'Outlander' Season 3: "The Bakra" Recap
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Outlander Season 3, episode 12. It wouldn’t be much of a recap if it didn’t.
When I started watching Outlander, one of the things I liked best about the show was how deftly it handled the mystical-mysterious-magical elements at the core of the story. Sure, Claire had time traveled through some stones after watching women do a pagan dance in the forest, but the show kept it light on the juju.
Most of that first season played like a thought experiment with very high production values: How would a self-reliant, opinionated, war-seasoned modern woman like Claire navigate the 18th century?
Now, I regret to say, in the penultimate episode of season 3, we found ourselves awash in pent-up juju. There are witch doctors and magic herbs and seers and a prophecy and precious gems with prophetic powers, not to mention a series of coincidences that will spin even the heads of die-hard fans.
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I sincerely hope this show, when it is finished getting Jamie and Claire through the trials of their Caribbean journey, pulls back on breakneck speed of this plot. Must someone threaten to rape Claire in every episode? Must Jamie be dragged off to his certain death yet again? Let’s get them settled somewhere again and exploring the realities of marriage in a two-career household - Claire as a doctor, Jamie as a... well, whatever it is Jamie is.
But first, a recap of this insane installment of the Frasers' New World adventures.
We Find Out What Happens To Ian
The episode opens with the scene we saw from the shore in episode eight: Young Ian being dragged onto the Portuguese ship the Brucia. He’s told he will be turned over to “the Bakra” when he makes it to Jamaica, because whatever it is “likes young boys.” When he arrives on the island, he’s thrown into a deep, dark dungeon. Two boys there tell him that no one taken to see the Bakra ever returns.
Eventually Ian is dragged to a giant pink mansion and ushered into a lavish bathroom. In a center tub, a woman is bathing in blood. (I told you this episode goes off the rails.) Surprise: It’s Geillis Duncan! We last saw her at the hands of an angry mob screaming "burn the witch"; she had sacrificed herself to save Claire and we all assumed she was burned at the stake. Turns out she’s alive and well and apparently eating teenage boys in the islands.
Don’t worry - the blood is just goat’s blood. It’s some kind of beauty treatment that all the 18th century bloggers are going crazy for.
Geillis feeds Ian some truth serum along with pretty cakes (“a witch doctor makes it for me”) and then asks Ian how he came by the treasure and whether he took a sapphire that she says is missing from the box. (Quick reminder, earlier this season, when Jamie was in prison, he swam out to Selkie Island, retrieved the sapphire, and then swam back with it. John Gray eventually took possession of the stone.)
Once Geillis has discovered that Jamie is Ian’s uncle, she tries to compel Ian to have sex with her, an act of coercion that she suggests would lead to his death. “Virgins have such power inside,” she says. “Come on lad, it’s not such a bad way to go.”
Just in the nick of time, Ian remembers that he’s not a virgin. (Thank you adorable bar wench in Edinburgh!) Geillis doesn’t seem to mind. “Good,” she answers, “then you’ll know what to do.”
Jamie and Claire Come Ashore
Now it’s our protagonists’ turn to make landfall in Jamaica. They start looking for Ian right away. They’re told he might have been sold into slavery, which means they must immediately make their way to Kingston’s slave markets. Claire is horrified by the grotesque realities of an institution she’s only read about in history books.
While watching an auction, she is overcome with rage and revulsion and hurls herself at the slave owner and auctioneer. Jamie comes to her rescue and, to appease the men she attacked, he purchases the slave she sought to protect.
Claire is horrified to see her name on the deed of sale of a human being and wants to set him free immediately. She can’t, Jamie explains, because that would leave this man vulnerable to anyone who wanted to snatch him up and claim he was a runaway. “Keeping” him was the only way to protect him; they would find a way to free him later.
The slavery scenes are intensely uncomfortable. It is awful to imagine the actors, the crew, and the extras attempting to accurately portray the horrors of the Middle Passage. They can’t soft pedal these scenes because to gloss over these crimes would be deeply wrong. To ignore the horrors altogether would be a grave omission.
The evil of slavery clearly infects every aspect of island life, turning everyone who benefits from human bondage, however tangentially, into a repulsive monster. That much Outlander gets right.
But in a show like this, so centered on the love story of two white characters, these slaves are merely scenery, their sorrow, their vast suffering is used to heighten the drama for Jamie and Claire. It is wildly inappropriate to make genocide a prop in your swashbuckling romance.
The whole scenario seems designed to further prove Claire and Jamie’s instinctive goodness, but there is something deeply perverse about making these white people the heroes of a slave story. Still worse, Jamie and Claire ask their new slave to help them in their search for Ian. No intentions are good enough to absolve anyone from the crime of profiting off human slavery.
Margaret and Archie
Turns out the troubled soothsayer Margaret Archibald (whom Claire treated in Edinburgh) - along with her exploitive brother Archie - has made it safely to the islands, and their wealthy employer is none other than Geillis. (I told you to brace yourself for the absurd coincidences - they’re coming fast now.)
