Hi and welcome to K Let's Talk, the podcast where we break down
storytelling across books, television and film with a
special love for book to screen adaptation.
Here we talk about craft, character arcs, structure,
dialogue, visual language, and the creative choices that shape
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Let's talk. Hello everyone and welcome back
to the podcast. Today I am breaking down
Outlander Season 8 Episode 1 titled Soul of a Rebel and I
wanted to do a long form podcast just because I have lots of
commentary on the episode. It's easier for me to really
fully flesh out my thoughts in a podcast form so hopefully you
guys enjoy. As always, if you are looking to
avoid spoilers from the books or the TV show, please be warned
that we will be discussing both in depth.
The title of this episode is the name of Frank Randall's book
that Bree brings back from the future in order to show Jamie.
And we open this episode with Claire and Jamie trying to sell
whiskey to a buyer in a boathouse in Savannah and Jamie
is under the alias Mr. Roy. He is speaking to a man named
Vasquez and reveals that he got his name from Mrs. Abbott in
Philadelphia and Mrs. Abbott is the woman who runs the brothel
that Jane and Fannie are from. The Captain, the Pirate had come
back to Philly with two girls whom he found at sea.
And we get the reveal from him that while on board the ship
that was under the command of a Captain Pocock, he discovered
that he had brought his wife and two daughters with him and he
owed a debt. So he ended up killing the
captain and taking Jane and Fanny because he knew they would
be worth a lot to the brothel owner.
And he described the captain's wife as a rabid dog.
And as soon as he went to take Jane and Fanny, she went
ballistic. And so he threw her overboard.
The whole time this is happening we can see that Claire is trying
to keep her composure and is struggling, and Jamie had asked
her earlier on in the scene to be quiet.
So we know that there's something going on here, and if
you didn't read the book you might be a little confused as to
what's happening. But in the book the story is
similar. Jane and Fanny's parents were on
a ship heading to America with their two daughters and their
dog, and when they finally arrived in America, Jane and
Fanny's parents were dead. Even though it's never confirmed
exactly how, but one theory that comes up in the book is that a
pirate had killed their parents, just like the show is choosing
to take that route and the captain of the ship sold the
girls to the brothel to pay his debt.
In the book, Ian actually goes to the brothel to try and find
more information about Jane and Fanny, so a lot of the
information that he gets in the book is second hand information
from the women in the brothel. So none of it's ever actually
verified. And Ian is also told that when
Jane and Fannie were sold to the brothel, Jane was supposed to
still have had her Maidenhead, but then it was later discovered
that that was untrue. So the show decided to make it
Canon that the pirate had taken it.
But again, in the book that's not confirmed and clearly they
are trying to truncate storylines.
And having Ian go to the brothel and do all of that legwork and
make him travel there would just take way too much time.
And we have him back at the Ridge.
And so they instead have this scene play out on screen as
we're listening to the horrible things that this captain is
saying. Claire then decides to take
matters into her own hands and she stabs him to death, which I
was so deeply confused by because Claire for eight seasons
now has sworn oath to never cross that line.
And it felt so out of character for her and the opposite of what
I would expect from this scene, especially so early on in the
season. It just made me think that she
was so unstable. And then to have the rest of the
episode carry on like she would not be carrying that weight of
having done that for the remainder of the episode.
It just felt so out of character because we've seen Claire go
through some horrific big things herself and she still wasn't
able to cross that line, but then she crosses it immediately
here. It just felt like a not very
well written scene in terms of us as viewers understanding her
motivations. Also for her and Jamie to
operate so strongly under the assumption that Faith lived is
so strange because they still can't even verify that Faith
lived, so for her to kill a man anyways is odd.
This never happens in the books. And for the show to insinuate
that Faith lived in this time, then was thrown overboard on a
ship for protecting her daughters and then having her
daughters be sold into a brothel.
And then hearing that this is what happens to her daughters.
Only for Claire and Jamie to magically cross paths with them
in this twist of fate and then learn that about their daughter.
It just seems incredibly unnecessary and cruel for what I
feel is very little pay off. It also just feels like such a
reach for me and I have never loved the storyline.
It does feel like a cheap one and it's not Canon to the books.
This will never ever happen in the book.
So it does feel like an unnecessary departure that the
show included and I just am never going to get behind it.
I don't think. Even if they change it or have
more twists and turns, I just don't think I'm going to enjoy
it. It feels like time wasted on a
storyline that does not matter in the long game.
