Outlander Episode 13 Recap: Dragonfly in Amber

Things unfold in short order in this century. Claire and Jamie find Murtaugh, who is nonplussed by their confession. “I’m not surprised,” he says of Dougal’s demise. “Only that it took so long.” Jamie does some last-minute bookkeeping, transferring ownership of Lallybroch to Jenny and Ian’s son, James. Fergus is tasked with mail delivery. He is successful, because, as we will soon learn, Claire unearths the document in the future. (How the French street urchin suddenly memorized Scottish geography is beyond me, but good for him.)
Now is when promises come back to bite Claire. When she requested Jamie forestall killing Black Jack Randall, he made her swear to put the nefarious captain’s survival to good use: if the Battle of Culloden proceeded as planned, Claire would go back through the stones at Craigh na Dun and into the arms of Frank. That is exactly where he plans to take her now, before returning to the battlefield to meet his destiny.
Here is the moment we have all dreaded, and it is as tearful as you might have expected. Claire puts up a fight about leaving Jamie, but he plays the trump card: she’s pregnant once again. It turns out Jamie’s been monitoring her periods, or her lack of periods as the case may be. Though it doesn’t sound like it, the moment is shockingly sweet. Equally sweet is the one last roll in the grass the couple enjoy before Jamie presses Claire’s hand to the stone. “Goodbye, Claire,” Jamie manages, but Claire is too stunned to respond.
That brings us forward, way forward, to 1968. Rev. Wakefield, who helped Frank search for Claire in the ‘40s, has died. Now she and her daughter, Brianna, have arrived to pay respects at his wake. That’s the story anyway. For much of this episode, Claire seems to be struggling to do something she hasn’t done in the 20 years she’s been back: say goodbye to Jamie.
The reverend’s adopted son, Roger, is all grown up, and he vaguely recalls Frank Randall, who we learn has also died. (Frank died as he lived: mostly out of the consciousness of this show.) Though Claire has aged—you can tell by the light streak of gray in her perfectly coiffed hair—she’s still the most exquisitely dressed person of any decade. It’s unfair.
Brianna and Roger being talking, and flirting, and going on romantic dates around town to historical sites and records offices and a dead man’s attic. The impetus for these outings is Brianna’s surety that her parents kept a secret—a big one—from her, and Wakefield holds the key. “My mother lives in another world,” Brianna tells Roger, which is why she can’t just ask Claire. Honey, you don’t know the half of it.

On one of their trips, Brianna runs into Gillian Edgars, a Scottish nationalist rabble rouser with a very familiar face. It’s Geillis Duncan! Remember just before she burned at the stake, Geillis whispered “1968” to Claire. That’s the year she went through the stones, and here we are, just before she makes that fateful trip. To hear modern Geillis speak so longingly of her Bonnie Prince Charlie makes you secretly pleased she died before Culloden.
We’ll get back to Geillis, but first let’s catch up with Claire, who’s been making her own day trips. First, she heads out to Lallybroch, now dilapidated and boarded up. She stalks the grounds, all the while hearing voices from the past—her past—in her head, in one of this episode’s more poignant scenes. At least it is until she winds up at Culloden. After she insults a rather too flattering wax figure of Charles in the museum (“They’ve taken a fool and turned him into a hero”), she finds the Clan Fraser headstone on the battlefield. Assuming Jamie’s buried somewhere here, she begins to tell him about Brianna, named for his father and resembling her father in almost every way.
“Jamie, I was angry at you for such a long time,” she explains. “You made me go and live a life that I didn’t want to live. But you were right. Damn you.” Jamie, if he’s listening, has to be smiling at that.
When Claire arrives at Roger’s, she finds someone equally as stubborn as Jamie: her daughter, who’s pieced enough of the reverend’s files together to come up with what she thinks is the truth. Brianna confronts Claire about her true parentage, and of Claire’s disappearance and affair. (The kid’s done the math, and she knows she’s the product of that prolonged absence.) For the first time in awhile, someone acts appropriately hostile to Claire’s story of time travel and century-spanning bigamy.
Roger, however, has a level head. Claire found a flier among Brianna’s things with a picture of Gillian Edgars. She recognizes Geillis at once, and when she learns that the youngsters have actually encountered her, Claire wants to do nothing more than warn the woman from going through the stones. But…Claire has finally learned something about time travel.
While she’s eager to stop Gillian from going through the stones, she did some extra research. Roger mentioned earlier that he was biologically a Mackenzie, so she looked up his genealogy. Roger’s ancestry is complicated, largely because his biological ancestors were a war chief and a witch. You guessed it: Roger descends from the child of Dougal and Geillis. She can’t stop her from going back without killing the young man in front of her. But she can warn her to keep a low profile.
With skeptical youths in tow, Claire hightails it to Craigh na Dun, arriving just in time to watch Gillian snap back through time. What’s even more unfortunate is the bonfire she left behind, which contains the remnants of her 1968 husband. Gillian didn’t realize you don’t need a human sacrifice to make the journey; it’s actually easier than TSA PreCheck.
Having witnessed Gillian’s departure, however, Brianna is much more inclined to believe her mother’s story, and that means she and Roger have something to tell Claire. They’ve also been doing some research, combing through records and the reverend’s papers. There was one Fraser officer who survived the Battle of Culloden: James Fraser.
Jamie lived, and he may live still in the 18th century. And that leaves Claire only one course of action. She has to go back. See you for Season 3, Claire. See you soon, Jamie.