Outlander Season 3 Episode 10 Recap: Heaven and Earth

Claire is making do on her hell barge, instructing all the crew members who aren’t dead on proper sterilization techniques. Naturally, there’s a fair number of men chafing at taking orders from a woman—particularly when she starts distilling the ship’s rum for disinfecting alcohol.
The men, she’s informed, won’t like that one bit. Never one to hold her tongue, Claire responds with (perfectly reasonable) sass: “Would they prefer to die?”
She meets more resistance when her sleuthing leads to the presumed source of the disease: an infected galley hand. One way to anger a beleaguered cook? Accuse him of spreading plague. I think that was the plot of Ratatouille. I don’t really remember.
Jamie is not faring so well either, locked up without Mr. Willoughby’s acupuncture treatments and without Claire’s minimally effective ginger tea. Between heaves, he tries to persuade Fergus to spring him, so they can mutiny and take the ship. (This seems like a poor repayment of Cousin Jared’s favor, I’ll grant you, but Jamie’s not thinking clearly.) He ends up alienating Fergus instead.
As a brief aside: if there is one bright spot in this episode, it is the fact that Jamie and Claire both have stumbled upon some of the fiercest hats they’ve had since France.
But back to the rampant misery. Have I mentioned that this ship is called the Porpoise? I’m not sure if that lessens the blow of the epidemic or makes it more whimsically tragic. Claire prefers to compartmentalize. “If you let yourself be affected by every death, you’ll never save a life,” Claire explains to her young officer friend, Elias Pound.

This is moments before her patience reaches its breaking point, upon the discovery that the ship’s gunner has poisoned himself on her alcohol disinfectant. (His wife, meanwhile, stands horrified near the goats she oversees.) Nearby, Claire discovers a Portuguese flag, which sends her upstairs to peer through the captain’s logs. Fortunately or unfortunately, the flag did not come from the ship that took young Ian. But there’s something else in the logs: someone on board recognized Jamie, which is as dangerous as any disease.
Claire’s got a lot on her plate, and it’s worthwhile to remember that no small part of this is Laoghaire’s fault. (Her alimony spurred Jamie’s bizarre treasure hunt, which resulted in young Ian’s capture.) So, it’s still kind of annoying to watch her daughter’s romance with Fergus, who’s so uncomfortable with everything about his situation that he squirms at Marsali’s sexual advances. He vowed to Jamie he wouldn’t bed Marsali until they’re properly wed, after all. Not to mention, he’s preoccupied with spying on the captain and his officers and all the hot and unflattering ship gossip.
Claire’s on her own quest to find Harry Tompkins, the man who ID’ed Jamie. Do you know who Harry Tompkins is? He’s the fiend who fought with young Ian and started the fire in Jamie’s print shop. Harry Tompkins has a lot to say on the matter of Jamie’s misdeeds—it turns out Sir Percival’s men found the body of Claire’s attacker in the cask of crème de menthe.
Proving she’s learned a few tricks in her many adventures, Claire has the scoundrel thrown in the brig on charges he’s the second source of the outbreak. Hallelujah, she’s playing dirty!
She’s still worried, however, about what awaits Jamie when they reach Jamaica. That niggling fear dampens her enthusiasm about the apparent end of the typhoid outbreak—that and the death of young Elias, her cherubic helpmate. RIP, Elias, he did not know the show he signed up for.
Things look up, however, when Claire finds a scheming partner in the aforementioned gunner’s wife, Annekje Johansen. Nearly out of drinking water, the ship stops when they find land. Annekje tells Claire her “goats need grass,” which is code for, “You can escape when we let the goats out to roam.”
The plan is thwarted, however, by the obnoxious young Captain Leonard, who catches Claire cresting a hill. He knows the information she found in his logbook and he refuses to let her run off to warn her husband. (This kind of thing is why the British lost the empire, young man.)
Fergus and Marsali have secured Jamie’s release. They’ve gotten the captain to agree to free Jamie in exchange for his word not to mutiny. Sure, it’s a bit of a deus ex machina, but it redeems Marsali and forces Jamie to give the pair his blessing, resolving that source of tension. Let’s roll with it.
Meanwhile, Annekje has tried again to secure Claire’s release—albeit in a more dramatic fashion. She helps Claire fashion a makeshift raft and persuades her to jump overboard as another island appears on the horizon.
Where this waterlogged Sassenach winds up, we’ll find out next week. All we know is that she did not grab her tremendous hat before she took the plunge, which is a loss in and of itself.