Then we get a conversation between Jamie and Claire where
he has this beautiful line of I'm the true true home of your
heart. And they discuss how despite
Claire losing her own parents so young, she and Jamie found one
another and found love in each other.
And so they can take comfort knowing that Faith would have
been loved as well, despite not knowing that Claire and Jamie
lived and would have done anything to have raised her.
And again, this is meant to be a very tender moment between them,
but I can't invest in it because they still can't verify that
what they're upset over is even the truth.
So it just feels cheap to me, for lack of a better word.
Then we get the title card of the episode where we see hands
typing on a typewriter, which are meant to be Franks, who is
writing the book. And they do something new here,
which is that they put the credits into the title card clip
on the piece of paper and then also on a book.
So that's kind of a new device that's been introduced here.
We get a date, a time stamp and a location.
Savannah, 1779. We don't know what month and
Jamie has already been awake. He says he hasn't slept because
he was thinking about faith. They wish that they could give
themselves more answers through Fanny, but they both don't want
to push her on it. And in the book, Fanny does have
very little memories about her parents.
And so Claire kind of pieces things together about them
through Fanny and what she can recall.
But it's again, very fragmented and she went through a lot of
trauma. So a lot of it is stuff that
Claire doesn't want to dig too deeply into so not to incite
more trauma on her. But again, it's so strange to me
that they're both so dead set on Fanny being their granddaughter
and I just don't understand how we got here.
It doesn't feel like these very rational characters would allow
themselves to buy into something like this so easily.
The scene breaks when Jamie hears giggling outside his door
and when he opens the door, he finds all his grandkids at the
door with Marsley and Fergus. So now we know that they are
staying with them at their print shop and Savannah.
And this is a storyline from the books where Fergus opens up a
printing company where he prints the local newspaper.
And he notes to Jamie later on that they had just arrived here
before the British took over the city.
And so Fergus is choosing to keep his newspaper neutral so
not to draw attention to himself.
Since he is French, he actually is even complimentary of the
British in the newspaper and is trying to use the tools and
advice that he had learned from Jamie.
When Jamie was working in his own print shop, many of the
British Army that had seized the city were also Highlanders, and
so Fergus notes that it that was helpful that his last name is
Fraser and that he's also married to Marsley, who is
Scottish. The scene with Claire and Jamie
and the grandkids. When Jamie is in the print shop,
he goes looking for a hidden compartment similar to one that
he would have had in his print shop, and he finds seditious
papers that Fergus has hidden in the walls.
And he warns Fergus about them because he has a family and we
have seen just how big his family is.
We got our eyes on all the children.
Fergus, who I absolutely love. I'm thrilled to have him and
Marsley back on screen. They make such a big difference.
In the show. He tells Jamie, I learned how to
do this from you. And he basically calls Jamie out
for that. And he has this beautiful line.
My pen is my sword. But Jamie wants Fergus to be
careful, and he promises that he will always.
And so I loved that even though this was a short, quick scene,
we have now confirmation that Fergus and Marsley are in
Savannah. They've opened a print shop.
They're all doing well. And so I know that this
storyline for the two of them is going to be very heartbreaking.
So I'm reveling in the fact that the scene that we do have with
them is so sweet because I really do love Marsley and
Fergus. Yes, the scene with Claire and
Jamie and the grandkids actually steals dialogue from a scene
that happens later on in the episode where Mandy and Jem have
arrived at the Ridge and are eating cookies before Mandy asks
the family to read her a book. And here the line that they
borrow is about counting legs and dividing by 4.
They use it amongst Fergus and Marsley's family instead.
And so when we are back at the table with all of those kids
ready to eat, we see Fanny with them as well.
She's eager to help with all these kids once Once the kids
leave, Fergus and everyone at the table start to talk about
Fanny and he starts asking questions about her childhood in
a brothel because he can relate to that.
And he points out that she has lost her home and her sister,
and that would be something that's very difficult for her at
her age to wrap her mind around. And she's alone.
So they tell Fergus and Marsley that they're going to bring her
with them back to the Ridge and leave Savannah.
And so we leave Fergus and Marsley there, and Fanny and
Claire and Jamie start to head back to Fraser's Ridge.
Now, again, a lot of this is heightened by the fact that we
as viewers know that Jamie and Claire are so convinced that
Fanny is their granddaughter. So there's a lot of that kind of
going into the acting choices here.
Claire looks at her very affectionately in every scene
that they're in. In the book.
I think the relationship dynamic between Claire and Fanny is also
very friendly and motherly, but I think the show's playing it in
a very different angle than the book.
