the song, that newborn infant Faith Fraser remembered her mother singing to her and actually remembers the words? That makes zero sense whatsoever, even in the mystical magical logic that this show sometimes implies. I guess we'll wait and see what they do in the final season, but I found that to be a rather dissatisfying cliffhanger. Plus, if true, Jane is William's niece technically speaking which is a little yikes for me, I must say!

I liked the conversation between Brianna and Brian but there was a bit of a pacing weirdness with it, I could have used maybe a bit of tightening and maybe just make it like 20 seconds shorter? It felt like the sentimentality was dragging a bit and undercutting the sincerity of some of what was happening.

Outlander: Written in My Own Heart's Blood (7x15)

A pretty solid and exciting installment!

Cons:

Obviously this show hovers on the edge of being cheesy a lot of the time, and honestly I wish that we'd be trusted as viewers a bit more to feel the love and connection between Jamie and Claire, without the weird flashbacks where they're stargazing? It just felt a little hammy to me, like maybe they could have gone a little more subtle with some of the conversations about life and death and war and whatnot. I know a lot of this is material listed from the book, but even so, it took me out of the emotions a little bit. These performers are strong enough for me to feel the depth of what's happening just looking at their faces, we don't need to gild the lily here!

In the books, there's a hidden compartment in the desk drawer at Lallybroch that Brianna and Roger both know about, and Roger hides his letter to Bree there. The way they did it here was just to have him lay it in an empty drawer, which I thought was a little silly? Like, the idea is that it's ambiguous. That letter was already there when Bree and Roger bought Lallybroch in the 20th century, or at least it could have been, and they were just destined never to find it until the circumstances tracked.