When last we left Claire and Jamie Fraser 15 months ago (or 200-plus years ago), they were sailing away from the American colonies mid-Revolutionary War to deliver the body of Jamie’s kinsman Simon Fraser to Scotland for a popular burial. This familial duty also offers Jamie the opportunity to return to his ancestral home of Lallybroch… not to mention settling some alimony issues with ex-wife Laoghaire. And little do the Frasers know that in present-day Lallybroch, Roger and Buck MacKenzie have just passed back through the stones to rescue poor kidnapped Jemmy from gold-seeking Rob Cameron.
This mid-season premiere is all about trades—not just characters moving back and forth across the same land over the centuries, but various recastings of actors as well as returns of familiar faces; money and signatures buying autonomy for mothers and daughters, while illness and injury determine the fates of young and old men. It’s a solid episode that deals with some genuine (and nicely understated) emotional issues, before closing on the kind of Outlander drama we’ve been sorely missing thanks to an old fan favorite.
Spoilers for Outlander 7×09 “Unfinished Business”
Lallybroch was always going to be a bittersweet homecoming, as Jamie felt he’d failed his sister Jenny (Kristin Atherton replacing Laura Donnelly) for not returning Young Ian home sooner. Upon arriving, they discover that the elder Ian Murray is suffering from consumption, and that it’s advanced to the point that there’s nothing they can do but make him comfortable until the end. This dovetails with Claire revealing the truth about being a time traveler, in order to warn Ian’s brother Michael to move his business away from France before the revolution in a decade’s time.
Usually I dig a big reveal scene like this, all the delicious anticipation piling up for years and the complete unpredictability of how everyone will react. But it all felt a bit… muted. The writers didn’t lean into a comedic reaction, nor did they go for something with real gravity. Obviously Claire herself was feeling vulnerable to share this information, considering she was almost burned at the stake as a witch for far less! But the Murrays just seemed briefly stunned, then all accepted it as if they had no other option. And not even the magic of time travel; they regard Claire as having a bit of fairy magic about her, but that’s about as well as they can understand it.
Where things do get interestingly thorny is Jenny asking Claire to use her modern know-how to save Ian, and Claire’s devastation at having to tell her she can’t, that whatever cure exists in the future isn’t possible to create or administer in 1778. This is where all of the discomfort and resentment boils over, with a sobbing Jenny accusing Claire of being soulless before fleeing to the woods to rage-scream out her helplessness.
While Jenny was quick to forgive the passage of time, it’s understandable that Jamie would nonetheless feel out of place in Scotland; he’s lived so many lifetimes since he was last there, only to return as some wealthy settler just visiting from America. Nowhere is this disparity more obvious than in his strained interactions with ex-wife Laoghaire, who has no interest in dredging up more memories of their unfortunate marriage and how she wasted years of her life pining for a man who would never love her back. But the reason that Jamie pushes through in seeing her is for the sake of her daughter Joanie, who wants to become a nun but needs her dowry money to pay her way. Jamie revises the contract he drew up with Laoghaire to ensure that Balriggan will be hers—not Jamie’s, nor belonging to her eventual husband Joey Boswell—thus granting both women their respective autonomy.
Jamie’s admission to Claire that he feels as she must have after stepping through the stones—“as if your world was still there, but it was not the world you had”—is the best line of the episode. That their conversation takes place in the laird’s chambers, where they first said “I love you,” makes it even sweeter.
Then a letter comes from Lord John Grey, who has a penchant for throwing plot curveballs at the Frasers while also being a dear friend and ally: His nephew Henry has sustained a stomach wound that only a surgeon of Claire’s caliber can repair, and he’s begging her to sail back to Philadelphia to try and save his life. (My admittedly inexpert question is, how do they keep him stable and avoid infection long enough to wait out the duration of Claire’s sea voyage? But our star-crossed lovers must be torn apart yet again, so.)
What Jamie intends as comfort must rankle, as he praises Jenny for being the strongest of them all, taking care of their father in his final years, which must make it incredibly triggering to face Ian’s grim fate. What Jamie is describing is just the expectations placed on good daughters/wives/mothers, and when Jenny jokes about hiding away in a cave like he did after he lost Claire and after Culloden? Let the poor woman run away for a bit if she likes!
Then there’s the fact that it’s up to Jenny to basically give the blessing for Claire to return to the colonies and care for Lord John’s injured nephew. Claire has already admitted that Ian’s consumption is too far gone for her to treat, but she is capable of performing the surgery that could save Henry’s life. Even though the thought of embarking on yet another sea voyage so soon after the last must be exhausting to Claire, she must understand that it would be churlish of her to prioritize her comfort over her oaths. At least she and Jenny part on good terms, with the latter saying that “I trust in your love for this family.”
Jenny also encourages Young Ian to return to the States to declare his love for Rachel Hunter, rather than send the Dear John letter he’d been intending to instead; he didn’t think he could ask her to wait for him for however long he would be in Scotland for the end of Ian’s life. Instead, Jenny tears up his letter, uses her maternal influence to convince him to pursue his second chance at love, and briefly plays grandmother in showing Young Ian where they’ve made a grave for his deceased daughter Iseabaile. (OK, I teared up.)
Poor Jenny is doing so much heavy lifting here—the character and the actress. I’m sure that this is all drawn from the books, and that Janet Fraser Murray has a lot of unresolved shit to work out with her brother and his wife, but it also felt as if they were justifying the recasting, giving Atherton a number of emotional monologues, the opportunity to play the same character forty years apart, and an episode-long arc. She’s got three more episodes left, according to IMDb, but she certainly left an impression in her first appearance(s).
Then to our other pair of (time) travelers, also heading for 18th-century Lallybroch, unbeknownst to the Frasers. I could really do without Roger’s awkward voiceover, but I guess it’s the best way to transmit his thoughts as he realizes that he’s thrown himself backwards into the wrong time. Is it because they were following someone not meant to be a time traveler? Is it because of Buck being incredibly displaced in time? At any rate, he’s in 1739, not 1778, and who does he find at Lallybroch but Brian Fraser (Andrew Whipp). Bringing the character back, albeit in middle age, is a handy reminder that Outlander: Blood of My Blood is currently in production and will eventually tell the parallel love stories of Jamie and Claire’s respective parents.
While there are some potential leads on Jem and Rob, what’s more pressing and further complicating Roger’s search is Buck’s reaction to time travel: he’s experiencing chest pains and doesn’t look good. Brian points them toward a local herbalist, who turns out to be none other than…
FUCK YEAH GEILLIS! The writers pulled a cheeky bait-and-switch on us, thinking that Laoghaire was going to be the messy bench who loves drama when her plotline wound up being a surprisingly touching rumination on forgiveness and how unrequited love can ruin a life, or at least derail it before finding a second first love.
Of course, those rules don’t apply to pragmatically murderous time traveling witches-slash-succubi. Whenever Geillis Duncan’s life doesn’t go the way she likes, she can just cross back and forth through the stones. What will be exciting is figuring out where in her own lifetime this iteration of Geillis is, if that’s even her name for this stint as herbalist. We know that someday she will get all-but-beheaded in a cave in the Caribbean at Claire’s hand, but we don’t know how many different lives and identities this Geillis has taken before appearing in 1739. (And thankfully in this case there is no recasting, with Lotte Verbeek rejoining the ensemble for however long we get to have her.)
Oh, and let’s not forget that Geillis is Buck’s mother! It’s four years before she will deliver her illegitimate child, and she’s about to meet him as an adult. What a way to start slowly wrapping up season 7, hopefully with more bombshells to come.