And Fanny is being played in a very different way than in the
book too. She's someone who's very candid
in the book, she has a tongue tie, so she has a lisp in the
book, and she blurts out what comes across as very
inappropriate statements informed by her time in a
brothel throughout the story. And Claire has to kindly teach
her that you can't talk like that in front of people.
But we don't seem to get that. She seems to be far less mouthy
and candid in the show version when they're riding in the
carriage together. Fanny is shocked that Fraser's
Ridge is so vast and so large, and Jamie and Claire make a
point to tell her that this is her home now as well.
And we cut then to Lord John and William.
And I feel like this is where the show starts to get really
choppy for me because the splices in this make no sense.
We are with them in the woods driving to Fraser's Ridge.
We cut to Lord John and William, they have a very short scene,
and then we cut back to the Ridge and then cut again to John
and William. I would have liked them to just
finish the scene in Fraser's Ridge, then go to John and
William, have that play out in its entirety, and then move on.
So I don't really understand the choices made for how they
spliced this. But in our first scene with Lord
John and William, there's a baby.
And John is holding this baby. And William has been taken to
his house by a British soldier because he had been drunk.
And they're worried that he might have been, you know,
coercing with the enemy. And that's when we're introduced
to Trevor, who is William's cousin Ben's son.
So it does look like we're going to be getting the Bend
storyline, although again, I assume it's going to be
truncated. Then again, we cut back to the
Ridge. Claire is with Fanny.
They're at the location of the house that had burned down.
And Ian comes to see them, and he runs over to them very
excitedly and reintroduces himself to Fanny and tells
Claire that the baby hasn't come yet.
So they all will head together to see what Ian has been doing
in their absence before we splice back to John and William
and William admits that he is in the city looking for Captain
Richardson, but none of the rebels would speak to him or
give him any information unless he got them drunk.
So that's why we see him very intoxicated and hungover in this
scene. But in the book, William shows
up to Lord John's home with another character named John
Cinnamon, who I believe they have cut from the show, and he
meets Amaranthus for the first time in John's house, but it's
under very different circumstances and in a very
different timeline. He had already been searching
for Ben by the time he meets Amaranthus in the book.
At this point in the show, he does not know that Ben had gone
missing and is presumed dead. So in the show, John confirms
William's cousin Ben has a wife and a baby, but tells William
that Ben is not here and is reported as dead.
And William is deeply hurt by this.
And John says that then was taken prisoner, held at
Middlebrook encampment in New Jersey, and then succumbed to an
outbreak of jail fever. And when William asks For more
information, John tries to comfort him despite the fact
that he doesn't have any more information beyond that.
And both Henry and How are mentioned by John and he says
that neither of them know about Ben yet because he doesn't know
how to tell his brother that his eldest son has died.
In the book, that's when William offers to go and search for Ben
because he does not believe that he could be dead.
And in September of 1778, William finds Ben's grave, but
the body buried inside of it is not Ben's.
And so he goes searching for Amaranthus in January of 1779
after he gets a tip from Claire. And while looking for her, he
doesn't find her, but instead finds Fanny, and Fanny tells
William that Jane has been taken and arrested.
And so you can see here that the timeline has been changed quite
a lot in the show because Jane has already died by this point
in the story. Amaranthus and Trevor are
revealed to have appeared on John's doorstep, with Amaranthus
claiming she was Ben's widow and she had fallen into a difficult
circumstance because of Ben's death.
And William starts to question things because he believes Ben
would have told him if he had been married, or at the very
least told his brother. And so William thinks someone in
their family would have known if he had actually been married to
this woman. In the book, John and his niece
Dottie actually go looking for Amaranthus and Trevor in
Savannah. So that's another change from
the book. And John and his brother Hal are
the ones who ultimately end up finding her in the show.
She had come to John with love letters with Ben's signet ring.
And Trevor bears the name Water Suede, which is a family name.
And William thinks that John's being a fool.
And that's when Amaranthus appears and calls William a
drunkard and a fool himself and leaves very abruptly.
And I thought it was kind of interesting that she just
leaves, because I was thinking to myself, did you leave without
your baby? Back on the Ridge, we see the
new big house, which in the show is already built.
That's a change from the story. When Claire and Jamie get back
to the Ridge in the book, the big house is not built yet.
