Outlander

The Happiest Place on Earth Season 7 Episode 2 Editor’s Rating 4 stars ****

Outlander

The Happiest Place on Earth Season 7 Episode 2 Editor’s Rating 4 stars ****

Holy hell, this episode of Outlander is a journey. It kicks off with a metaphorical bombshell and ends with a literal explosion. By my count, there are four major, iconic Outlander moments that go down in the course of “The Happiest Place on Earth,” plus one of the more gorgeous, loving Claire-and-Jamie scenes to date. There is so much going on I barely have time to point out that OF COURSE Bree is a Disney Adult. It tracks so hard; what an A+ reveal. I will cherish it. Although I’d like to talk about that for days, we have a lot of important items we should get to.

The episode gives us another big reveal, although this one has been long suspected: Allan Christie murdered his sister, Malva. He confesses it to Claire when she finds him weeping over her grave on the Ridge. He also admits to having sexually abused his sister since, well, basically since birth. The baby she was pregnant with? That was Allan’s. The plan to say Jamie was the father? Also Allan’s. But when Malva tried to put a stop to it — she cared about Claire too much to hurt her this way — and was ready to tell everyone the truth, Allan put a stop to her. He goes on and on about how much he loved her and how she should’ve loved only him, and Claire tries not to vomit. It’s disturbing, to say the absolute least. We’ll all need a shower after watching it. When Allan goes to shoot himself, Claire stops him. She refuses to let Tom’s sacrifice be for nothing, which, I don’t know, is A Choice. But it doesn’t matter: Suddenly, Allan keels over to reveal an arrow in his back; Young Ian heard the whole thing and couldn’t stand to let Allan live. Man, the Fraser men are just murdering left and right these days. Auntie and Nephew drag that body out into the woods, where Mrs. Bug comes upon them and offers to help bury him. She didn’t really like Allan from the get-go, which is hilarious. Anyway, now both Claire and Jamie have dead bodies they are keeping secret from one another (there is not one mention of Richard Brown, by the way), so that’s cool.

Anyway, no one cares about Allan. He is never mentioned again, even in passing! We are all the better for it! There’s something much more pressing taking up Claire and Jamie’s time: Bree and Roger need to travel back to the future. And for real this time. No Fraser’s Ridge–wide good-bye just to have the MacKenzies wind up where they started! Roger and Bree have blue-balled us one too many times! Things actually are quite urgent: Bree gives birth to baby Mandy, and after an adorable sequence in which Jamie introduces his newborn granddaughter to the horse he’ll one day teach her to ride (I would honestly watch a full hour of Jamie holding a baby and talking to horses, and I am not exaggerating) and Claire doing the same, but with her medical equipment, Claire deduces that Mandy has a heart defect. It would be easily fixable back in the time they came from, but here, Claire can do nothing about it. Without surgery, Mandy will die. They have to go through the stones.

So, the Frasers and MacKenzies head to Wilmington to procure some gems, as time travelers are wont to do. Before we get to the time-traveling portion of the proceedings, there is another huge moment that takes place back in Wilmington that has to do with one Mister Lord John Grey.

No, I’m not talking about the scene in which Brianna stumbles upon Lord John and a post-puberty William, and Bree is emotionally moved because she is meeting her brother for the first time even if he doesn’t know it, but it turns out her brother is super-intense and no fun at all and simply cannot wait to deal with all the rebels by way of “iron and blood.” And I’m not talking about the moment Jamie lays eyes on his two children talking to each other, although that is nice. I’m talking about Jamie and Lord John breaking up, friend-wise. It’s crushing! Neither of them wants to do it, but when Jamie goes to visit Lord John and Jamie once again affirms that he will not be fighting for the crown, both men agree that being associated with the other could get them killed. “Damn this war!” Lord John says. It is very hot. Both men are teary-eyed as they say good-bye. That is also hot. I don’t condone cheating, but, like, if Jamie and Lord John had made out in this moment, I wouldn’t have hated it.

