"Actions have consequences, Sassenach."
Hello everyone!
So last week, we were keeping company with our favourite Fraser couple as they dealt with their house of horrors and ended up with one dead adult, one missing adult, and one baby on their hands.
It's really only the two of them who manage to get themselves into these kind of conundrums, honestly.
Meanwhile, if you'll recall, Himself, aka Jamie Fraser, tasked Roger and Fergus to take the militia on to Brownsville and start conscripting there while they waited for their colonel to catch up.
In this particular episode, we get to see exactly what happens with the mice when the cats are away, aka what goes on with the kids while their parents are occupied elsewhere?
Jamie and Claire might not be the biological parents of either Roger or Fergus, but they're definitely their parents by marriage to the both of them, and they expect a certain kind of result from them, at that. Meanwhile Roger and Fergus are ... well.
Let's see The Company We Keep and discover what they are, shall we?
In episode four, we clock in right as Roger, Fergus et all ride into Brownsville, and to be honest you'd find more cheer in a graveyard, to quote Gimli the Dwarf. It's damp and soggy and quiet and menacing, and when you're not distracted by Fergus all covered up and looking like some sort of Dementor in broad daylight, you realize there's guns being pointed straight at the militia by the people barricaded into the main house.
Uh-oh.
Once the shooting starts, Roger needs to do something, fast, and I was kind of hoping he'd do what he did in the books, which is to say storm the door and tower over everyone in there, roaring about what the hell they were doing.
Seeing as the Browns want this one guy, Morton, for dishonouring their daughter (and thus ruining her chances of marrying a wealthy farmer, since rich liaisons were all the rage back then, both for status and survival), Roger needs to come up with a strategy, and quick, otherwise everyone and anyone will get shot and killed.
This is when you'd need Jamie the most, but he's slowly clomping along behind the militia with the newborn baby in tow, so it's Roger and Fergus against the world.
Which means, in Roger's head, he needs to delay any actual action until Himself gets there.
How does he do it?
Well, when in Rome ...
Ordering a cease-fire, the captain agrees to keep Morton contained, and orders Fergus to roll out the whiskey the militia is porting along with them, so that the mood can start to slowly calm down.
Which is how Jamie finds the situation: Roger singing, the men drinking (those who haven't left because they disagreed with Roger's decision), and Morton swearing up and down that he loves this Miss Brown, but he can't actually marry her because he already has a wife.
This is the part where Jamie tries VERY hard not to shoot someone.
He's also mad at Roger for losing him men, and also for taking a peaceful enough route when he outnumbered the Browns so clearly and the militia could have simply taken a stand. Claire argues that everyone makes mistakes, especially someone who isn't from the 18th century, but that's the catch, isn't it? No one will ever solve problems quite the way Jamie does, because Jamie has years of experience, and the genetics of a fox in his very blood.
In any event, he now has to do damage control somehow, and joins in the general revelry by dancing the sword dance, which used to have a massive significance for the Scots, who danced it before going to battle for luck, and Jamie himself was especially prolific in it.
He keeps running into problems though, quickly amounting to more than 99.
While he and Claire are discussing the possibility of keeping the little newborn they helped deliver, and Claire explains that, while she loves him more than anything for suggesting it, they don't need to upset their lives like that, they need to also do some rescuing since Miss Brown, aka Ally, is attempting suicide over Morton.
She's also pregnant, so I mean ... hormones, am I right?
Just when you think Jamie could have gotten a good night's sleep, Morton himself makes a reappearance, much to the annoyance of Himself, who's tempted to just shoot him on sight, but in the end, he, Claire and Roger help the two lovers escape in the morning mists; Jamie even lets loose the horses to cover their tracks.
The Browns, who've been suspicious already from the get-go, and there's going to be trouble eventually because they don't answer to authority well (the head of the family swore his family to the militia, but on the condition they answer only to him, which is BOUND to be an issue, because he himself needs to answer to Jamie, and I have a sneaky feeling this isn't going to work out to their satisfaction), are now suspicious about just what happened with Morton's escape, but they have no proof, so there's that.
With one problem settled, Jamie sends Roger with Claire and the Beardsley twins back to the Ridge so she can perform the surgery on their abscessed tonsils, which doesn't make Roger feel any better about himself, but Claire comforts him by saying Jamie just trusted him with the thing he loves most, and is giving him a second chance.
So while Jamie and the militia press on, Claire is going back, with the newborn left with the Browns to care for (and her lands, which are quite substantial, also brought in to the Browns with that one), and with hopes that her foray into medical advice won't be noticed.
If you remember, in the previous episode Jamie asked Fergus to take a note to the printer, and Fergus used a paper already covered with writing, so the printer just decided to run that, too; it turns out that's Claire's medical advice for the people on the ridge, under a pen name. Which is all well and good, but hopefully nothing that'll come bite them in the arse later!
And as for the Ridge itself, well.
Even hundreds of miles from civilisation, Bree still can't catch a break. Instead, she finds a coin in Jemmy's basket, and Mrs. Bug explains an Irishman gave it to him, which immediately makes everyone and their mother think: Bonnet. When Jemmy later crawls away and goes missing in the dark, it prompts a full-on panic attack for his mother, thinking Bonnet somehow managed to find the Ridge so fast and so smoothly.
Note to anyone reading this: the Ridge isn't THAT easy to be found. The location is difficult to get to, and Bonnet's last known area is hundreds of miles away.
Terrors have a way of working themselves into your psyche though, and Bree is no different, though she gently refuses to share her troubles with Marsali even though Marsali would have probably been all on her side. I'm hopeful the two can grow even closer as the season progresses, but we'll see.
In any event, Mama Bear returns next week, while Papa Bear continues on. The kids have so far proven a bit more troublesome than either of them expected, but we live and we learn, right?
Especially Roger and Bree.
While Claire is quite acclimated to the times and has had opportunity before to learn which battles to fight and which to wisely leave to Jamie, both Roger and Bree are very much modern-era people, and they certainly act like it. It'll take them time to get used to how things are, to leave some of their modern ideas and convictions behind them. Those can work very well between the two of them in private, but as a general rule, not so much.
It should be noted, however, that virtually no one, not even Fergus, can ever reach Jamie's level of subtle machinations and reactions. Nobody's the King of Men, after all.
But we'll see what said King gets into later, without his Queen by his side.
Until next week, clan!
xx
*images (not screencaps) and video not mine
No comments:
Post a Comment