It had been cleared for land and everything, but it was not built
like it is in the show. It does look close to the
description in the books, and Ian shows them what he built
with the other men on the Ridge, saying that people of the Ridge
all joined together to put the house together by donating
furniture and that he had already staked out a garden for
Claire. So all of this is a show change
and we get to see Rachel for the first time, who is very visibly
pregnant, and Ian, Jamie, Claire and Rachel go into the house
together. We hear Jamie thank Ian and
Gallic, and the inside of the house is so much more rustic
than the one previous to this. We can see that it's still
incomplete and so I expect over the course of the season that
the house will change quite a bit as they start to put the
finishing touches on it. Claire walks into her new
surgery so we can see beds and instruments because everything
would have had to be replaced since she lost so much in the
fire. And this is when Hiram Crombie
is mentioned. I'll go into a deeper dive on
him later on in the episode. Claire promises that she'll take
good care of Rachel and the baby since they're going to be the
first patients. And Jamie brings Fanny upstairs
to show her her very own room, which is still framed and the
walls are not completed. And Fanny can't believe that she
would be getting an entire room for herself.
And since they're adding the layer of Jamie believing she
could be one of his grandkids, that adds to the intensity of
this scene in the book. Like I said, Fanny also is
tongue tied with a lisp. And so since they removed that
from the show, we don't get the scene in the book where Claire
performs surgery once they're back on the Ridge.
And over the course of the story, they help Fanny to
improve her speech. And she's also a character that
serves kind of as comedic relief with how abrupt her commentary
is. So I'll be curious if over the
course of the season they introduce any of that because it
seems like she's a very different character in the show.
That night we see Claire looking out the window and Jamie comes
in and it's a very similarly composed shot to season 1 when
they are in Lally Brock together.
And it sets the tone for the scene before the dialogue even
starts, because it's a visual callback that show watchers will
immediately recognize. The camera angle's the same, the
distance is the same, the physicality is the same.
But in the book, this plays out very differently because Roger
and Bri and the kids are already there.
They're staying in the very first cabin that was built on
Fraser's Ridge because the Big House has not been finished yet.
And the conversation in the book starts off a bit more tense
because Claire is concerned about why Bree and Roger have
returned, and she knows that the reason must be bad.
And her and Jamie are both terrified, knowing that they are
not safer in this time than they would be in the future.
So for them to come back means that they're running from
something quite terrible. Jamie and Claire then leave the
house and continue their conversation outside by a fire,
which is where this dialogue is pulled from.
In the show. Jamie and Claire are in the big
house and Jamie tells her that he is convinced he knows that
the night Faith was conceived is when they were at Lally Brock
and In the book they're looking at the stars outside laying
outside by the fire and he recalls not seeing stars like
this since the night they conceived faith.
The show instead does the same camera blocking and angles and
choreography to draw the parallel to a different moment
from season 1. Instead of the Abbey, he thinks
that the night they conceived faith was in the Abbey in France
after he is rescued from the prison.
And so the dialogue here is much the same as the book.
But in the book, he is recalling that he had been near death in
that Abbey after they escaped. And so the weight of his words
is very different here. Because in the show, Jamie is
reminding us and Claire that it was the night she first told
Jamie she loved him, that he conceived Faith with her.
And we get dialogue call backs of what he said to her back
then. So the entire scene is
definitely meant to be a strong visual and narrative call back
moment. And he says he knew he was
giving her a child. We cut back to the people of the
Ridge who were all meeting at Crombie's trading post and Jamie
and Claire look incredibly happy to be back there.
And we see Amy McCallum, her boys.
She confirms that she has now married someone else and her
last name is Lindsay. So she's married Evan Lindsay,
and this is the same character we saw Roger with while she was
in mourning. But in the book her name is Amy
Higgins and she's married to a man named Bobby Higgins, who I
think the show has completely omitted.
Bobby was originally hired by Lord John Gray to be a servant
and he had been sent by John to the Ridge back in 1773.
The first time they went, John brings him to have his eye
inspected by Claire. He ended up losing it after a
fight in a Tavern. The next time he comes to the
Ridge, it's to bring letters from John, and he shows interest
in both Lizzie and Malva, but both women are not interested in
him and they reject his marriage proposal.
And then he ends up coming back to the Ridge for good in 1776.
And that's when Roger actually introduces him to Amy McCallum
and they get married and they live in the house that Jamie and
Claire built first on the Ridge, which is where Bree and Roger
used to live. So by the time we're in 1779,
which is the current timeline, Bobby would have been in the
role that we see Ian and where he had cleared the land for the
big house, helps build it. He'd been serving as a factor on
the Ridge and he had ushered in multiple families while Jamie
and Claire were gone and is very close to Jamie and the Fraser
family. Unfortunately for this character
and the show having introduced her, they can either lean into
this or omit it and just mention her as a character in the book
later on after everyone returns to the Ridge.