Instead, Lord John, knowing that Jamie is on the hunt for a jewel to give to Bree, gifts him the sapphire that Jamie had given him after retrieving it off Selkie Island while in Ardsmuir Prison — the sapphire Lord John has been wearing around ever since to remind him of his and Jamie’s friendship. If that isn’t high romance, I do not know what is! Alas, that very specific version of events will have to remain in my Outlander fanfic. The two men are heartbroken that they are on opposing sides of this war, but something tells me this isn’t the end for them — especially since they’re already making so much out of the possibility of Jamie and William meeting on the battlefield. When that happens, because you know it will, are all the handsome men going to be dramatically holding back tears again? If so, I might not survive it. Or will it reinvigorate my life force to heights heretofore unimaginable? Time will tell.

With Lord John’s sapphire added to the other gems Roger collected around town, there’s nothing stopping the four MacKenzies from going through the stones. While I did make light of the lengthy good-bye Roger and Bree got the last time they were planning on going through the stones, the lengthy good-byes here are actually quite moving. Everyone is on their A game tonight, babes! First, Jamie and Bree take a father-daughter stroll among the fireflies to talk about William a little bit and the future some, and, surprisingly, Mickey Mouse and Disneyland a lot. Just for the record, Jamie’s semi-appalled reaction to learning that parents take their children to hug a giant rat in the future isn’t totally off base. Jamie and Claire also share a sweet moment together: Jamie offers Claire a gem he’s saved, giving her the chance to go with Bree back to her own time, but Claire tosses it out the window. She loves the big dummy, she’s not leaving him!

But it’s the conversations the next day, at the stones, that will really tug at your heartstrings. Claire tells Roger to “look after our girl,” and Jamie tells Roger he’s proud of him. Roger assures them that he’ll tell the kids all the stories about their grandparents he can (“Maybe leave out the one about the snake bite,” Jamie notes). Jamie refers to Mickey Mouse as Michael, which is objectively hilarious.

Claire tells Bree that they’ve had to say good-bye before and found their way back to each other, so who knows if this is really the last time they’ll see one another — there’s always hope. Jamie tells Bree, well, he can’t really get any words out when he has to say good-bye to his daughter. Bree, instead, fills the silence with a gorgeous sentiment about how she’ll always carry Jamie with her. “Nothing is lost, only changed,” she tells him. And then, they’re gone. Claire and Jamie’s faces after watching the people they love most in this world just vanish are ones of complete hollowness. How do you recover from that? Well, as Jamie says, the only reason he can go on living after this kind of loss is because of Claire; otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to continue. It is bleak as hell.

But if that sequence in front of the stones didn’t crush you enough, the following scene between Claire and Jamie in bed certainly will. It’s honestly one of the most moving scenes in the whole series. I can’t stop thinking about it. And really it works so well because it’s happening seven seasons in between two characters who we’ve seen face unfathomable situations before, but here they are facing one that seems so utterly devastating — you can feel it changing them throughout the whole scene. The fact that it takes place in bed and ends with Jamie holding Claire in a position that, like, we’ve definitely seen them have sex in before, but this time we’re seeing a different layer of vulnerability, is such a gorgeous choice. As Claire begins to buckle under the loss of her child and grandchildren, Jamie begins to list all the people they’ve lost, but takes her into his arms (“Can you bear it if I touch you?”) and tells her to weep for as long as she needs. And she does! Honestly, I’ve run out of words that mean gutting, but whatever that word is, this scene is that.

But babes! We are not done with the misery and trauma yet! No sir! We get, like, a one-minute montage of life on the Ridge post-MacKenzies and healing and happiness, and then (dun dun duuun …) Claire finds Wendigo Donner in her surgery. Wendigo escaped and attempted to go through the stones, but he got drunk and it didn’t work. Claire calmly tries to tell him that it takes focus and to get the fuck out of her house, but Wendigo needs more than just stone advice — he needs gems. He and two goons he’s hired hold Claire and Jamie hostage as they search the house for gems — things get awkward when they find gold bricks in Mr. and Mrs. Bug’s belongings, but that is for another time! — and grow angrier the longer the search goes on. Eventually, the two goons start smashing up Claire’s ether stash, and you know, even before Wendigo stupidly lights one of Bree’s matches to help them see better, exactly what is going to happen. From the moment Claire started making that ether, we knew it would come back to haunt them in some way. And haunt them it does: The entire house explodes into flames. Claire and Jamie really can’t catch a break, can they?

Outlander Recap: Chekhov’s Ether