Recap of Outlander
Season 3, Episode 1:
The Battle Joined
Jamie is grievously wounded in the bloody Battle of Culloden and finds himself in dire straits until a past kindness proves key to his future. Meanwhile, a pregnant Claire tries to adjust to life back in 1940s Boston.
Tropes
- Agonizing Stomach Wound: The mortal wound for Captain Randal
- Androcles' Lion: What saves Jamie's life is that the British Colonel, Lord Melton, is the brother of John William Grey, the youth Jamie spared back in the season 2 episode "Je Suis Prest". Bound by honor, Melton arranges for Jamie to escape execution in secret as payment for the debt.
- Appeal to Novelty: Invoked by Frank while discussing the teabags Americans use for tea. He insists that the traditional methods for storing tea work perfectly well and remarks that he doesn't understand the American obsession with "new, new, new." Claire rebuts that it's part of America's charm. The country is "young, eager, and forward thinking."
- Bittersweet Ending: Despite believing he was destined to die on Culloden Moor, Jamie survives the battle, the death sweeps, and the executions and is returned home to his family at Lallybroch. However, he's still a wanted traitor, Claire is gone along with their unborn baby, Murtagh is missing, and the Highlanders have been defeated, meaning that retribution from the Crown will be swift and brutal.
- Buried in a Pile of Corpses: Jamie only survives being speared to death because he's trapped under the body of Captain Black Jack Randall.
- Call-Back: Claire's waking up after her birth to find her belly flat and her baby gone is a call-back to her miscarriage in "Faith".
- Combat Pragmatist: Losing his blade, Jamie uses handfuls of dirts and grass to suffocate the British soldier who is trying to kill him.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: As in real life, the Battle of Culloden takes only twenty minutes with the Scottish forces routed by the British.
- Death by Despair: Subverted. Having lost the love his life to time, thousands of his kinsmen to war, and his uncle to a misunderstanding, Jamie begs multiple times to be allowed to die. But fate keeps stepping in to keep him alive.
- Delirious Misidentification: Jamie is suffering from exhaustion and extreme blood loss. He imagine Claire appearing and asking if he's still alive. It turns out to be his friend, Rupert, instead.
- Due to the Dead: Averted. The Highlanders are left on the battlefield to rot after their corpses have been picked clean of anything that could possibly be of use to the Redcoat victors.
- Face Death with Dignity: The captured Highlanders manage to keep their strength up as they're marched one by one to the firing squad.
- Failed Future Forecast: In-universe example as Frank's boss talks of how it's "a matter of fact" Harry Truman will be defeated in re-election.
- Flashback Cut: A series of these take place while Jamie is lying on Culloden Field after the battle.
- Get It Over With: The Redcoats make it clear that all of the Highlanders will be executed and ask for volunteers for who goes next. One by one, the men steel themselves and volunteer to be next to get it over with.
- How We Got Here: The episode begins with Jamie, painfully pale and gasping with what sounds like death rattles, stuck in a pile of dead bodies. The episode then uses flashbacks to explain how Jamie ended up there.
- Insult Backfire: When Claire talks politics, Frank's boss chuckles "next thing you know she'll be trying to get women into Harvard law!" Claire calmly points out that Harvard started accepting female applicants three years earlier.
- Karma Houdini Warranty: Black Jack Randall has escaped the consequences of his actions towards the Frasers more than once across the series, surviving being trampled when Jamie is rescued from his custody and surviving Jamie's Groin Attack during their duel in France. But the third time is the charm and Jamie is finally able to kill the man who has been harassing and torturing him since he was a teenager, fatally stabbing Randall during the Battle of Culloden.
- Killed Off for Real: Rupert, Ross, and Black Jack Randall.
- Manly Tears: Jamie silently weeps when he hears the gunshot that signals Rupert's death.
- Meadow Run: Played with. Black Jack and Jamie find each other on the battle field and the color saturation becomes extremely bright and vivid, they focus on each other to the point of not being able to see the others around them, they run towards each other full bore, clashing swords their faces scant inches apart as they jockey for position. They fight until they collapse together, Black Jack dying, Jamie barely clinging to life.
- No One Should Survive That!: Jamie's femoral artery appears to have been cut and he lays on the battlefield for hours before he is rescued, but the rescue is by friends who are unable to provide medical treatment. The matter may have been helped by the sub-freezing temperatures, but in most cases, someone wounded as Jamie was would have died without immediate, high-level medical care.
- Oh, Crap!: The expression on Claire and Frank's faces when the nurse mentions that Brianna has red hair.
- Rule of Three: Jamie's life is miraculously spared three times. The first is when Black Jack Randall collapses on top of him, saving him from being speared by Redcoats who are killing the wounded Highlanders on the battlefield. The second is when Rupert miraculously finds him in the middle of the night among all the dead and dying, saving Jamie from bleeding to death. The third is when Lord Melton, William Grey's brother, hears his name and honors Grey's debt of honor to Jamie by saving him from execution and sending him home to Lallybroch.
- Stay in the Kitchen: Claire gets this big time, laughed at for reading political news and her desire to be a doctor. It reaches its height when she goes into labor and her doctor insists on talking to Frank on details of her birth (Made more absurd by the fact that Frank doesn't know her obstetrics medical history and she has to correct him).
- Straw Misogynist: Frank's new boss is this in spades. He mocks Claire for reading politics, jokes about how Harvard only accepted women doctors because of Eleanor Roosevelt and says they're "barely adequate" and a woman can't be a doctor. When Frank mentions Claire being a combat nurse in the war, the man still shrugs it off as her being a wife is a "more important concern".
- The Mourning After: Claire is still mourning Jamie six months after her return to the 20th century.
- Tattered Flag: The opening image is a tattered Scottish flag. Such an image would normally be used to denote resilience of the men fighting under that banner, but instead the flag is unceremoniously uprooted and tossed on a waste pile by Redcoats scavenging the battlefield.
- Together in Death: Averted. Captain Randall and Jamie end up lumped together having fallen while locked in battle. While it is reminiscent of a lover's embrace, the two were mortal enemies and Jamie survives, found hours later by his fellow Clans men.
- Upper-Class Twit: As canons are going off around them, Prince Charles is admiring a silver chalice that he received for his 21st birthday from his father and waxing about his plans to watch the Duke of Cumberland drink from it as a sign of surrender by day's end. His aides are already preparing a table for the War Councils to sit at and sign treaties. Of course, by the end of the day, the Highlanders have been slaughtered and Prince Charles is running for his very life.
- Villain Respect: Lord Melton, the British colonel sent to execute the "traitor" Scottsmen does seem to have this for them. He says that instead of being hanged, they will be shot "as soldiers". As each man goes with a strong face to his death, the colonel gives them a nod of respect for facing their fates instead of fighting or begging.Melton: No man in the king's army will be shot lying down on my watch. Not even traitors.
- Wham Line: The nurse's comment about Brianna's red hair at the end of the episode.
- Would Hurt a Child: Rupert tries to convince the Redcoats to let the two teenage boys hiding with them return home, but the man replies that they've been given execution orders with very strict orders not to make exceptions for age.
- You Can't Fight Fate: Just as Claire predicted, Black Jack meets his end at the Battle of Culloden, at Jamie's hands.
