SOME SPOILERS AHEAD.
Jamie and Claire are off to Jamaica a lot sooner than I thought and not in the way that I expected. Not that I had any particular scenario in mind as to how they would end up in Jamaica, but I wouldn’t have thought of this. They’re off to rescue Young Ian who is being taken there by the sailors who kidnapped him in the previous episode, which, if you ask me, was rather unnecessary since they could have just knocked him out and taken the treasure. But it looks like they may plan to sell him as an indentured servant. I must say that I’m kind of sad that they won’t be going to Paris.
Yet again Jamie – and now Claire – is lying to Jenny and Ian about the whereabouts of their son! Instead, they left Scotland before the letter they sent could reach her. I don’t exactly blame him, however, Jenny is fearsome when she is angry and I would not want to face her wrath either. But really, he needs to stop lying to his sister.
Also lying in this episode was Fergus, who had been secretly courting Laoghaire’s elder daughter, Marsali, and had handfasted/married her before taking her onto the ship without telling Jamie or Claire. I already don’t like her because, not only is she the spitting image of her mother, but she has her wicked, vindictive personality as well. What Fergus even sees in her, I don’t know. Perhaps when she’s not actively hating Claire – another trait she picked up from her mother – she’s actually a nice person.
Given that some of the new visuals for the opening (which I love; kudos on the music team for not going the tired old route of using steel pan music to denote the Caribbean) show what I assume to be Claire washing up on a beach and what looks to be a ship being battered by waves, I thought that would mean that their ship would be hit by a storm.
That the wind was lost only made me think that it would happen all the more, since still air precedess storms or very heavy rains. When one of the sailors peered out onto the horizon with…whatever instrument that was…I thought he was going to see a storm coming. But there was nothing. My fear that they would be hit by a storm was quickly dispelled, however, by the fact that they had suffered the loss of wind for weeks.
That didn’t mean that they were completely out of the woods, though. The sailors were very agitated by the fact that there had been no wind for weeks and their superstition and paranoia was kicked into high gear. As brutal and archaic as it would have been to throw someone overboard to assuage the situation, I understood where the Captain was coming from.
I could not disagree with him for letting the crew do whatever they felt like they needed to do in order to fix the situation. It would have been far better than a mutiny. That being said, had they done it and it not worked, things could have gotten so much worse. A small part of me suspected Marsali as being the one not to touch the horseshoe. Not that I would have wanted her to be thrown overboard, but it would have been nice for her to receive the venom she was spewing at Claire.
Thanks to Jamie, no one was thrown or threw themselves overboard, but I really thought that Willoughby was about to. When people get backstories they generally die and the fact that he had told Claire that once he tells his story, he’ll need to let it go, didn’t give me high hopes for his survival. Neither did him saying that he gave up everything to keep his manhood and it wasn’t worth it, nor did his jumping up onto the side of the ship.
I thought that it was a case of him realising that the wind had returned when everyone else was too caught up in their near mutiny to notice. So, believing that he had wasted his life, he was going to end it and at the same time make them believe that he was the Jonah and that his death gave them back the wind. Turned out that he meant that he would need to literally let go of the papers he was writing his life story on and scattered them into the wind so that the crew would see that the wind had returned.
Just as they got out of the woods, they met with another misfortune. I celebrated a little too early when it turned out that the British ship didn’t want men to man the vessel and Jamie wouldn’t be taken from Claire. It was the other way around! I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach for that entire sequence that something bad was going to happen. I knew that them being separated wouldn’t bode well. The moment that she was escorted out of the Captain’ quarters, I knew that he was going to kidnap her. At least they’re headed to Jamaica as well, so she and Jamie will be reunited there.
Random thoughts:
- I love that Claire’s mainly upset because she won’t get to bone Jamie.
- Wont’ her Paris clothes be 20 years out of style?
- The same way that Jamie and Claire snuck of to do the deed, couldn’t Fergus and Marsali have?
- Is it just me or is the British ship the Dauntless from Pirates of the Caribbean?
Outlander airs Sundays at 10 PM on Starz.
