By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes – and it just might be Claire’s eighteenth century BFF Geillis. Welcome back to another week of Outlander with Jodi!
When we left things last week, Jamie and Claire had fought, made up, fought again, and made up again by having passionate make-up sex on the floor, despite the fact that there was a perfectly good bed right there. Some people are in such a hurry.
This week, we discover that they’ve apparently made it to the bed at some stage, and that Jamie is 100% committed to ensuring that his wife has a good time in it, because he wakes Claire from her slumber, by, ahem, going down to funky town.
And Claire is a fan of this method of waking, to say the least.
It is so refreshing to see a representation of oral sex on screen that is totally focused on the lady’s pleasure. It says a lot about the way Jamie – who, as we learned last week, has internalised a lot of the mores surrounding gender relations from his eighteenth century world – feels about Claire. He prioritises her pleasure, which we see here: not just because he goes down on her, but because, when someone starts knocking on the door while they’re in the middle, he keeps going until she gets off before he even thinks about getting up to answer it.
Jamie Fraser is basically the X-rated version of a Disney prince. What a sexy, sexy dork.
BLESS HIS DORKY HEART
The person at the door is Murtagh Beardy. “Why did you take so long to answer the door?” he grumbles, striding in. “Don’t tell me you’ve started sleeping in – oh. There is a naked and obviously very satisfied woman in your bed. I – uh – well – that is –“
The reason that Murtagh has come a-knocking even though the Claire/Jamie boudoir was a-rocking is because he has news. The Duke of Sandringham has turned up to hang out with Colum. This presents a chance for Jamie to finally, finally go home again: if the Duke talks to the right people, then the price on Jamie’s head might be lifted.
Also Jamie puts on pants to talk to Murtagh Beardy. Where is his kilt? Pants are weird on him.
But Claire finds this all a bit worrying. “Um, Jamie,” she says. “If I tell you something, do you promise not to ask me how I know?”
“Of course,” he says. “Although if it’s that the Duke of Sandringham is gay, I already know. He was here when I was about sixteen, and he totes had a crush on me.”
“No, not that,” she says. “He, um… well, he’s mates with Black Jack.”
“What?” Murtagh Beardy says suspiciously.
“No way,” Jamie says.
“Yes way,” quoth Claire.
“Even if that’s true, I still have to give it a go,” Jamie says. “If the price on my head is lifted, I can go home to Lallybroch, Claire. And you can be my lady. And we can have 2.5 children and a dog – no, two dogs – and live happily ever after.”
“Frank who?” thinks Claire. “Tell me more about this happily ever after.”
Jamie has such domestic fantasies. I assume he completed his “my dream nuclear family” scrapbook around the same time as the “my dream wedding” one the wedding episode made it totally clear he had. Bless your heart, dorkus.
To this end, Jamie goes to see Ned the lawyer. “I reckon we can pull this off,” Ned says. “What we need to do is make the Duke understand that Black Jack is a dick by presenting him with a formal petition of complaint for dickish behaviour.”
“Yay!” Jamie says, images of his dream house obviously floating around his mind.
“And we’ll decorate the house in shades of blue with pops of tangerine.”
Claire, meanwhile, has other business. She strides down to the kitchen, and she is ready for a rumble. “Hey Laoghaire,” she says. “What’s up with this?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Laoghaire says primly, catching the voodoo doll that Claire has flung at her.
“I know you put that under my bed, Regina George,” Claire says. “Look, I get that you’re super into Jamie, and I get that you hate me for taking him away from you. But you need to back off.”
“Jamie is mine, bitch,” Laoghaire says. “So yeah, I put that voodoo doll under your bed. Because I want him to hate you. You broke us up. Also no one likes you, because I bought that off your friend Geillis. You are, like, soooo unpopular. And do you even go here?”
Claire slaps Laoghaire. “Oops,” she says. “My hand slipped.”
Also, we need to discuss the fact that Claire has the greatest “come at me bro” face of all time.
“You’ll pay for that,” Laoghaire hisses.
“Stay away from me and Jamie,” Claire rejoins. “He’s my sexy dork now. Deal.”
MIC DROP.
Claire is still itching for a fight, so she heads on down to the village to level with Geillis. But Geillis isn’t there – only her old, fat, incontinent husband is home. “If you want to find her,” the maid whispers to Claire, “maybe go check in the woods at dawn.”
This seems like a PATENTLY TERRIBLE IDEA – remember what happened last time you went wandering in the woods, Claire? – but she does it anyway. What I want to know is this: how did she slip away from Jamie? It’s like, four in the morning. You can’t tell me they weren’t in bed together.
…she wore him out, didn’t she? daaaaaawwwwww.
Staying in bed with Jamie would have been a MUCH BETTER IDEA than wandering around in the cold, dark woods, if you ask me.
Anyway, so Claire finds Geillis in the woods and hides behind a tree to spy. Geillis is wearing some kind of chiffon toga in which she must be absolutely freezing her arse off, and is waving a torch around while she writhes around in some kind of interpretive dance.
