'Outlander' Attempts Full Circle with "Abies Fraseri" & "Muskets, Liberty & Sauerkraut"
'Outlander' attempts to come full circle with Episodes 3 and 4, but only sticks part of the landing.
In Outlander’s latest episode, “Muskets, Liberty & Sauerkraut,” just as Jamie Fraser and a-no-longer-so-young Ian Murray (John Bell) arrive at Fraser’s Ridge, Rachel, the Quaker young woman now Ian’s second wife, tells him the American Continental Army has raided, destroyed, and sabotaged many Native American villages. Among them, they targeted the Mohawk community, where Ian’s former wife, Wahionhaweh, and son, Tehiokas neh To’Tis (Swiftest of Lizards) live. Ian insists on traveling north to see what has happened; Rachel and Oggy go with him – to make sure he stays connected to them. They’ll be back to take Ian’s late father’s place fighting by Jamie’s side in the Battle of King’s Mountain (a real battle the Americans won).
They are a third young “satellite” family; to wit, son, daughter, grandchildren – like Roger, Brianna, Jem, and Mandy; and Fergus, Marsali, and their seven children. Jamie utters a prayer in Gaelic, wishing them a safe journey.
The prayer is about an Irish wandering saint who made pilgrimage a central aspect of a spiritual or ethically meaningful life, doing good in the name of Christ, a self-imposed exile to create a new, restored life with others, from which they might wander again. It’s said this archetypal myth has become a post-modern form of personhood, and ties to others through love, time, and work. It is peculiarly appropriate for our unstable era, subject to natural catastrophe, devastating, ruthless, ferocious wars, attempted genocide, unmitigated capitalism and its gross inequalities, and traumatic individual, tribal, massive flight as refugee immigrants seeking safety, a place to build houses again, to re-make needed roots, obligations, and responsibilities, again.
That this is the one Jamie naturally chooses, embedded in Highland religious practices, is a beautiful way to express the core, resonant significance of the many time-traveling historical romance novels of our era. As the reappearance of literal things (objects, books, people, “strange” clothing to a different era, jewelry, and pictures and photographs) are emotional authentications binding people’s memories together, blending different eras (1739, 1743-46, 1947-67) and three continents (Europe, North America, Africa), this magical mode is continually at work not only through ritual stones, but cars, trains, ships, horses, sheer walking.
(Gabaldon is aware that she adds these repetitive patterns and incidents across the books and seasons in her Outlandish Companions, and in the features on the DVDs.)
Among the most lovely is the song Gwyllyn the Bard (Scottish musician Gillebrìde MacMillan) plays one evening at an annual gathering of the Mackenzie clan at the close of Season 1’s “The Way Out,” titled “The Woman of Balnain.”
Episode 3 is almost wholly taken up with characters meeting for the first time or meeting again, and either having to explain who they are (and persuade others to believe them) or tell of the identity they seek and the quest for who or what they have come to. There is perhaps a bit too much of this, done in what felt at times like a mystery-story way, so too much attention might make a viewer sense the ridiculous or overdone when yet another new person is found or a new explanation is required. In Episode 4, Fergus (César Domboy) is informed he is the legitimate heir of Count St Germaine, an arrogant aristocrat. Fergus’ skeptical dismissal, “Preposterous?!” would have carried more weight if this unexpected news had not turned out to be true.
I like how he said, when reminded the count was somebody, “I am already the son of a great man” (Jamie). He is following in his true father’s footsteps by having become a publisher and printer of seditious pamphlets.
Jamie and Claire acquire a new granddaughter, Frances or Fanny, perhaps one of the two daughters of their long-lost and thought dead daughter, Faith, and learn of a Jane who died tragically. Florrie May Wilkinson enacts the role well. There are two quiet sequences of scenes and dialogues between Claire (now a grandmotherly 62) and Francis (age 10), as Claire teaches Fanny the uses of an 18th-century microscope and about pregnancy, childbirth, and reassures Fanny she can stay with them as long as she wishes as a member of their family. So too Jamie has several scenes alone with Frances: they visit the Lallybroch graveyard, and he shows family cairns; they walk in the woods together, he mildly teaching the way he once did with Brianna.
The emphasis is again on Claire as healer, surgeon, and concerned neighbor. A young Black woman, enormously pregnant and in agony, is brought by a woman friend to Claire’s door. Claire discovers twins, one of whom is in a breech birth position, with the other tightly wrapped around the mispositioned baby. Her husband comes in and attempts to intervene, worried that somehow they will find themselves re-enslaved. His wife is not the first woman in this TV series to beg her husband, imposing his authority on her to allow her to save her life. One of the rare overt fantasy moments occurs as one twin is stillborn, and Claire is frantic with efforts to apply CPR.
Her memories of what happened to Faith (who was born before the seventh month of pregnancy) become vivid, and we see Master Raymond (Dominique Pinon), the apothecary, telling her of a light that emanates from some people, enabling inexplicable powers. The memory seems to evoke a bluish air, and the baby stirs to life again. It is a touching moment deepened by her memories of her traumatic grief.
Once again, Bree and Roger are given short shrift and space. Frank’s book about the Scots in the American Revolutionary War is another connecting object. Still, it was a false note to have Claire attribute some of her first husband’s warning prophecies to spite. Throughout the first four seasons, his scholarship was presented as earnest, the book’s hard work, and acts of integrity. But the most irritating moment was Jamie barking with anger at Claire for having gone to bed with Lord John Grey (who was providing Claire the needed protection from hanging as a spy-by-marriage when they thought Jamie dead). It was petty how Heughan plays it; another spat becomes the occasion of a love-making scene whose success is cheapened by this pragmatic usage.
Again, much time is given to Jamie’s biological son, William, as he seeks a social identity he can live with. Together with the thin story of his attraction to his half-brother’s flirtatious widow, with the botanical name Amaranthus, it is undeniably the secondary story of the hour. Charles Vandervaart has the gravitas needed but lacks the larger-than-life presence of the young Willie in Season 3’s “Of Lost Things.” Charles Butler’s pout, sulkiness, and large, dark yearning eyes left an untransferrable impression.
The series needed the same actor to achieve a proper full circle. Every time in these last couple of seasons, when an actor from the first four seasons returned to the series, it stirred as if an electric current jumped out at us from its first magnificent four years. (Case in point: Season 7’s Lotte Verbeck, as the murderous witch-like bewitching Geillis Duncan.) Steven Cree as the now-aged Ian Murray was last seen fleetingly in the fourth season (and without the thickening of Laura Donnelly as the tenacious protective Jenny), yet his reappearance as the still loyal, trusting patient man dying, sitting with Sam Heughan as brothers once more, is the kind of thing this final season calls out for and as yet sadly lacks.
Outlander Season 8 continues with new episodes on Fridays on Starz through the beginning of May 2026. Seasons 1 through 7 are available to stream.
(I am much indebted to Simon Weil, The Need for Roots [L’Enracinement], Routledge, 1952; Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, Princeton, 1997; and Duane Meyers, The Highland Scots of North Carolina, 1732-1776, North Carolina University Press, 1961)
