Recap of Outlander
Season 1, Episode 3:
The Way Out
When Claire saves a boy's life, her abilities as a healer puts her at odds with the town priest and deepens the suspicions against her. After hearing a folk-tale, Claire realizes that she may be able to travel back through the stones to Frank.
Tropes
- Artistic License – Pharmacology: Lily-of-the-valley does exist in Scotland, and is probably more common than wild garlic (whose leaves, not berries, are sometimes confused with the poisonous plant). Treating with digitalis (foxglove), which has a similar heart-effective poison, is risky at best, and might worsen the symptoms at worst.
- Bait-and-Switch: Claire convinces Jamie to help her free the Tanner's boy from the pillory without him being forced to rip his ear open. Jamie starts a loud performance, playing up to the crowd like he's going to rip the boy's ear through the post for him. Just as he makes to do it, Claire fakes a faint, knocking over an open fire cooking pot and several nearby observers, getting the whole crowd to turn away from Jamie and the boy to look at her. While they're distracted, Jamie pulls the nail from the post, freeing the boy to go home with his ear mostly intact.
- Berserk Button: Colum is furious when the tailor makes his cloak longer than standard, presumably to cover his deformed legs. Colum demands the tailor go back and fix the cloak by sundown the next day upon pain of death if he fails to do so.
- Central Theme: Promise me you'll return. Claire and Frank promised they would reunite after the war and now Claire is fighting to return to her husband after her unexpected trip through time.
- Clarke's Third Law: Claire is doing basic medicine from the 20th century but the townsfolk of Castle Leoch consider her work somewhere between magic and a miracle.
- Creepy Cathedral: The residents of Castle Leoch believe the Black Kirk monastery to be haunted. The boys go there to prove their bravery but some fall ill and die due to what the townsfolk believe is demonic possession.
- Daydream Surprise: Claire reveals to Mrs. Fitz that she's a time traveler trying to get back home. The more information Claire gives, the more frightened Mrs. Fritz becomes until she accuses Claire of being a witch and slaps her. The sound of the slap jolts Claire out of her daydream and back to the real Mrs. Fritz who is calmly brushing Claire's hair and talking about the party they're preparing for the clan.
- Death of a Child: Played straight and averted. Lindsey dies after mistakenly eating the poisonous Lilly of the Valley. Tammas gets deathly ill, but Claire is able to figure out what happened and create and administer the antidote in time to save him.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Cultural norms obviously changed a great deal between 1743 and 1948.
- Gaelis says Father Bain preaches that all women since Eve are natural temptresses and they should be beaten daily to keep evil at bay.
- A boy is accused of stealing bread. Father Bain demands that his hand be chopped off to save his immortal soul. The fiscal has "mercy" and sentences him to one hour of a pilloried ear, meaning the boy's ear is nailed to the pillory in the town square where he has to sit for an hour while all the townsfolk can laugh and mock him. At the end of the hour, he is expected to rip the cartilage of his ear open to free himself so he can go home.
- Demonic Possession: The townsfolk believe that the boys who fall ill after visiting the Black Kirk are suffering from demonic possession.
- Drum Bathing: Claire is given a cold bath in a standing tub. She does not enjoy the experience.
- The Fundamentalist: Father Bain believed Tammas is possessed and refuses to hear anything to the contrary. When Claire is able to revive him through medical treatment, Bain tells her that she reeks of demonic influences and promises that God will have the last word.
- Gasshole: Arthur Duncan is farting and belching the entire time he's on screen.
- Gilded Cage: Although she is not allowed to leave the grounds, Claire has run of the castle, the most luxurious places to stay during those time. She has free access to the kitchens and to her own surgery. She'd probably thoroughly enjoy it if her presence was voluntary.
- Hard-Work Montage: Since she is confined to Castle Leoch, Claire decides to use her medical skills to work in order to when the trust of Colum and Dougal. A montage is shown of her reading through the available medical books, organizing the medicines at hand, figuring out how to mimic 20th century treatments, and treating a number of patients, all while Angus and Rupert look bored and drink in the background.
- Insult Friendly Fire: Jamie makes a self-deprecating joke about being too full of himself when he was 16 to remember any kids around Castle Leoch. Claire jabs him in the side realizing how much it would hurt Laoghaire to hear Jamie saying both that he can't be bothered to notice the girl or that he thought of her as a snot-nosed kid. The look on Laoghaire's face makes it clear that she's hurt that Jamie doesn't consider her a mature woman.
- Just Friends: Laoghaire's crush on Jamie intensifies after he takes a beating to save her the embarrassment, but Jamie seems to have done it more out of loyalty to Mrs. Fitz than any feelings for Laoghaire.
- Misplaced Vegetation: An intentional case. The Black Kirk is covered in what the local boys think is edible wood garlic. Claire discovers that it's actually toxic Lilly of the Valley which was brought to the Black Kirk by the German monks who built the monastery. The two plants look very similar but one is harmless and the other can kill within hours.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Claire starts providing medical care to earn Colum's trust so that she can leave and return to Inverness. However, when she saves Tammas from dying, she is hailed a miracle worker and Colum is more determined to have her stay on as their healer.
- Nosy Neighbor: Geillis is visibly upset when her attempts to dig into Claire's past are interrupted, first by her chamber maid and then by Jamie's arrival to take Claire home.
- Oblivious to Love: Jamie doesn't realize that Laoghaire has a crush on him nor does he realize that he's hurting her feelings every time he dismisses her shy overtures.
- Ping Pong Naïveté: Claire is fairly decent at fitting into the 1740s, but her major blind spot is the traditional roles of men and women. After seeing Laoghaire and Jamie kissing off of the kitchens, she decides to tease him at dinner about having swollen lips and playing with wild fillies. Jamie tries to cut off the line of joking more than once and finally leaves the dinner table when she persists. Murtagh, Jamie's godfather, then slides in and sets Claire straight. If Colum or Laoghaire's father catch wind of her jokes, Jamie could end up both beaten in front of the whole town and forced to marry Laoghaire. Claire is instantly contrite, reminded that this is not the 1940s where the two would just get a stern talking to.
- Precocious Crush: Despite being about eight years his junior, Laoghaire has an obvious crush on Jamie. She distinctly remembers him from the year he stayed at Castle Leoch when he was sixteen, but Jamie claims not to remember having met her and clearly still views the seventeen year old as a child even though in the 1740s, he would have been allowed to take her as a bride if he so desired.
- Rite of Passage: Jamie says the boys of Castle Leoch come to the Black Kirk to prove their courage, but when asked what they do while there, he admits it's not much more than puttering around, climbing the walls, eating berries and wood garlic that grows in the area, and occasionally, peeing on the rocks.
- Train-Station Goodbye: In a flashback to the 1940s, Claire and Frank part ways at the train depot as Claire is deployed to the frontlines to work as a nurse while Frank is assigned elsewhere as an intelligence officer. Frank notes that they're a reversal from the usual, with Claire on the departing train while Frank is left on the platform.
