Author: Genevieve Valentine / Source: New York Times
Richard Rankin and Sophie Skelton in “Outlander.” Aimee Spinks/Starz
Outlander, Season 4, Episode 3: ‘The False Bride’
It was a dark and stormy night when the ghost of a Native American helped Claire find her way home in the rain.
That’s one of the set pieces of this week’s episode, and although the plot isn’t particularly tense — it’s largely a means to cut to the past, where Roger and Brianna have their own raging storm in 1970 — the rain itself is suitably visceral.
Claire’s traveling dress practically sinks her when it’s wet (“Outlander” doesn’t skimp on the heft of a 18th-century ensemble). Darkness presses down on every side.Then comes Otter Tooth (Trevor Carroll), visible only in the lightning, and somehow still not quite. (The effect is good — otherworldly without feeling as if Otter Tooth were consciously attempting a dramatic entrance.) And when Claire wakes, he has left a trail of her own boot prints to lead her to Jamie.
This is, at best, awkward. The book by Diana Gabaldon that provides the source material was published in 1996, before the last several years of cultural discussion about threadbare and dismissive plot devices. Among those devices: marginalized characters who appear in a story as if by magic, primarily to offer their services to the white main characters while not even asking for characterization in return. The show, however, is being made on the far side of these discussions, and in moments like these that you can feel things straining at the seams.
The episode’s ending is no better. When Myers told them this land “mostly belongs to Cherokee now … they do what they must to guard their land from whoever has a mind to take them,” Jamie said with a nod of approval that he didn’t blame them for it.
And then Jamie and Claire end the episode standing on Cherokee land, making plans to accept the Governor’s land offer and rename it Fraser’s Ridge.The music swells triumphantly to let us know all’s well. But in its own way, this moment is as jarring as watching Claire denounce slavery in last week’s episode while a slave fitted her dress. We can guess that the Cherokee whose land they’re on will come to accept them — Claire and Jamie aren’t mere protagonists, they’re heroes, and they will likely prove their mettle…
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