the thing about the time travelers is that being uprooted from their own time to another fundamentally breaks every single one of them. It’s the shock of it, the way the magic and the experience utterly changes them, remakes them into something that isn’t exactly human anymore and then puts them back together and says “now go try to live your life again.”
it doesn’t matter if they fall through like claire, if they smash through with a bloody purpose like geillis, or they walk through with a prayer like brianna. they all belong to the faeries now and there’s nothing they can do to get around it. down to the way they speak to each other - roger says some pretty fairy words that donner recognizes, speaking a language only they understand. claire’s magical knowledge can’t save her from being hunted and tried as a witch, a faerie, a traitor, a murderess. ottertooth’s cassandra esque warnings of the future do nothing but cause strife among the same people he wanted to save.
even their morality has wholly changed into something else, something inhuman. roger says it himself in the premiere; when you’re scared and alone and desperate and there’s no way to get home, your sense of morality shifts and twists in a vain attempt to protect yourself.
so a doctor becomes a murderess and a freedom fighter becomes a slaver and a holy man watches while a woman and her child are drowned and an independent modern yank loses every shred of what made her stand out and a man who fought the never ending death march of genocide goes back in time and stands frozen as he listens to a woman just like him be tortured and raped and he stands there and does nothing because he’s small and tired and old and he wasn’t even supposed to land in this year and he didn’t even meet his own fucking people anyway and hes scared, so scared, and he just wants to go home.
and geillis and ottertooth and donner are all forced to die in this terrifying, human world. they can never go back to the realm of the faeries because it never even existed. claire going back does not heal her, it breaks her even more. there’s no going back, there’s no going forward, because they are the ones that are wrong now. and all their worst traits get amplified and all their best traits twist into something wicked until geillis’ fanatical devotion to the independence of her people - to the detriment of all others - is what gets her killed. ottertooth’s steely resolve does nothing but get him stubbornly stuck alone in that storm. and donner’s fear for the future eats him whole, and a man that shouldn’t even be in this time lights a match that doesn’t even exist yet, and realizes that his fear will never get him back home but if all he does is drop the match and let the flame consume him, he can find his damning release all the same.