Geillis explains that the treasure was gathered by Dougal MacKenzie, who died gallantly,she says, in the battle of Culloden. Geillis wants those three sapphires in particular because apparently there’s a prophecy that states that when a seer holds all three, he/she will be able to foretell when the new Scottish king will rise.
“And if it’s 500 years hence,” asks Archie mystified. He apparently doesn’t believe a single word of the nonsense he’s been peddling via his sister. The irony is Geillis seems to believe Margaret is the real thing.
“Don’t concern yourself with that,” answers an imperious Geillis.
Margaret is deeply troubled. The treasure, she says, is “born of blood.”
Off to the Ball
The island’s new British governor is conveniently throwing a party - what more perfect place to search for a lost loved one than a formal gala? Off our characters go, Claire in one of her Versailles gowns, Jamie in a formal wig (oddly becoming on him - literally nothing looks bad on that guy), Fergus and Marsali, Yi Tien Cho, and their new slave, who’s going to ask around in the slave population.
As they wait on line, some women come over to Yi Tien Cho and ask “is he real?” He’s prepared to play the part of Chinese court jester, a walking curiosity who distracts the party guests while Jamie and Claire look for Ian. This was the first time Mr. Willoughby’s character made me uncomfortable - his ethnicity reduced to stereotype and that stereotype used as a plot device.
After some heavy flirting (and a sexy eye contact session that passes as the closest thing to a love scene in this episode), our merry band gets to the front of the line. Lo and behold, the governor is none other than John Gray. He’s as stunned to see them as they are to see him. Gray, they notice, is wearing the third sapphire, which he’s had made into a waistcoat bauble.
Gray is as surprised as anyone to see Claire, whom he was told was dead. “It certainly is a pleasure to meet the love that was [Jamie’s] every heartbeat,” he says gallantly. He is perhaps more surprised that Jamie has told Claire about William - and, presumably, about Gray’s secret homosexuality.
Geillis and Claire finally meet and Geillis tells us her survival story. She wasn’t dragged off immediately to the pyre to be burned as a witch. Since she was pregnant at the time, she was allowed to carry her baby to term. “They let me hold him,” Geillis says of her son. “He was as warm as his father’s balls.”
Dougal, he of the warm fatherly balls, comes to fetch the baby and bust her out of prison. “Why are men such fools,” Geillis asks Claire. “You could lead them by the cock anywhere. Give them a bairn and you have them by the balls again. But it’s all you are to them - whether they’re coming in or going out - a cunt.”
After Dougal’s death at Culloden (or more accurately, at Jamie’s hands right before Culloden), Geillis married a plantation owner, now deceased, and moved to Jamaica. She is now the wealthy mistress Abernathy of Rose Hall. She promises to help Claire find Ian. Claire brings Geillis to Jamie, who is talking again to John Gray.
The Prophecy
Geillis immediately notices the sapphire and puts it all together at dizzying speed. She orchestrates an impromptu public fortunetelling session with Margaret and bullies John Gray into taking part. Margaret needs to hold something personal, Geillis says, relieving John of his sapphire. Conveniently, Archie has the other two in hand and Margaret holds them all. “This will bring death,” she warns desperately, before delivering the prophecy:
“When twice 1,200 moons have coursed between man’s attack and women’s curse, and when the issue is cut down, then will a Scotsman wear a crown.”
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Geillis and Archie hustle off to discuss. “Twice 1,200 moons” is 200 years. A woman’s curse is childbirth, so they reason that a man’s attack is conception. The issue is the child. So it follows that a king will rise when a 200 year old baby is killed.
Archie assumes this is nonsense but Geillis says she’ll figure it out. (We, of course, know that Brianna Randall was conceived and born 200 years a part. Good thing she’s safe in 1968!) Geillis is practically rubbing her hands together gleefully at the prospect of this murder-for-resurrection.
I’m a little sad at the reduction of Geillis to a cartoon villainess. She was an intriguing character in season 1. A time traveler like Claire, she used her knowledge of the period to manipulate those around her, to buy herself some power in a time when woman had very little. To find this power twisted into something so malignant feels a little retrograde, a sly endorsement of the 17th century view of woman like Claire and Geillis as evil witches.
The Chase
Fergus and Marsali have escaped the party for a makeout sesh outside and spot the British Captain Leonard arriving, presumably to arrest Jamie. (It’s not entirely clear to my why a guy who lost most of his crew, including all the officers, would be so preoccupied with fugitive Jamie. Doesn’t he at least have some paperwork to fill out? The British navy is a bureaucracy after all.)
Jamie and Claire and co. escape just in the nick of time. They find their slave outside, who tells them that he discovered that Ian was bought by mistress Abernathy. Claire realizes that’s Geillis - “she lied to me,” she gasps. “I told you she had a wicked soul,” says Jamie.
Their slave has also discovered that there is a place for free men in the mountains near Geillis’s property, Rose Hall, and he parts ways with Claire and Jamie to head up the path to freedom.
And then, just at the end, Captain Leonard finally catches up with them and drags Jamie off despite Claire’s furious reminder that she saved the Captain’s men. “Find Ian!” he barks as he’s hauled off to English prison.
Next week, the season finale. Will Jamie and Claire be reunited (again!) or is another cliffhanger separation in store for our love birds?
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