You ever have one of those days when you run into everybody you know?
Jamie, Claire, Murtagh and Fergus rejoin the Jacobite camp just outside Inverness, and, damn, these soldiers look like freaking hell! “Five months of retreat with not enough food and brutal weather had left them broken and demoralized,” Voiceover Claire explains. "Our worst nightmare was coming true.” They are depressingly close, in both time and space, to the Battle of Culloden. Three days away and just a few miles. It’s not looking good.
Sure enough, one of those dumb, bewigged generals has a plan to confront the British at a little-known moor named Culloden. Poor Jamie! He tries everything. Doesn’t that flat ground benefit the British? The men are exhausted! Why not wait for that French gold and fuel up first! He even kneels before that spoiled fop of a prince. No luck! Charles makes a speech about god and being a man or something else. Glory calls and he wants to march into battle. Once again, he is the worst! Mark me!
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prince and jamie
But before all that, Claire discovers little Mary Hawkins trying to score some laudanum for Alex Randall—and she’s mad as hell. She knows Claire tried to talk Alex Randall out of their romance back in Paris.
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Alex is looking like a zombie from The Walking Dead. He makes those starving Jacobites look healthy! Just as Claire is about to perform some super medical magic, Alex’s brother Black Jack enters. You know that awkward feeling you get when you accidentally bump into your husband’s violent rapist? Well, you gotta hand it to Claire; she manages it with true grace. A deal is made. Claire will care for Alex if Black Jack gives her the location of Cumberland’s army. And Mary is pregnant! Frank Randall, who it looks like is really descended from the good brother, is one generation closer to existence!
Colum MacKenzie hobbles into the picture looking almost as bad as Alex. 1746 was not a great time to have a terminal illness, and this one has had enough. He asks Claire for some poison to end his pain before we cut back to Alex coughing his lungs up. Medical magic time! With smoke! In-between gasps, Alex asks his brother for his last favor: He wants Black Jack to marry his beloved.
blowing smoke
Worried over the evils he could inflict on Mary and her child, Jack just tells Claire just how much he really, really enjoyed torturing and raping Jamie. Claire, of course, just wants Mary and her child safe—to survive with that sweet widow’s pension so Frank can eventually be born into his rightful life. That’s right! Widow! We finally find out the date of Black Jack’s death: April 16, 1746. He'll bite it at Culloden Moor, which goes to show there’s always a bright side to everything.
Things happen fast from here: A dying Colum names Jamie as his son’s guardian. This will make him de facto clan leader until the boy grows up. (Big snub to Dougal!) In the least romantic ceremony possible, with an almost-dead Alex between them, Mary and Jack wed. Then, in a last-ditch effort to avoid Culloden, Jamie convinces that goddamn prince to launch a sneak attack on Cumberland’s army.
Finally, Dougal and Black Jack both watch their brothers die. Dougal tells Colum how it felt to see his big brother slowly devoured by Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome (thought it’s not called that yet). Illness is a multi-faceted betrayal; it breeds resentment in many places. Watching his hero fall sick was too much for young Dougal, and he blamed the afflicted for shattering both their childhoods with illness. But with a vicious rivalry only brothers can have, Colum cheats Dougal out of his big confession. He already drank the poison Claire gave him!
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colum dead
Then, just after Alex Randall takes his final breath, his big brother sort of loses it. What would posses a man to smash the fresh corpse of the brother he loved—possibly the only person he’s ever loved—just a moment after his death? Is it the anger at being left behind? Jack’s now been abandoned by the only one who inspired any kindness in his vicious soul. Now there’s only rage and evil—and no one left to hold it back for. Perhaps smashing Alex’s dead face is somehow Jack embracing the monster he’s now condemned to be in his brother’s absence. Or maybe he’s just pissed. Who knows? He might be the villain, but he’s anything but uncomplicated. With this one, the show’s brought something uncomfortably nuanced—a monster whose humanity makes him no less terrifying, maybe even more so.
One last thing: the prince messes up and gets lost. The sneak attack is called off. Culloden is 100% happening. Dammit, that guy is just the worst!
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