http://www.vulture.com/2016/05/outlanders-caitriona-balfe-on-claires-grief.html http://www.vulture.com/2016/05/outlander-recap-season-2-episode-7.html http://www.vulture.com/2016/05/outlander-star-chamber-set-design.html http://www.vulture.com/2016/06/outlander-stephen-walters-on-kissing-claire.html http://www.vulture.com/2016/06/outlander-recap-season-2-episode-12.html http://www.vulture.com/2016/07/outlander-graham-mctavish-dougal-knife-fight.html http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/18/outlander-recap-geillis-trial-witch/?_r=0

The friendship between the two women, though brief, is powerful because it exists as beloved childhood friendships once did. The magic of being understood without having to explain yourself, to be known by someone before they’ve even come to know you, is an occurrence so prized in adulthood that it’s been almost entirely co-opted by romance. Claire and Jamie have love and fidelity and have sworn to protect the other, but when all is said and done, it’s Geillis Duncan who gives herself over to the angry mob to keep Claire safe, an act of love that stands unrivaled. Geillis’s choice changes the trajectory of many lives, and allows for the escape of Jamie and Claire. In “The Reckoning,” while acting as the show’s narrator, Jamie speaks of every man making a choice between right and wrong and that the sum of those choices becomes your life. And while that’s not necessarily wrong, it misses the heart of what much of marriage is. Marriage, at its core, is making the same choice over and over, every day, every moment. The choice is not between right or wrong or love and hate or life and death. It’s about whether you want the person you’re with or not. Marriage is choosing the former, even if you suspect the latter. And once they’re free of the bloodthirsty mob, Claire and Jamie realize the breadth of what that choice entails. It is when they’re free of the frenzy that Claire finally admits to Jamie the truth of who she is. He asks if she’s a witch, and she tells him the whole of her story. She explains why she knows what she knows and how she can walk amid dying men and remain untouched. She tells him how she understands that this truth is likely more unbelievable than any lie she might tell him and declares that she’s no witch, but a time traveler. But, because he’s Jamie, true and good and honest, he believes her. And the next day, when Jamie asks Claire if she’s ready to go home, it’s not Lallybroch that lays over the horizon, but Craigh na Dun, the stones through which Claire slipped out of her time and into his. He leaves her, telling her to return to her time, as there’s nothing for her in Scotland. After he’s gone, Claire examines her two hands, her two rings, her two love lines, her two lives, and she makes a choice. She chooses Jamie. She’ll make that choice again and again, just as Jamie will, an infinite number of times, because that’s what marriage is.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/27/outlander-lallybroch_n_7155096.html

Claire, Jamie’s wife, plays the role of Scotland in their marriage: She may mime deference when she needs to and she is still learning to play by an alien society’s rules. But, like the Scottish people, she is not actually cowed and demands to be taken seriously — heard, seen, understood. Sometimes, she’s too brash and stubborn, but neither Jamie or the English give ground easily. All progress and compromise is a struggle, and sometimes compromise is just not possible.

With some shows, I find myself thinking about what the people are doing when they’re not on screen because their inner lives and agendas are so rich and dynamic. “Outlander” isn’t that kind of show for me, but I think about it all the time, partly because its many collisions produce so many interesting frictions. We see Claire’s 20th Century baggage collide with Jamie’s 18th Century ideas about what’s masculine and what’s feminine, what’s proper and what’s not.