'Outlander' Season 3: "The Doldrums" Episode Recap
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Outlander Season 3, Episode 9. It wouldn’t be much of a recap if it didn’t.
Lest you think reuniting with your soulmate after 20 years (and two centuries and an ocean) of separation is easy, Claire and Jamie are here to tell you it’s not. At the very end of the last episode, Claire told Jamie that she’s having serious doubts. “I’m just not sure we belong together anymore,” she says on the windswept bluff overlooking Selkie island. “It’s been so much harder than I ever imagined.”
Perhaps all these lovebirds need is a change of scenery? The opening credits, always a harbinger of what’s to come, let us know we are headed in an exotic direction. A tropical-flavor version of the theme song plays over scenes of shipwreck and 18th century island life.
To the sea!
Cousin Jared has appointed Jamie steward of his alcoholic cargo onboard the Artemis, which will pursue the ship carrying young Ian. It’s a Portuguese vessel headed toward Jamaica, and Jared assures them that their nephew is probably fine because his captors won’t harm him. He’s too valuable - “a healthy male can fetch upwards of ￡30.”
There’s so much exposition going on you might miss the moment where Jamie offers to take Claire back to the stones again if she really is having second thoughts. No need she says briskly, let’s go save young Ian.
This is not likely to be a romantic cruise, however. Onboard the ship, it’s clear Claire isn’t welcome. The sailors all give her the stink eye as they ritually tap a horseshoe for good luck. Women are bad luck on a ship, a point further made when Claire treats a hurt member of the crew. His fellow sailors believe his injury is no accident - it’s an ill omen.
To further complicate matters, Fergus has smuggled a girl onboard. Turns out he’s been courting Marsali MacKimmie, Laoghaire Frasier’s eldest daughter. Fergus and Marsali want to get married, and they strong arm Jamie into letting them stay on the ship. Now, instead of snuggling into a berth with Jamie, Claire will be sharing a cabin with Marsali, who hates her. It’s all to “protect her virtue” says Jamie.
Keeping the Faith
While a seasick Jamie is busy puking his brains out, Claire has dinner with the captain in his cabin. She has rightly deduced that he wants to tell her that she’s an unwelcome presence on the ship. “By rights you and mistress MacKimmie should at this very moment be bare breasted,” he tells her. “A woman’s bare breasts calm an angry sea.” Fortunately, the figurehead on the ship’s brow will fulfill this role, but the point has been made: the threat of sexual violence will follow Claire out to sea as it has dogged her everywhere else in 18th century Scotland.
Claire is incredulous that the well-educated captain of the Artemis would indulge his men’s belief in absurd superstitions. Not only will the captain not disavow these beliefs, he needs them to help control the unruly sailors. Claire isn’t so sure that’s a good idea. What happens when they lose faith in his leadership because of a bad omen? “I would rather have them make their luck than give up all hope,” responds the captain.
The captain is a vaguely threatening figure and Claire is admirably playing the role of the no-nonsense Scully, modern rational woman. But part of me wanted to shake her and say “you in danger girl.” Drilling holes in people’s heads and and talking about germs has never won her friends before. Maybe play along now that you’re trapped at sea with dozens of antagonistic sailors? Also, I get that you’re a woman of science but that whole time-travel-through-the-stones thing has yet to be explained. Perhaps you could give a little ground on the existence of mysterious forces?
Willoughby’s Truth
Meanwhile, Willoughby convinces Jamie to try a bit of his own mysterious magic. He has a remedy for seasickness and Jamie is finally desperate enough to try it. We learn a few scenes later that it’s acupuncture. Jamie didn’t want Claire to know because he wanted her to think her ginger tea was working. (Just for the record, I tried ginger tea when suffering through pregnancy nausea and I can confirm that it does not work at all.)
Later on deck, Claire watches Willoughby use a reed brush to write in Chinese with water. They watch together as the elegant, looping characters evaporate quickly in the dry air. Claire asks him what he’s writing; a poem, he responds. He has been writing the story of his life in China, he tells her, so it won’t be forgotten. “A story told is a life lived,” he says.
Claire asks if he’ll tell her his story. Not yet, he says. “Once I tell it, I have to let it go.”
Willoughby is apparently a polarizing figure among book readers. He’s something of a racial stereotype in Voyager, his dialogue delivered in cringy Chinese dialect. I’m wary of the mystical-wisdom-of-the-east trope that he seems to embody, but so far I like Willoughby. He’s sharp, funny, and compassionate. He’s also a nice reminder to Claire that she is not the biggest outsider in this world. She speaks the language, knows the history and customs of the place, and has at her side a gorgeous, six-foot redhead who has given her a family and made it clear on multiple occasions that he would die for her.
Willoughby has survived harrowing conditions - and a healthy dose of racism - without any of those things.