Amy, Brie, Jimmy, Mandy and Amy's sons are out hunting, and
Amy is very tragically killed by a bear.
And Brie manages to get her back to the Ridge, but she ends up
passing away there with her husband and her sons.
And it's a really, really sad, tragic scene.
And I think this is going to be a callback to the trailer
because we got a shot of Jamie building a coffin and I think a
lot of people assumed it might be for ornery Christian, but it
could be for Amy as well. We see Hiram Crombie appear and
he welcomes them back, shows them inside of his trading post
where he sells fabrics and tools and medical supplies.
He is a character who is largely representative of the Fisher
folk on the Ridge, and in the book he has a brother, Cyrus,
who ends up showing interest in Fanny down the road, so it'll be
interesting to see if we get him.
Hiram is also largely intertwined with Captain
Cunningham and a side plot that Cunningham gets up to on the
Ridge, but ultimately he is a character who is loyal to Jamie.
We do meet Charles Cunningham for the first time in this scene
and he announces himself as Crombie's partner for the
trading post. And the actor who plays him,
Kieran Beau, is also in the show House of the Dragon.
You might recognize him from that show if you watch House of
the Dragon. Charles Cunningham has been
living on the Ridge with his mother, and he moved here while
Jamie and Claire were away. And so Jamie accompanies him out
of Hiram's trading post to start asking him more questions and
get to know this man a little bit more.
And Jamie clarifies to Charles that he is no longer associated
with the Continental Army and therefore or does not maintain
his title. This dialogue mainly felt like
filler to remind the viewer of what happened at the end of
season 7. And then Jamie presses to find
out more information about Cunningham's title as captain.
Cunningham says he prefers Captain because he never liked
the name Charles, but also admits that he served for the
King for 30 years as a British captain who fought against Jamie
as both an American and as a Scott.
He tells Jamie he laid down his sword after the Battle of Bemis
Heights and points out that he knows Jamie was at Saratoga and
so Jamie acknowledges that they were very recently enemies and
Cunningham says he is most happy to be done with war.
The Battle of Bemis Heights is the one that took place in
October of 1777 where we saw General Simon Fraser, just for
reference. Jamie asks him how he finds
himself at Fraser's Ridge, and Cunningham tells Jamie that he
had acquaintances, he came to visit them, and then he walked
until his legs could carry him no further, and that brought him
to Fraser's Ridge in the spot on top of a hill that we see in the
show. On their way back to the house,
Jamie and Claire start talking about Cunningham and how things
have changed so much at the Ridge in their absence, and
Jamie is suspicious about Cunningham, which rightfully so,
but Claire points out that people can wonder the same
things about Jamie, as in, is he ever truly done with war and
serving? Many people would argue that
Jamie can say that he is all he wants, but I don't know how many
people can believe that fully, including Jamie himself.
We cut back to William and John, and we see John giving William
an egg to help with his hangover, and John says he's set
to dine with General Provost in an hour and asks William to go
with him. And that's a character that's
mentioned quite often in the book.
He is a commander of the British company from Florida who joins
forces with Colonel Campbell to take Savannah in the book.
And both Hal and John meet with him a handful of times
throughout the story. He had a nickname, Old Bullet
Head, because he had been hit by a bullet and his skull fractured
during the Battle of Quebec. William can largely see through
John's attempts to get William back into the army, and John
tries to remind William that the British Army is not to blame for
Jane's death. But William very deeply feels
that it is his fault and both he and John want revenge on Captain
Richardson. But John reminds him that they
can be more calculated with their efforts because William,
like his biological father, can be quite hot headed.
If William is truly done with the army, John thinks he should
perhaps return home to England and take up his role as the
Earl. And William struggles in his own
head with this quite a lot. Through the last two books,
books 8:00 and 9:00, he does not feel worthy of his title.
Despite those details. He owns the title, and he
doesn't know if he even wants it, especially now that he knows
that his parentage is so false. And John has a great quote
that's pulled from the book and reworked slightly that a peerage
is the gift of a grateful monarch.
There are no means sit down in law to renounce it.
A monarch who ceases to be grateful can strip a man of his
title, though the only grounds for that which come to mind are
to engage in rebellion against the crown.
And in the book, how Gray is actually present during this
conversation. And he warns William that if
he's willing to resort to treason and betrayal of his
country, king and family as a way to deal with his issues,
then John had not raised him very well.
In the show we see William sort of smiling sarcastically when
they talk about treason and he feels unsure of who he is.
