#rewatch of doom

i think instead of whatever voyager was outlander should have turned into a sitcom about jamies ghost haunting frank and claire in boston bc his spirit cant move on until claire is actually happy and so the universe's machinations teleport his incorporeal form to their house and trap him there until The Issue Is Resolved. claire of course is a woman of science and doesnt believe in ghosts but does believe shes finally & completely lost the plot. privately, shes pretty ok with this - shes so traumatized already that Hallucinating Jamie Frasers Presence might as well happen - but she doesnt want to admit this to frank for fear that hell have her committed and shell lose bree, who is the reason why theyre all trapped in this purgatory in the first place. frank meanwhile refuses to admit to claire that he actually DOES increasingly believe. there is a ghost. haunting him. in their house. because, well, 1) its embarrassing that the ghost seems to specifically hate him while adoring claire, and 2) admitting to the existence of the ghost would also mean admitting that he believes in the supernatural (and therefore would necessarily have to believe all of her time travel claims, which in turn makes him look like the worlds biggest dick. which he is). meanwhile, jamie is crashing out on the daily because he cant believe any man who claims to love claire would ever treat her Like That. all his carefully held hopes, his perfectly executed schemes ... catastrophically wrong. alas, he cant kill frank, due to being a ghost. so he is reduced to throwing his books off the shelf or spilling his coffee or dropping his best tie in the dirty sink. bree (a baby) is the only one who can properly actually See him, and they get along like a house on fire, which both alleviates and contributes to jamies (and franks, increasingly) daily crash outs. general highlights of this arrangement include their radio constantly going off at odd moments not for traditionally spooky ghost reasons but because jamies 1700s ass is insufferably obsessed w the concept of a radio. same goes for the shower, which hes devastated to realize he cant actually feel. one time he unplugs the frigidair by accident and frank crashes out so badly and publicly that claire finally realizes he literally believes a ghost is haunting them. also i think it would be really funny if jamie leaves spiteful one word notes (he cant hold the pen long enough to write more than 1 often bitchy word) in franks history books wherever something is recorded incorrectly. anyway eventually claire realizes shes not crazy and her second husbands ghost is literally stuck in her fucking walls and after a general comedy of errors further realizes that she just needs to leave frank. which i realize is easier said than done in 1953 but if anyone can do it claire can. i actually dont care either way when or if she decides to go back in time again & frankly neither would jamie as the purpose of this story is letting claire have narrative autonomy and happiness and we two are aligned on that front always. this is all more realistic to me than the 20 yr separation by the way

i know it was necessary for time but s1 cut so many hilarious bits of jamie dialogue bro this guy is a regular comedian and he knows it

no one else has been brave enough to say it so i must. shrek storming the castle in shrek 2 and jamie storming the fort in 1x08 are the same scene and i think abt it constantly.

another clairejamie thought i had during the rewatch of doom is that romantic compatibility comes in many forms but I specifically think that “girl who is passionate about the technical complexities of emergency surgery” and “guy who keeps needing emergency fucking surgery” is a really funny match made in heaven

guy who heroically beats illness so many times everyone thinks he’s unkillable but actually he’s normal and his doctor just doesn’t know she’s lowkey a necromancer

the greatest tragedy of bree being raised by fr*nk is that she was a weird and intense little girl with the exact same personality as her father and speaking as a former weird and intense little girl with the exact same personality as her father bree was robbed of the universal experience all people in our great category have: Mutual Crash Out Over Math Homework At The Dinner Table

ik its literally just bc of the internalized misogyny in diana gabaldons heart or whatever but truly criminal for claire and jamie to have 4 children between them and for those children to never grow up together as siblings. like??? sure its evil that their parents were both banned from ever being able to properly raise any of them bc of [checks notes] bad melodrama sexism and poorly executed probably unintentional narratives abt colonialism BUT YOU KNOW WHATS MORE EVIL??? those kids would have had so much fun. together. & more importantly they would have been so funny. together!!! like. can u imagine. 4 beauchamp-frasers under 18 w unlimited predisposition to both their parents Crazy all in one room at the same time. actually the total chaos this would have caused would have forced a genre switch into situational comedy so maybe i can see diana's problem

the scene where claire tells jamie she’s from the future is top of all time for many reasons but i think my favorite part of it has to be immediately before she actually does the telling, where jamie asks her straight out if she’s a witch. like at this point they’ve already established that he’s not at all superstitious by nature and you’re fairly sure, since he just went through all that trouble to rescue her from the stake, that claire being a witch is not going to be a major issue for him, but you can also so clearly tell he’s spent the last hour or so mentally playing detective with all the evidence laid out in front of him & coming up empty as to what in gods name is actually going on. principle of parsimony is spinning at top speed in jamie frasers big slightly confused brain at that moment. it’s simply the most obvious answer. he approaches the question with so much pragmatism you’re half convinced that he’s got a whole follow up “what to do now that the only logical conclusion, ie that my wife is a witch, has been confirmed” action plan ready to go when she finally comes clean. he’s completely off base, of course, but then who in a million years would have jumped to “time travel” as the totally normal and not at all weirder alternative