Becalmed
Sure enough, the bad omens of the first scenes have borne fruit. Just as Claire and Jamie are about to get their first bit of boat nookie, they realize the ship has come to a complete stop.
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As the Artemis languishes in the placid ocean, the sailors became increasingly agitated. When the ships stores of waters spoil, open hostility begins to brew. The seamen are looking for a scapegoat and begin calling for a “Jonah,” someone they can throw overboard as a kind of offering to the sea. They find their Jonah in Hayes, a sailor loyal Jamie.
Hayes isn’t sure he performed the appropriate rituals to the sacred horseshoe, and afraid he’s going to be thrown overboard, he gets drunk and decides to throw himself into the ocean. He climbs up to high point on the mast and Jamie goes up after him to coax him down. (Apropos of nothing, I’d like to say that I am really digging Jamie’s strappy boots in this sequence. You get a really good look at them as he climbs the rigging.)
Jamie succeeds in getting Hayes safely down but the mob is still angry, and just as they’re about to descend on Jamie and his loyal men, Willoughby rings the ship’s bell. He has their attention and he begins to tell his story. In China, he was a gifted poet. He was eventually recognized by the emperor’s second wife. She wanted to have him as her personal poet, but that required him to become a eunuch. (A sailor or two in the audience has to explain this to his companion with some helpful gestures.)
Willoughby could not refuse the emperor’s gift except on pain of death, but he knew he could not let himself be castrated. “I had fallen in love with woman,” he says. “The emperor’s wife?” Claire asks. “Not a woman - all women.”
To his blushing audience, Willoughby holds forth with some 18th century sexy talk. He had fallen in love with “Their beauty blooming like lotus flowers. The taste of breasts like apricots. The scent of a navel in winter. The warmth of a mound that fills your hand like a ripe peach.”
He left China rather than face execution, and found himself in Scotland:
“a place where the golden words of my poems are taken as the clucking of hens and my brushstrokes for their scratchings. For the love of women, I came to a place where women are coarse and rank as bears. And these women disdain me as a yellow worm so that even the lowest of whores will not lie with me. I’m not surrendering my manhood. I have lost all else. Honor, livelihood, country. Sometimes, I think, not worth it.”
Having said his piece, Willoughby throws the pages he’s been composing for years off the side of the ship, where they are picked up by a sudden gust of wind. His performance seems to have broken the spell and the ship is no longer becalmed. The rain arrives just then to slake the crew’s thirst.
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In the commotion, Claire asks him how he knew the weather would change. Willoughby explains that he saw a gull flying low over the water. When the light and dry, they fly high, but when it’s heavy with moisture, they fly low near the water.
Claire thanks Yi Tien Cho for sacrificing his story for the ship. With any luck, she’s learned a lesson from him. To survive, he’s had to learn to use his knowledge of art, weather, and human nature, but to communicate in a way that his crude Scottish audience can understand. He may think his home is superior (and frankly, at least when it comes to hygiene, it probably is) but he has to be very careful about how he expresses that superiority. He also knows when to let go of the past. It would behoove Claire to do the same.
Claire and Jamie
Don’t worry, our lovers finally get their carnal moment alone in one of the ship’s storerooms. In the aftermath, Jamie tells Claire he likes the gray hair that has started to emerge as the dye washes out. “The way the light hits it,” he says, is “like a piece of silver in moonlight.”
“How could I not love a man who says such things?” says Claire.
Cuddled together, Jamie againt gets to reiterate his belief that “what it is between us never changes.” Like Willoughby, Jamie is steered by an unwavering conviction. Claire has wavered since coming back - she looks at the evidence that they were meant to be and finds it occasionally lacking - but he never has. Blind faith has its upsides.
But Outlander is never content to let Claire and Jamie canoodle happily for long. Happiness is boring, after all. The Artemis is being pursued by a hulking British naval ship, the Porpoise. At first, they are worried that the ship is there to conscript men. But it turns out the very young captain is in search of a doctor. His crew has been decimated by an illness, which Claire suspects is typhoid fever. She’s been inoculated in the 20th century and wants to help.
Dr. Frasier’s unwavering conviction is to her oath as a healer. Jamie lets her go, saying “I’ve taken an oath now and then myself and none of them lightly. There’s no talking you out of this, is there Sassenach?”
“Seems we are both older and wiser,” Claire responds. Pretty speeches about gray hair are one thing, but find yourself a man who supports your career ambitions the way Jamie does. That’s a romantic prize you’re not likely to find in the 20th century, much less the 18th.
Aboard the Porpoise, Claire discovers a crew of orderly British sailors led by mere boys. She also finds a below-decks hellscape of sick men, vomit, and death. She sets about cleaning up the mess and teaching them how to create a field hospital when she feels the ship begin to move again. They won’t be returning her to Jamie and the Artemis, the young captain explains. They need her help onboard.
And just like that, Jamie and Claire are separated again.
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