“What the actual fuck,” is clearly Claire’s first reaction. Her second is, “oh. This is kind of similar to what those witches doing back in the twentieth century when Frank and I spied on them in that stone circle that one time. Huh.”
OMG she must be FREEZING. This is SCOTLAND, Geillis.
“You can come out now, Claire,” Geillis (now topless) calls when she’s finished.
“wut,” says Claire’s facial expression, but she comes out anyway.
Geillis smiles. “That was awesome fun,” she says. “You should have come and joined me.”
“Um… I’m good, thanks,” Claire says. “I, er, noticed that you’re pregnant.”
“Yep,” Geillis says.
“Congrats.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s not my husband’s.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“It’s Dougal’s.”
“…what…?”
“And this whole ceremony thing was a spell so that we can be together,” Geillis says cheerfully. “Come on. Let’s go.”
They start walking back to the village, Claire clearly kind of shell-shocked. “Oh, and also don’t tell anyone what you saw me doing,” Geillis says. “I don’t want to get burned for witchcraft, LOL.”
“Sure,” Claire says faintly. “You’re my friend. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Though maybe you should stop wearing pointy hats if you don’t want people to think you’re a witch, Geillis.”
Then they hear a baby crying on a hill. “Come on,” Geillis says. “That’s just a changeling someone’s left out. Fairy stuff. Let’s go and have coffee or something.”
“Fairies aren’t real, Geillis,” Claire says witheringly, and tears up the hill to find the child.
I see where you’re coming from, Claire, but you did travel two hundred years into the past via a stone circle, so I wouldn’t be ruling fairies out quite so quickly.
The baby has died before Claire finds it, and she sits there hugging its poor cold (and very obviously fake) body until Jamie finds her. “Oh Sassenach,” he says when he sees her.
“They just left it out here to die,” she says. “A sick baby.”
“I know, but…” he hesitates, taking the baby from her and putting it back where she found it. “Think of it this way. Most of the people around here aren’t that educated. It’ll give them some comfort to think that the baby that died was a fairy and their own child is living forever with the fairies.”
Claire can’t argue with this logic, so asks Jamie to take her home.
“…for snuggling purposes, ideally.”
At said home, they have some paperwork to be getting on with. “Here,” Jamie says, pressing a quill into her hand. “Ned the lawyer drew up the petition of complaint against Black Jack. I know you don’t trust the Duke of Sandringham, but this is seriously our best chance to be able to go home to Lallybroch and have 2.5 kids and two dogs – no, three dogs. And a cat.”
Claire, unable to resist the lure of Jamie’s domestic fantasies, signs – and, importantly, it is the first time she has ever signed her name as ‘Claire Fraser’.
And Jamie is SUUUUPER into it.
But she isn’t going to just hope and trust that everything is going to work out. Unbeknownst to Jamie, she goes off to see the Duke of Sandringham herself (who is played flamboyantly by Simon Callow). “So I’m married to Jamie Fraser,” she says.
“Ah yes, Jamie,” the Duke says. “The hot one.”
“That’s the one,” Claire says. “And I want you to uphold his petition of complaint against Black Jack Randall, or I’ll tell everyone you and BJ are buddy buddy.”
“So what if we are?”
“Okay, how about if I put it this way?” Claire says, remembering something Frank had said back in the future. “You do what I want, or I’ll tell everyone that you’re a secret Jacobite.”
Claire Fraser, landing EPIC BURNS wherever she goes.
“It’d be hard for you to tell anyone that if I CUT YOUR HEAD OFF!”
“How much of Dougal’s Jacobite IndieGoGo money went to you again?”
The Duke sighs. “Fine, fine,” he says. “Jamie is mega hot, after all. And I wouldn’t mind him owing me a favour…”
And so, when Jamie and Murtagh Beardy go to see the Duke later that afternoon, everything goes swimmingly. “I’ll tell you what,” the Duke says. “I’ll make this little ‘price on your head’ thing go away if you agree to be my second in a duel I have to fight against the MacDonalds.”
“Um, okay,” Jamie says. “That sounds easy enough.”
“But please stop touching my face.”
Murtagh Beardy is less convinced. “The MacDonalds are sworn enemies of the Mackenzies!” he reminds Jamie.
“Whatever,” Jamie says. “I want to go home to Lallybroch with Claire, so we can have our 2.5 children. And three – no, four dogs. And two cats. And maybe a goldfish.”
Also Jamie wears pants again in this scene. What’s up with that? #kiltlyf
Claire, meanwhile, has gone back to Castle Leoch, only to find things in a bit of a shemozzle. “You’ve got to come quick!” two Beardies say, hurrying up to her. “Dougal’s wife died and he’s gone mental and he’s smashing everything up!”
“…Dougal was married?”
“Yes, and now he’s flipping tables!”
“I forgot I even had a wife and NOW SHE’S DEAD!”
Claire hurries into the hall, where Dougal is, as advertised, wantonly destroying furniture in his drunken grief. “Please roofie him before I have to send half my servants down to IKEA to replace all this,” Colum says to her. “They’re terrible at putting together flatpack furniture.”