And John says if it is up to him to decide who he wishes to be,
so be it. But regardless of the name or
title, he claims no man with any claim to his parentage would
speak to a lady the way he did Amaranthus.
And so he insists that William make it right with her, which we
do see later on in the episode. Back on the Ridge, we see the
bee's nest that Lizzie brings to Claire, along with her daughter,
who is named Claire. But in the book, John Quincy
Myers is actually the one who brings Claire a swarm of bees,
and he's the one who tells Claire about how to talk to
them, and he blesses them. But they give a lot of those
talking points to Jamie here, actually.
And so they set the hive quite close to the house.
And the books, it feels like they're closer to the woods over
by Claire's garden. And Jamie tells Claire about the
lore and the bees and why you have to talk to them about
what's going on with the Ridge and the people who reside there.
And so that's a theme that is woven into the book quite
heavily. So I expect that we're going to
get a lot more scenes of Claire actually talking to the bees.
That's when the camera angle changes, and we get this fuzzy
image of a doll in a little girl's hand, and we see Rodger
and Bree and the kids approaching the Ridge, and
Claire looks like she's seen a ghost, and she might fall over.
And Bree runs to hug her, and they're reunited again.
And once again, the wigs are terrible.
The Hello the House scene in the book takes place right at the
end of Written in My Own Heart's Blood.
And then this scene is quite shorter.
It drags out a lot longer in the book than it does in the show.
And we see in the show Claire and Jamie meet a grown Mandy and
we hear Bree tell her parents that they simply wanted to come
home. In the book, Claire knows there
is far more to the story than that, none of which can be good.
And I think the show version is less impactful than the books
because in the book, Claire sees them approaching from a great
distance and can hardly believe her eyes as the family walks
across the field. And she keeps thinking to
herself that they look so much like Brie and Rodger and the
kids, and it's not until they hear hello the house from a
distance that they realize that it's actually them.
Once they're inside, Brie asks Jamie about Fanny and how she
came to be with them and Jamie mentions that it was by way of
William and Brie learns that William now knows Jamie as his
dad and therefore that she is his sister and Brie tells Jamie
to give him some time to come around to it.
So Brie and William stories intertwine with one another in
the book. So this is more foreshadowing
that we're going to get to see the two of them interacting in
this season. This is when Mandy asks Jamie to
read her book and how we're going to get a Segway onto the
topic of Frank's book, which is a huge part of season 8.
And Jamie opens Mandy's book and is shocked by the way it looks.
And Fannie is also shocked by the way it looks.
But for them to openly look through this picture book and
not be at all concerned about Fannie, who in the book is like
such a blabbermouth, it seems weird to me.
But again, they've changed her. In the show she doesn't seem to
be as candid about things, so I guess they're not worried about
her talking about it in front of other people.
In the book, German is actually with Jamie and Claire as well,
but in the show he stays with Ferguson Marsley.
So again this is a slightly recycled scene from the book
that plays out differently on screen.
The other change is that the story Jamie reads in the book is
a Doctor Seuss one. In the show they have a call
back to season 3 and Claire tells Jamie that this is the
story she told him while they were on the ship.
She used to read Brianna as a kid.
Bri looks like Santa Claus pulling books from her bag and
she gifts Claire the Merck Manual 13th edition.
And a lot of the dialogue that Jamie delivers in that scene is
straight from the book as well. For Jamie she brought Frodo
Baggins and Lord of the Rings and in the book they give Jamie
books one and two and he thinks it would be nice to read them
with Fanny because Fanny was taught how to read by Jane and
that would be something that the two of them could do together
and bond over. Jamie and Roger are talking
later and Jamie asks him if he was a minister in the future and
he says no. Jamie then reassures him that
there's new folk here that have settled here and he should make
a point to go make his introductions, and he tells
Roger about Cunningham and that he wants Roger to help him get a
better read on him. And that's when Claire and Brie
come back, sit at the dining table and say that the kids have
been put to bed. And they talk about the letters
that Claire and Jamie had left them at a bank in Edinburgh and
how Claire and Jamie didn't know if they would work.
They largely leave that entire storyline out of the show and
truncated a lot. It's actually really fascinating
how they explain away the letters in the book.
It's too much for me to include here in a formal breakdown.
Maybe I'll do a separate video about that or talk about that
separately. But they definitely truncated
that. And that moment is when Brie
decides to present the soul of a rebel Scottish Roots of the
American Revolution book by Frank to Claire.
It was published after she and Claire left, and she tells Jamie
that she's never read it, which to me is wild.
