Visual languages, literary allusions, and the Outlander finale. Or, Frank was wrong and Jamie and Claire were right. As always.
This episode is very callback rich, to put it mildly. When they’re in bed together on their last morning at the house, Jamie more or less asks Claire if she regrets not buying the vase. She tells him, unequivocally, that she doesn’t. And they talk about bees sleeping together who just need rest, but seem dead. Jamie quotes the Yeats poem, which in book canon is part of a conversation with Bree. Frank and Bree thought Claire wanted to live in the woods alone. Jamie and Bree now know differently. Because Bree knows who she is. And Jamie has always understood Claire.
Frank was wrong is the episode theme in so many ways. Frank looks at Bree and claims to love her, but also knows she is a constant reminder of Jamie, part of why Claire can’t forget him. Jamie looks at Bree and sees Claire: their love for each other, Claire’s own capacity for love and sacrifice and care. He is still grateful to Frank, and most of all still able to look at Bree and see only good. His daughter is a person in her own right but also another way to see the love of his life. And to see the light of the moon, too, of course. (My headcanon is that Claire’s name was also inspired by Debussy’s Claire de Lune).
Where is Jamie when he asks if Claire can forgive him for bringing her here? Near water, like in The Reckoning, and Alamance. He is restless, tapping his fingers, until she takes his hand. Which she does when he admits he’s terrified of not seeing their oldest grandson again. He asks her to remember him, and we transition to one of the most joyful love scenes we’ve seen. Jamie smiles repeatedly. Whatever is ahead, the delight of being with Claire overpowers it. After, the camera lingers on their strewn clothes: their passion is the same as always.
We’ve seen a lot of Claire and Jamie’s battlefield farewells. This one is about contrasts. Jamie doesn’t promise it won’t be today. He tells Claire he loves her in Gaelic, and she says it back in the same language, the language of his heart, her heart’s home. She doesn’t need an interpreter anymore, is not an Outlander in the same way. He bows like before Prestonpans; the weight of history, their history, is still the weight of love.
Notably, Claire doesn’t bow her head in the prayer before battle. For her, faith without works is dead, which lucky for Claire is not Saint Paul, it’s from the book of James: she will go where Jamie goes and do her job. Roger is a historian, but he’s not like Frank: he follows Claire’s lead. He also understands her allusion to Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, a woman who can see the world only in a mirror. Probably also an allusion to Claire’s least fave, St. Paul, who wrote about seeing “through a glass, darkly.”
Roger tells her to hope the curse doesn’t break, because when it does the mirror cracks and the lady dies. It’s an Arthurian story. Lancelot’s also in it. Claire and Jamie are always mythical, whether they are invoking Orpheus and Eurydice (Wentworth) or The Odyssey and its separated married couple. Incidentally, the Mirror Crack’d, a line from that Tennyson poem, is also an Agatha Christie novel, which I will come back to in a minute.
Jamie tells Claire he’s only afraid of not seeing his home again. She assures him they’ll see the Ridge, and he just nods. Because he doesn’t mean a place. He means *her.* Roger suggests taking Jamie’s body home and Claire says “he is home.” Her eyes shut, her breath gusts out. She glows blue. And then we are in 1945 Inverness and see the ghost. Because the bees are only sleeping, and so are Jamie and Claire.
I watched part of “Sassenach” yesterday and what struck me most was Claire and Frank admitting they struggled to remember each other. Jamie goes to Claire because he remembers everything. And, as he’s admitted, because there are people he would enjoy haunting.
Frank was and is wrong: he’s not seeing Claire’s wartime past in the stranger outside the window. He is seeing her future and her forever. One he can’t write about accurately because he underestimates her at every turn and doesn’t give her choices. Like Tom Christie (whose name is clearly an Agatha callback) Frank claims to love Claire and writes about her, only to be incorrect. Frank, like Tom, doesn’t understand her. He silences her story. Jamie lets her tell it. And Jamie only goes to the stones because he already knows Claire would do it all again. Because he asked her what she wanted. He always does. And he lets himself haunt Frank, even if it’s not the main point. Because it’s fun. And he keeps his promise not to scare Claire.
Jamie goes back to 1945 Inverness for more than a prank. He touches the stones. He calls Claire back to him; he can’t travel to her time permanently but he can trust her. She has the spyglass again in this episode. He can trust her vision and her heart—she will see the flowers and find him. And then the flashbacks begin, which I am convinced Jamie and Claire both see. Because neither of them has forgotten a thing.
Claire told Richardson she didn’t know what it was that brought her to the past the first time, just that she is meant to be part of history. We know now what brought her. It was love. And memory. And because she told Jamie what she wanted, and he always gives it to her. Their love is not in Frank’s book, is only captured in Claire’s journal, what she calls “our history.” Claire makes such a tender and anguished face when Jamie tells her he hasn’t had everything he wants, only to relax when he admits it’s just that he hasn’t slept in a flower holding her feet. She makes it up to him in the end.
Wherever they go next—they’re alive, it’s not an afterlife, Claire’s too practical for that—history doesn’t capture it. They’re finally free of official records. It’s all a love story from here on out. Because the world is all around them. It’s just the two of them now.
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