There's something about modern music played over period scenes that's just so...exhilarating? Wonderfully alarming?
Not sure what the word is, but we did love how tonight's episode of Outlander ended with a Marshall and Sarah cover of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."
Bob Dylan originally released the song in 1963, which means it's perfectly reasonable for it to have been playing as Claire and Brianna packed up and headed back to the U.S. (even if this cover actually came out in 2012), but it was a little more jarring to hear it as Jamie, with tears in his (and our) eyes, bid farewell to his son and headed back to Scotland as a free man in the 1760s. But jarring in a good way, because we then googled the song and have now been listening to it on repeat.
Tonight's episode, "Of Lost Things" brought us ever so closer to Jamie and Claire inevitably reuniting as we finally caught up to where Claire, Brianna, and Roger were in the season two finale on their quest to find Jamie. Meanwhile, Jamie was dealing with his new life as a groom for a wealthy family.
It would have gone fine if it weren't for the family's 17 year-old daughter Geneva who took a liking to Jamie (because who doesn't?) and decided she was going to have sex with him before her arranged marriage to the much older Lord Ellesmere. Jamie tried to decline, but she kinda sorta blackmailed him into doing it, and thus Jamie and Geneva had some sex (in a scene very much...softened...from the book).
Imagine Jamie's surprise when, several months later, Geneva came back for a visit with a very large bump and a bit of a smirk on her face. A few months after that, Jamie was called in the middle of the night to get the horses ready, because Geneva was in labor and not doing well.
The baby was fine, but Geneva ended up bleeding so much that she died, and Lord Ellesmere was pissed because he was pretty sure he couldn't have gotten Geneva pregnant in the first place. He was about to even shoot the baby, until Jamie shot him, and Geneva's mother was offering Jamie the chance to go home but he wanted to stay to see the baby who was definitely not his son or anything grow up.
All of a sudden, it was like seven years later, and everyone was whispering that little Willie, Lord of Ellesmere, was spending so much time with the groom that he was starting to look like the groom, and thus it was time for Jamie to leave before more people got suspicious. Jamie even heartbreakingly offered himself to John Grey in exchange for him taking care of Willie. Grey declined the offer but agreed to help, and all of that happened in a matter of minutes to the point where we were exhausted when we should have been dealing with all that heartbreak. And that was only one half of the story.
In Scotland, 200 years later, Claire, Roger, and Brianna have been desperately searching prison records and trying to track Jamie after Culloden. The closer they get, the more they individually start to freak out a little bit. Claire has a job and a life and a daughter she's finally feeling closer to, and Brianna has had an entire life with the guy she thought was her dad, and now she's finally getting to know her mom better and her mom's thinking of leaving her for the past. And then Roger knows that when they find Jamie, Claire and Brianna (or mostly Brianna) probably won't need to live in his house anymore. So everybody wants to find Jamie but also kind of doesn't want to find Jamie.
In the end, Claire and Brianna decided they'd searched enough, and it was time to go back to the U.S.
The two stories together were kind of strange. Jamie's spanned a decade while Claire's was just a few weeks or so, and they just didn't quite feel like they belonged in the same episode, but tha'ts just kind of an inherent problem for this part of the season. The show has to get both Jamie and Claire to the same place before their inevitable reunion, and Claire's 20 years passed slightly less eventfully than Jamie's did (but only slightly).
With the way "Voyager" was written, it makes sense that either they had to divide it into two with the reunion as the season finale, or do it as one and just really have to sail through much of the story (pun for the back half of the season not intended). And while this is all probably for the best and it probably would have been tedious to have this first half as an entire season, it would have been nice to spend more time with some of these characters, and to not feel quite so rushed.
Scroll down to for scoop on this season so far!
Outlander airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on Starz.