A ring of gold, a debate of abortion, and a haunting love story missing it’s ghosts…..
I was going to do this after the finale, but, eh, it’s raining, I got a minute, and I don’t need the last episode to air before making my case.
Admittedly, not my fav of the series. It’s pretty close to the bottom actually. I’ve read it the least of them all and I tend to skip through it more so than the others. I still know it like it’s my third child, though, and I’m here to tell you Drums is a GHOST story.
“Look back, hold a torch to light the recesses of the dark. Listen to the footsteps that echo behind, when you walk alone.
All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hiding in the future. We look in the mirror and see the shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our ghosts; we haunt ourselves.”
(It’s in the prologue. The adaptation instructions are in the prologue. It couldn’t be easier to comprehend. Every episode should prove the theory in the prologue. Every season should open with a voiceover of the book’s prologue.)
That’s what this book is ultimately about. Jamie and Claire learning to be together with the ghosts they created in those 20 years apart. Bree is one of their ghosts. The most important ghost. Roger is one of Bree’s ghosts, nothing more, he’s not a lead character, there’s no co lead couple. This ain’t the Roger and Bree love story! It’s Jamie and Claire’s GHOST story! (All love stories are ghost stories, really.)
The climax of this JC ghost story was…. the fucking gold ring. It represents Frank. The biggest fucking ghost in all of Outlander. It was STUPID, STUPID, STUPID to have Bonnet take Jamie’s ring. While I agree it was a ~little far fetched that Bree would recognize the plain gold ring, they could have come up with something. It was never about the ring, it was about Frank. Who they love over in Outlander world so I can only assume they just did not GET IT, because they lurve fic’in some fucking Frank and they coulda spun some super scary shit if they wanted. But. Thank goodness for some dropped balls.
Instead, well, y’all know what we got. Better to completely eviscerate the Outlander, draw and quarter Claire, than to have Bree recognize a ring. Please, that’d be more unbelievable than touching a stone and time traveling. Oh, no, wait. It’s not.
One of the things I was most looking forward to this book was the Jamie and Claire abortion debate. Huge, huge chance for them to be relevant and they just threw it away, la de da.
So much going on here outside of a pregnancy resulting from rape. Could have been an entire episode!
Claire came from 1968. Bree came from 1971. Pivotable times in the history of abortion law in the US. Why didn’t we see this perspective? Would have been a great place to insert the convo between JC and her not getting her tubes tied. Great foreshadowing to that menopause bairn, JS.🤨 More importantly there was great opportunity for character development! Jamie not only is opposed for reasons of religion, but he himself was the son of a man who was conceived through rape, Lovett used his maids for sex. Jamie has been raped, Claire has been pregnant, they have opposing points of view about the consequences of both. Here was the perfect place to insert conflict between JC, a fight! They fight so passionately. Why didn’t they go there? Because they are too close minded to consider showing a viewpoint they don’t personally agree with? That’s what I think. Afraid of being labeled pro life, they skipped it. They should have gone there and trusted the audience to handle it. But no. We got a preachin’ to and they had visions of all us dummies noddin’ along thinking oh yes well since Claire would do it…. 😑. That’s not how that works.
Furthermore, Claire. Don’t you think it out of character for a woman who struggled with fertility and experienced stillbirth to be so casual about offering an abortion like it was a tattoo? It would be WAY out of character. They should have explored that. But Claire is wallpaper now, so here’s the reason she did offer it and not casually in the books:
“Sometimes I wondered if I could rightfully blame you,” he said, almost thoughtfully. “He looked like Bree, didn’t he? He was like her?”
“I could see it in your face—when you’d look at her, I could see you thinking of him. Damn you, Claire Beauchamp,” he said, very softly. “Damn you and your face that can’t hide a thing you think or feel.”
Remember this from Voyager. Bree was the ghost of Jamie in Claire and Frank’s relationship. It’s why Claire offers Bree the chance to free herself from what could be the ghost of evil. Claire knows how powerful of a ghost a child is. This is the convo Claire and Bree should have had!
Instead, we got 13 episodes of “The McKenzies are here.”
No fucking shit, Sherlock’s. 😴
