“Look back, hold a torch to light the recesses of the dark. Listen to the footsteps that echo behind you 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.” [1]
It’s 1945; World War II has just come to an end, and it’s time for loved ones to reunite, those separated by one of the bloodiest wars in history. Frank Randall (Tobias Menzies) and his wife, Claire (Caitriona Balfe), are in the Scottish Highlands on a second honeymoon, hoping to rekindle their relationship. He was an intelligence officer and she, a combat nurse, with the British army, seeing each other a total of 10 days in the past 5 years.
Frank is a history professor who is tracing his own ancestry with the help of the Reverend Wakefield, a man who possesses a large library of Scottish Highland history. Frank has recently learned that his four-time great-grandfather was Jonathan Wolverton Randall, also known as Black Jack Randall, the notorious captain of a Dragoons unit in the British army in the 18th century who had married Mary Hawkins, according to the family bible.
One stormy night, while walking to the inn he and Claire were staying at, he saw an odd sight. A Highlander stands on the corner in the rain, looking up at the window where Claire sits, brushing her hair. As he approaches the man, the Highlander vanishes before his eyes. Frank thinks perhaps it’s someone from Claire’s past who comes to reconnect with her. In some way, he might be right.
It is Samhain (Halloween), the ancient Celtic festival marking the end of summer and the harvest, and the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. [2]
Frank and Claire go watch the Druids perform their sun dance at the standing stones of Craig Na Dun. Legend has it that Celtic giants carried the stones to Scotland. [3] However they got there, one thing is certain: They hold a powerful secret.
Claire, who is interested in botany, returns to Craig Na Dun to collect a sample of a flower she had seen previously, when she suddenly disappears. Frank, along with the police and Reverend Wakefield, conducted an exhaustive search for her without luck. Three years pass when suddenly Claire reappears in 1948.
Claire tells Frank everything that has happened to her—an almost unbelievable story about traveling back in time to the 18th century. There she met and fell in love with a Scottish Highlander, Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan), becoming his wife. She would never have come back had it not been for the Battle of Culloden, which took place on April 16, 1746, ending the Jacobite Rising and clan culture.
While Frank doubts the story, he tells Claire that he just wants them to go back the way they were. That is, until she tells him she is pregnant. For a brief moment, we see Frank go through a range of emotions as he finally realizes that he can’t be the baby’s father – he is sterile.
Frank agrees to raise the baby with Claire, as if it were his own. They move to Boston to put some distance between them and the past. They are happy being parents to Brianna, but Claire’s heart could not forget, and they grow further apart as a couple.
As Claire described it: “There was only one small problem. It wasn’t Frank I reached for, deep in the night, waking out of sleep, my heart pounding from the half-remembered touch. Jamie, I whispered. Oh, Jamie.” [4] Frank was an observant man. He asked Claire, if she could she forget Jamie, with time. “That amount of time doesn’t exist” was her reply.
In 1968, Frank died in an automobile accident. In the aftermath of this tragic loss, Claire tells Brianna about her disappearance 20 years earlier, and about Jamie Fraser, her real father. The man she loved desperately. Presented with overwhelming evidence that Claire is being truthful, that Jamie had survived Culloden and was alive in Edinburgh as of 1776, Brianna encourages her to go back and find Jamie. Later, Brianna would tell Claire: “Daddy knew you went back to Jamie. I found your obituary on his desk.” Claire replies, “Frank always was an astute man”.
References :
[1] Drums of Autumn, Diana Gabaldon
[2] Historic UK: Halloween Customs in Scotland
[3] Outlander Cast: The Symbolism and Superstitions of Outlander
[4] Voyager, Diana Gabaldon
Photos: Outlander Starz
