OUTLANDER, 3.3 — ‘All Debts Paid’
By: Frank Collins
Tags: Culture, Television, Outlander, Review, TV

Frank certainly touches a nerve when he accuses Claire of jealousy. The shoe is definitely on the other foot in this confrontation, and Frank confesses that “maybe I wanted to give you a taste of your own medicine, Dr. Randall.” Physician, heal thyself. Frank suggests their marital bedroom is “far too crowded already” to support any notion that he’s made love to Sandy there. What’s painful is that Claire doesn’t allow Frank to have the happiness of a loving relationship outside their marriage, and he eschews divorce to stay with her out of devotion to their daughter Brianna.

We reach Brianna’s 16th birthday (now played by Sophie Skelton) and then her own graduation in 1966. Claire’s kept her love for Jamie alive vicariously through Brianna all these years. Frank now seeks his divorce. He wants to marry Sandy and move back to England. Having paid his debts in full, and with Brianna a grown woman, he wants to live the rest of his life “with a wife that truly loves me.” He asks if, without Brianna and over time, she could have forgotten Jamie? “That amount of time doesn’t exist,” she tearfully explains. By the time Frank’s been killed in a car accident, Claire’s declaration of love seems rather hypocritical. A truly exhausted Frank has discharged his duty but sadly does not get happiness as his reward.

At Ardsmuir prison in 1755, Colonel Harry Quarry (Jay Villiers) assures his replacement Major John William Grey (David Berry) that the list of wine merchants he’s left will supply something to keep out the cold, while trying to fill his time hunting for grouse and seeking the hidden gold that Bonnie Prince Charlie left behind in Scotland. Presumably, this is a reference to the Loch Arkaig treasure, six caskets of Spanish gold that remained from a shipment sent to support the Jacobite uprising but then left in trust to Macpherson of Cluny after Culloden and Charles left Scotland. Not all of the gold found its way back to Charles and there’s a convoluted history of various attempts to recover it.

The treasure’s recovery would elevate the status of its finder in the eyes of the Crown, and Grey files this away for future consideration as Quarry confirms that “society” in this cold, damp prison will consist of conversation with his fellow officers and one prisoner, a certain ‘Red Jamie Fraser’. Grey’s sympathies are evident from the start as he regards the bedraggled, chained Jamie, once called “the very devil himself” by terrified redcoats, as merely a “poor devil now.”

Known as ‘Mac Dubh’, Jamie represents his fellow prisoners and petitions Grey for better conditions and medical attention, particularly for his friend Murtagh (Duncan Lacroix), an ailing survivor of Culloden. Gabaldon didn’t allow Murtagh such a privilege in her books, killing him off at Culloden, but Ronald D. Moore and his writing team have developed the character and made him more pivotal to the ongoing story. While we see him shipped off to the colonies at the end of this episode, Moore’s acknowledged that we’ll catch up with Murtagh again. As he tends to Murtagh’s rat bites with milk thistle, Jamie’s painfully reminded that this herbalist knowledge was taught to him by “a lass who knew a fair amount about healing.” Claire is gone but not forgotten.

Grey eventually takes Quarry’s advice to dine with Jamie, in order to secure his cooperation, and thus begins a growing friendship and respect between them. Roberts’ script allows this development plenty of time and offers two fine performances from Sam Heughan and David Berry. The discussions move from the efficacy of cats for reducing the rat population and, inadvertently, a source of food for the prisoners, to the more intimate and confessional mode of lost loves. Jamie wonders why Grey was sent to replace Quarry as governor, and it’s only later when we get to this heartfelt unburdening that there’s an intimation of what might have happened.