And she says she knew that if she had read it, it would feel
like she lost her father all over again.
But to me, I'm I'm not buying that.
To me, I think if you're holding a book that your father wrote
about the very thing you're about to walk back into, which
is the American Revolution, I would want to read that.
I would, especially when the dedication page is for her that
I have a hard time buying into. Rodger and Bree also say that
they had spaced out reading the letters because it felt like it
suspended the belief of them still being alive, which also
happens in the book. Bree and Rodger also come closer
to admitting why they came back in this scene and Claire says
they need to know about Fanny and Bree's sister Faith.
And once again, I really just dislike this storyline.
We don't even get this conversation on screen, which to
me felt like an odd choice. So we as viewers don't actually
know what Claire and Jamie have decided to tell Bri and Rodger
about this faith storyline either.
So it just felt like an odd clunky choice to insert here and
bring it back up again. When we cut back to William, we
see him nervously approaching Amaranthus, who was outside in
the garden, and he apologizes to her and insists that he acted
that way because he was in shock about Ben and it made him angry
with her. And she admits that she had also
not been kind to him. So she invites him to sit and
tells him more about her marriage to Ben and admits that
they were married quite quickly. They had sent a letter, but it
seems to have been lost and that would be why nobody and his
family knew about it. When she starts to tend to
Trevor, William feels struck by how much he resembles Benjamin
and Amaranthus says it's a reminder of the love that bore
Trevor. And William then decides that he
is going to do everything he can for Trevor and Amaranthus
because his cousins were like his siblings, he grew up with
them. And she reaffirms that by saying
that Ben had said the same about William to her.
This is kind of the first hint into Williams heroes journey of
the season. So I'll be very curious how much
they include of it and also the Lord John storyline, how they're
going to change that and speed it up because it does last
nearly the whole book. When we're back in the woods,
we're with Jamie and Brie, who are out hunting and they are
talking about Rob Cameron and they wonder if Rob has the
ability to time travel and if he does, whether or not he has
already traveled back in time to come looking for her or not.
Brie figured she and her family would be safer back in time than
staying at Lally. Brock and Jamie and her talk
about how they can hide the gold in a different location so that
if he ever comes back, he would not be able to find that gold
through anyone except Jamie, and that removes Jamie from the
equation. In the book, Rodger spends a
very long time explaining everything that happened in the
future to Jamie. It's not Brie and he includes
the whole story with Rob, Cameron and Jimmy being
kidnapped because he met Jamie's father.
And the reason he tells Jamie is because Jamie's sister Jenny is
on the Ridge in the book and he's going to see her again.
And he worries that Jenny will recognize him from when she was
younger and when Roger and Buck visited their home in the past.
So again, that's a different storyline that they've shifted
around in the show. Jenny isn't in the Americas in
the show. I'm curious if they're going to
send her there at some point, especially when young Ian has
his baby, because she is actually quite important.
Later on in the book, as they are getting back onto the path,
Brie and Jamie stumble upon two men who are hanging in the tree
labeled with GR. And this is when Jamie kind of
points out to Brie that it's not much safer.
Back then, these men were killed for being loyalist, and Jamie
has a great line that there are devils on both sides of this
war. We see someone then approaching
the big house and it is Captain Cunningham's mother, Elspeth.
She's dressed in all black, which we'll learn about later in
the season. And Mandy starts singing and
showing her her doll. And the two of them get into a
tift because Mandy, she is so forward.
And the women slaps Mandy across the face.
And that's when Jamie and Claire approach her and they introduce
themselves and she presents them with the Jesuit bark.
So that's how Claire and Jamie both realized that this must be
Missus Cunningham. And the scene plays out nearly
exactly the same as it does in the book version.
So now we've met Cunningham, we've met his mother, we can
tell that there's something going on with them.
And that's a big storyline that they are going to explore in
this season. We've seen that from little
splices of the promotional material as well.
Later that night, Jamie is sitting by the fire and he opens
Soul of a Rebel. The dedication page on the front
says for My Dearest Deadeye, which is what Frank called Bree.
So again, we know that he wrote this book and dedicated it to
her with a nickname that only she would recognize.
And we see Jamie flip to the back of the book, and in the
jacket sleeve, he sees the photo of Frank.
And there is a voice over that says, says, is it my face you
see looming in the darkness? And it's Blackjack Randall's
voice, which is so ominous. I was not expecting that at all.
And Claire approaches Jamie and puts her hand on his shoulder.
And that snaps him out of it and back into the present.
And that's when Jamie asks Claire why she didn't tell him
that Frank looked just like Blackjack Randall.
