Outlander - Freedom & Whiskey - Review: "The Wait is Over"

This week is, finally, about getting Claire back to the past. The bulk of the episode takes place in 1968. We spent so much time rushing through the 20 years since Clarie returned to the 20th century that it was really nice to slow down and delve into some of those relationships.

Apparently, finding out your birth father is an eighteenth century Scottish Highlander rocks your world. Brianna is struggling to figure out who she is no that she knows the truth about her parentage. She decides to drop out of Harvard (she’s flunking anyway) find an apartment on her on and figure it all out.

Poor Roger shows up in the middle of the fight Claire and Brianna are having about her decision. Roger tells Claire that he’s found Jamie in 1765 only a year ago according to their formula.

I was expecting Claire to whip out Balki’s Dance of Joy, but she didn’t. Her concern about Brianna won’t let her consider leaving.

In a move that paints Brianna, for me at least, as an adult ready to live on her own, she immediately tells her mother that she has to go to Jamie.

Despite the fact that she’s struggling to figure out who she is (she later tells her mother she thinks she’s a lot like her) she looks at the situation unselfishly. Brianna does everything she can to make it okay for her mother to go and find happiness.

We finally get to see how close Joe and Claire are. The amount of story they’ve had to cram into each episode has kept us from getting a real feel for their bond.

I need someone to help my memory. The series hasn’t played with Claire’s intuitive abilities when it comes to diagnosing patients has it?

It was cool to see that ability make an appearance while she and Joe examined that skeleton.

Claire asking him if she was sexually attractive to men was sweet and funny. I was sorry that she couldn’t actually say good-bye to Joe, though.

I thought for sure they were going to torture us and stop the episode just as Claire opened the shop door. They didn’t! We got to see Jamie pass out when he saw Claire. Thank you, Ronald D. Moore. Thank you.

Seldom have I disagreed with the way the show has approached the changes required to adapt the novels to television.

But the one tiny element of the novel’s version of this scene that I wish they’d kept was the fact that Jamie didn’t pass out until Claire touched him. As he mentioned in the book, he’d seen her frequently over those twenty years but she’d never touched him. It’s a teensy teensy thing, but it popped me out of the moment.

There were so many standout scenes, again, in the episode. (How lucky have we been this season?) Bree telling Claire she’s figured out that she’s like her mother, the Christmas scene, Brianna and Roger watching "Dark Shadows", Claire and Brianna’s good-bye…..just so much.

Was anyone else giggling throughout the Batman themed sewing scene? I loved that. Hated the outfit but loved the scene.

I’m a little worried about the penicillin in glass ampules. If she steps wrong that valuable stuff is gone. Were the dissolvable tablets actually not available in 1968?

What did you think about the episode? Can anyone remind me if we’ve seen other examples of Claire’s intuitiveness? What scenes stood out for you?