Outlander Season 3 Episode 5 Recap: Freedom & Whisky

After last week’s disheartening episode, Claire and Brianna returned to Boston. And that is where we find Claire in action, her hands buried in someone’s chest. And despite the organs and blood and what not, it’s nice. So often, Claire’s been sidelined by circumstance—or the many, many men around her—and it’s refreshing to see her entirely in her element, owning the surgery.
Everybody Hurts
Brianna, on the other hand, is not excelling so much. Her Harvard history professor pulls her aside after class to inform she’s failing. In fact, she’s failing all of her classes, in stark contrast to her stellar grades last year. “What’s changed?” he asks. My dude, what hasn’t changed? Last year, the girl had one father. Then she had no father. Now she has a new father who is also technically dead as of December 1968 but alive in all our hearts.
Needless to say, for Brianna, it’s complicated. And so we see something else we don’t give a glimpse of often: Brianna’s true feelings. She wanders through her childhood home, pulling out trinkets and photos and remnants of the father she knew, Frank. For once, it’s her pain, instead of her parents’, that’s front and center.
This is why I audibly cheered when out of a taxi steps Roger Motherlovin’ Wakefield MacKenzie. He’s the gawky Scottish hero we deserve, and the one best suited to break up whatever argument Brianna and Claire are in the middle of when he arrives. As he bumbles into the house, we learn Brianna has decided to drop out of Harvard.
“You expect me to just come back to Boston and be who I was?” she hurls at Claire. “I tried and it’s not working.”
She soon leaves in a huff, promising to “hang out” with Roger tomorrow. Christmas, it seems, is canceled.
Historian, Hero
Left alone with Claire, Roger mentions, rather nonchalantly, that he has some news. “I’m a historian,” he declares, like the mild-mannered, broguish Indiana Jones he is. “That’s what I do: I pursue, like a dog with a bone.”
The bone in this instance? Jamie Fraser. “I found him,” Roger tells Claire, pulling out a newspaper article from 1765. The article quotes a Robert Burns poem that hadn’t yet been written at the time, something Claire quoted to Jamie on another occasion. Beyond that, the printer’s name is Alexander Malcolm, one of Jamie’s several hundred middle names.
Roger, you beautiful, sexy bookworm.
Claire reacts … badly. “Twenty years ago, I shut the door on the past,” she spits out. (Frank would argue this point.) Now, with Roger’s digging, hope is toying with Claire once more. She’s also finally confronting the reality that running back to Jamie would mean running away from her daughter. So she does as Claire is want to do: shut down and suppress. She commands Roger not to tell Brianna.
Over a nice set of 200-year-old human remains, Claire has a heart-to-heart with her colleague, Joe, in which he encourages her to pursue any kind of second chance of happiness. I bring this scene up solely because of Claire’s strange reaction to the skeleton laid out on the table. She’s able to identify within 50 years the age of the remains, as well as that the woman was murdered. More to come on that, I’d say.
In other uncomfortable moments, Frank’s being honored by a posthumous Harvard fellowship. At the celebration, Claire runs into Frank’s former side piece, who is amazingly brazen in her contempt for Claire. The interaction, however, spurs some truth-telling between Claire and Brianna, first about Frank’s infidelity and then about Brianna’s concerns that both her father and mother had cause to resent her.
There’s crying. There’s reconciliation. There’s a hug. And there’s a confession. Claire reveals to her daughter Roger’s discovery. And if she was looking for permission, she’s got it from the one person who matters.
“I’m all grown up, mama. I can live on my own,” Brianna tells her mother. “I love you, but I don’t need you.”
Homeward Bound
With that, preparations begin and Claire’s anxiety continues to build. First, about the time travel itself. If she goes through the stones, there’s no guarantee she’ll come back. “It’s not like an elevator,” she says, in one of the few times the show acknowledges how little it knows about the mechanics of its central magical device.
Claire’s also nervous about Jamie, of course, and about whether he still loves her. In the kind of conversation you can’t have with your co-workers anymore, she asks Joe to confirm something: her relative sexual attractiveness. “You’re a skinny white broad with too much hair but a great ass,” he tells her, objectively. “He’ll be in heaven when he sees you.”
With that matter settled, we move toward Christmas. Roger and Brianna have gotten Claire an assortment of antiques and historical guidebooks. Claire, meanwhile, gives her daughter the family pearls and the deed to the house. They share an emotional and moving farewell, as Claire sets off for destiny in a yellow cab. For her part, Brianna turns for comfort in Roger’s arms, and we leave them, adorably, curled up on the couch, reading A Christmas Carol.
That leaves us with Claire, who steps out of her cab and, in a deft bit of editing, into the past. My god, she finally did it. She went back through the stones in her handmade outfit and found her way to Edinburgh, where a plucky street urchin shows her the way to the print shop of Alexander Malcolm. Heart firmly in throat, Claire climbs the stairs and steps inside.
And there he is, with those chiseled cheekbones and that MacKenzie smirk. And there he goes, passing out on the floor.
As far as endings go, it’s a tease. But overall, I think Jamie took the shock well. Next week promises some extraordinary reunion love-making—once Claire’s able to revive her husband.