And Claire looks very surprised. In the book, this conversation
doesn't take place until chapter 72 of Go and Tell the Beast that
I am Gone. And Claire says she hasn't
thought about it in a very long time.
But once she was acquainted with Blackjack, the resemblance she
picked up on when she first met him quickly wore off because he
was such a evil person. And Jamie still thinks that she
could have told him. But Claire explains that she
doesn't know how she would have explained to him.
In the book, Jamie tells Claire that he had a dream where he was
looking into Frank's face, which then morphed into Blackjacks,
and he was staring across Frank's desk at Jamie with his
evil eyes. And he had only woken up when he
realized how much Frank and Blackjack looked alike, which is
why we get that audio overlay in the show.
It's meant to convey that internal moment.
And we couldn't actually see him dreaming it.
So this is kind of the compromise.
Jamie says he may have been initially upset about knowing
that Frank looked just like Blackjack before, but there
would have been no point in him staying upset because he knows
that Claire is his. And he starts to ask more
questions about Frank, like if he was honest, and Claire admits
that they both kept their secrets, but he wouldn't have
written anything that he knew to be false.
Jamie then tells her that he's already mentioned his name 14
times so far, and Claire can't believe that Jamie is in this
book. This dialogue takes place
between Jamie and Ian in the book version in chapter 62.
So again, the show is very quickly speeding up the timeline
and implying that Jamie has already read a lot of the book.
So evidently he disappeared that night and read half of the book
alone. An important part of this
conversation that we don't get here, but I do hope they cover,
is that Jamie can tell Frank did not value Claire as much as he
does. And Claire tells Jamie that when
he was afraid for Claire and the baby's safety, he sent them
away. And then contrast that with
Frank, who wrote this book while Claire was with him in the
future, and he knew that Jamie lived and didn't tell her.
So it's a huge admission of Claire and Frank's relationship
that he wrote it while she was grieving Jamie, and he chose to
keep this from her. And he never wrote the book with
the idea or really kind of understanding that the
circumstances would work out in this way where Brie would
physically bring this book back through time for Jamie to read
and that he might use the book as a warning.
So even though Jamie does largely feel like Frank is
speaking to him throughout the story, I don't think that Frank
would write this book with that in mind or that intention.
So I am hopeful that we'll get that dialogue.
And I know for a fact that in this story, Jamie is going to
read this book and feel as though Frank is communicating.
That's still going to be a big aspect of the show.
But Claire doesn't believe that Frank wrote it on Jamies behalf
or as an aide to Jamie. Jamie does then say that the
book warns of war in the Backcountry and a battle at
Kings Mountain where a James Fraser dies in it.
And that is the cliffhanger for the episode.
But it's also a huge window into Jamie's character arc and what
he will be going through this season.
So that is how we end the episode.
They've laid out all the major plot points.
We've seen all the major characters.
We've gotten kind of a lay of the land of where everyone is at
so far. We've reintroduced Ferguson,
Marsley, so they cover a lot of ground in this episode, but it
felt incredibly fast-paced and very choppy in the edit.
So that was something I wasn't entirely thrilled about.
But most of the time the first episode of a season really kind
of has to set up things for the rest of the season.
So a lot of times it doesn't flow quite as well as later
episodes. It has to cover a lot of ground
and kind of state things instead of show them to you.
So I do feel like it's done a lot of that.
And hopefully by next week we'll kind of live in these scenes a
little longer because it felt like we were bumping around from
person to person quite quickly. And we never had a scene where
we actually stayed in it for long enough to feel like we were
in meshing with the story or feeling like a part of the
story. We were more just kind of
observing and listening to dialogue and picking up what
we're meant to, but we don't actually feel tied to it.
At least that's how I felt. I can't believe we're in the
final season of Outlander. It's just crazy to me that it's
all ending here. So far, they have included a lot
from the source material. They've referenced it quite a
bit. But the faith stuff is such a
departure. I have absolutely no idea where
they're planning on taking that. I'm very curious.
And the season preview at the end of the episode really does
insert a lot of clips that we can kind of infer what they're
going to cover. Yeah.
Let me know your thoughts about episode one.
What was your favorite part? Yeah.
What are you most looking forward to as we continue the
rest of the season? And we we finish with the the
whole 10 episodes and cap the show off, which is just crazy to
me. Happy to be back in the
Outlander verse, happy to be back talking about these
characters in this story and excited to see what happens next
week. So thank you again for listening
if you've made it this far. I so appreciate it.
And we'll chat soon.