Oh my God, so much happens in this episode! Things are B-A-N-A-N-A-S. You can tell because I put on closed-captioning in order not to miss dialogue when people are Too Scottish, and we went through the following kinds of background music tonight:
• [dark music]
• [percussive music]
• [darkening woodwind music]
• [whimsical woodland music]
• [foreboding music]
• [quickening string music]
• [dramatic, percussive music]
• [stirring music]
• [extreme musical buildup]
That’s how you know it’s good.
We have, as promised, arrived in Jamaica, which is … difficult. I have been gritting my teeth and waiting for the show’s take on slavery, and tonight we get our first dose. Claire, having, as previously established, boldly tried to invent feminism on like 19 different occasions, is UNPREPARED for the slave market they have visited in order to search for Ian.
Being from a moderately less-racist time, Claire is extremely woke by 18th-century standards, and proceeds to flip her holy shit and attack a slaver with her parasol. That’ll do it, Claire! This is how she winds up purchasing and owning a young man named Temeraire, whom they have promised to free at the first possible occasion.
Ian, of course, is not at the slave market. He’s been taken to see the Bakra, who we are told “likes young boys.” That’s SO Outlander, right? Rape and the threat of rape, every damn day. My friend Mallory, who watched with me, said that just once it would be nice to have a villainous character be like, “I love old women” in a sinister voice. We live in hope!
I was very stoked to meet the Bakra (who I very much hoped would be white, because this show is not ready to portray a black villain, let me tell you), and I must admit to being GENUINELY SHOCKED OFF MY BUTT to see …
GEILLIS! It’s frigging Geillis! Remember her? From the future? The one who saved Claire and was PRESUMABLY burned alive for being a witch? Well, either she’s a great witch or she never died in the first place. (We will later learn that Dougal smuggled her out to safety.)
The first shot of Geillis is her naked back and butt, covered in blood, oozing sexily out of a huge bathtub, while Ian looks on in vaguely horny abject terror. Geillis, you see, was the recipient of the box of treasure that the Portuguese took from him, and has noticed the missing sapphire. She needs all three sapphires to unlock a prophecy from her seer. (It’s about the next king of Scotland.) Ian tells her that 1) Jamie has it, and 2) Jamie is en route to Jamaica.
Geillis then has sex with Ian, though since she apparently plans to kill him afterwards and he doesn’t have much choice in the matter, “has sex with” is probably not the right phrase.
Now as it turns out, Geillis’s seer is our girl Margaret! You know, the one with the scammy brother? I swear we have no new characters on this show anymore. People we know just keep turning up like bad pennies. Yet another good example of this pops up when Claire and Jamie scope out the Jamaican governor’s ball in hopes of finding word of Ian. The governor, of course, is LORD JOHN. He is wearing a dorky wig, and oh boy is he happy to see Jamie. He is SO in love with Jamie, it’s beautiful. So in love, you see, that he’s wearing Jamie’s sapphire on a beautiful little handmade embroidered watch fob.
As you can imagine, Geillis clocks that sapphire in a HEARTBEAT — she’s now Mistress Abernathy of Rose Hall, by the way, when she’s not the Bakra — and gets Margaret to do her prophecy under the guise of telling his fortune. It’s very confusing and Scottish and it’s about a 200-year-old baby and a Scottish king and it will obviously have something to do with time travel.
We don’t get much of a breather to revel in this information before Captain Leonard shows up at the ball, necessitating a hasty retreat. Good timing: Temeraire discovered that Ian is in Geillis’s custody, so they are just as happy to ditch, as well as drop Temeraire off at a stronghold for escaped slaves. (This seems like a terrible idea to me, but there you go!)
Just after giving Claire all of his keepsakes, Jamie is arrested again and now we will begin another round of Claire and Jamie being separated again. Next week is the season finale, so I don’t think they’ll be separated for long!
The most fun part of this episode, of course, is Geillis being BATSHIT, like she is vibrating on a way higher frequency than everyone else. She looks like the Borg Queen, she DGAF, she bathes in goat’s blood, and she deflowers and kills virgin men. Finally, a worthy antagonist! We haven’t really had one since Black Jack Randall (RIP).
Fade out to …
[extreme musical buildup]