With the help of a Beardy, Claire manages to slip a sedative into some wine and get Dougal to drink it, whereupon he collapses on the floor like a starfish of sadness.
“I cannae even do a somersault!”
The next thing we know, Claire is confronting Geillis. “So you did that witchy-woo-woo thing in the woods so you and Dougal could be together and now the wife no one knew he had is dead,” she says. “But you can’t be together, because you still have a husband, Geillis.”
“My, my, what an oversight on my behalf,” Geillis says innocently. “You’ve got me there, Claire.”
That night, Colum is throwing a banquet for the Duke of Sandringham. Geillis and her old, fat, incontinent husband are there. So are Claire and Jamie, who are a bit late.
Probably because they were getting it on again, knowing them.
“If Jamie gets hurt in your little duel, there will be a fucking reckoning,” Claire murmurs to the Duke.
But he doesn’t get time to respond, because oh my! Geillis’ old, fat, incontinent husband is choking!
Claire tries to help, but she’s too late – he’s gone. But she sees Geillis and Dougal exchange a smug look, and smells almonds, and knows what this means: Geillis poisoned her husband with cyanide. But there’s nothing she can do about it.
What’s their ship name? Geigal? Doullis? DunKenzie?
The next day, Jamie goes off to assist the Duke of Sandringham in his duel. As far as duels go, it’s pretty non-eventful – both parties seem to have pre-agreed to miss. The Duke’s real purpose in having Jamie as his second seems to be making people think that they’re dating. “Ugh, look at them over there, being all gay,” one of the homophobic MacDonalds sneers.
“Yeah, well, I hear all MacDonalds are literally motherfuckers,” Jamie cheerfully rejoins.
This, unsurprisingly, leads to a three-on-one brawl. Jamie takes down all three MacDonalds (he is, after all, a dorky be-kilted Batman) but suffers a flesh wound himself.
Ouchies.
“It’s only a scratch,” he reassures Claire as she sews it up for him. “I’ve got heaps of scars. I actually feel worse about the fact you’re fuming in silence now.”
Claire says nothing but continues to sew.
“You won’t need to fume when we’re at Lallybroch,” Jamie says. “You and me and our 2.5 children, and our four – no, five dogs. And our three cats. And all our goldfish. And how would you feel about a hamster called Reginald?”
“Also, my face is up here, Sassenach.”
Before Claire can answer, Jamie gets summoned to see Colum.
Colum is mad. Like, he’s mad. Like Claire, he’s twigged that it’s on like Donkey Kong between Geillis and Dougal, and he is not impressed.
“What do you want, a fucking medal, Dougal? I DON’T CARE.”
“I don’t care if she’s up the duff with a hundred kids,” Colum thunders. “Legally, they’re her husband’s kids, not yours, Dougal. I’m sending you away to your estate in the country until you stop being such a dick.”
“But –“
“No buts! And you’re going with him, Jamie, because I am pissed the fuck off that you brawled with all those MacDonalds! I don’t care about the price on your head! And to adequately demonstrate just how pissed the fuck off I am at you, you will leave your wife behind!”
Next thing you know, Jamie’s horse is all saddled up in the courtyard. “I don’t want you riding off with an open wound,” Claire says.
“I’ll be okay,” Jamie says. “You gave me a million bandages. But do me a favour. Stay away from Geillis. Colum is pissed the fuck off, and she’s definitely the next target.”
“JAMIE!” Dougal bellows. “Kiss your wife and let’s go!”
Jamie obeys.
I don’t think Claire even REMEMBERS that she ever had another husband at this point.
“I SAID KISS HER, NOT MAKE OUT WITH HER FOR A HUNDRED HOURS!”
With one last look back at Claire, Jamie rides away. Claire goes off to tend to a burn on Mrs Fitz’ arm, sniffling quietly. “There, there,” Mrs Fitz says. “Your sexy dork will come home soon.”
But lo! what is this! There is a letter for Claire. It’s from Geillis, and all it says is “come quick”.
Does Claire a) listen to her sexy dork husband and not go, b) remember that Geillis is literally a murderer and probably not a good person to be friends with and not go, or c) act like a total dumbass and go?
It’s c). DAMN IT, CLAIRE.
“Oh, hi Claire,” Geillis says. “I didn’t expect you.”
“I thought that you’d probably stay away, considering I know you know that I literally killed my husband last night.”
“But – your letter –“
“I didn’t write –“
“YOU ALSO DIDN’T EXPECT THE SPANISH INQUISITION!” a bunch of dudes yell, bursting into Geillis’ house. “Geillis Duncan, Claire Fraser – you are arrested on suspicion of witchcraft.”
Well, shit.
And as Claire and Geillis are bundled away in a caged wagon, Claire sees one lone figure detach itself from the shadows and smile menacingly.
“Damn it, Laoghaire,” she says. “You truly are the Blair Waldorf of your generation.”
“Suck it, Sassenach. xoxo Laoghaire.”