Inverness becomes the crossroads.
Full spoilers for Outlander continue below.
There was a lot of tying up loose ends in Outlander's penultimate episode of Season 2 between characters like Colum, Black Jack and Alex making reappearances and the battle lines being set for the Battle of Culloden in the finale. All these various fantastic performers coming together and -- in many cases -- saying goodbye led to a lot of amazing material, but the sense of setting the stage for the battle to come prevented "The Hail Mary" from being one of the best episodes of the series.
Many disparate storylines came together in this episode, and there wasn't a lot of cohesion between any of them. There was the sense that much of this was happening this week simply because the story needed to be taken care of before the finale. It seems like coincidence more than anything else that caused so many important moments to coalesce in Inverness, though the quality of the material featured was some of best of Outlander's season.
Duncan Lacroix and Caitriona Balfe on Outlander
First, Jonathan Randall's return. This is easily the most evil, sadistic and monstrous character on Outlander, but thanks to Tobias Menzies' performances, he commands the screen in every scene he's in. From the beginning of his time on the show, Black Jack's biggest conflict has been with Claire; time and again they clash, and though he did his biggest evil to Jamie, it's with Claire that he truly has been caught in a battle of wills.
Having them be forced to be allies in "The Hail Mary" is the best dramatic fodder of the episode. Alex Randall returned, as does Mary, after a significant time jump from the end of "Vengeance Is Mine." But his illness had overtaken him, forcing Alex to beg his beloved older brother to marry Mary and take care of their unborn child. This ties up Frank's parentage in an interesting bow: he's not actually the ancestor of Black Jack, but rather his sweeter younger brother. Claire makes a deal with the devil again to protect her former husband's life -- someone Murtagh humorously calls a "myth." ("Frank is neither a myth nor a prick" is one of the best lines of the episode.)
Like in Season 1's "The Garrison Commander," Menzies and Caitriona Balfe chew their screentime together. Her repeating her "curse" of his death date was a nice reminder that Black Jack might not be long for this world. Honestly, I'll miss him if/when he dies on the show if only because he brings such great dramatic tension to the series. He deserves to die, but the conflict he puts in the Frasers' lives -- especially this season, when Claire has been looking out for Frank as much as she has for Jamie -- won't be easily replaced.
Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe on Outlander
Another great return was Gary Lewis as Colum MacKenzie. Like Alex, his welfare was placed on Claire's shoulders -- and like Alex, his death is imminent. In this situation, Claire helped Jamie's uncle along to his end, and hopefully that doesn't turn around to cause issues in the future. ("What's one more sin to a sinner?" is another great line from the episode.) More interesting was the resolution of two key plot points: first, that Geillis gave birth to her child, a son left with William MacKenzie, before she was killed; and second, that Colum chose Jamie and not Dougal to raise his son Hamish as laird of Clan MacKenzie.
That's a pretty big blow to Dougal, and led to the best scene of the episode: Dougal's farewell to his brother. Graham McTavish has been underused (for good reasons) this season, but wow, what a powerful sequence for him. It was smart of director Philip John to stay close on Dougal's face throughout this scene; of course it was to prevent the viewer from realizing Colum was already dead, but also it really conveyed the conflict and anger living inside Dougal. Surely this will come into play as the final battle between the Jacobites and the English approaches.
These storylines overtook the episode, relegating Bonnie Prince Charlie's plight to the C-story of "The Hail Mary." That in and of itself feels like the wrong move, especially given that Charles Stuart's failure to launch a surprise attack was shoe-horned into the final minutes of the episode. It seems obvious that the Culloden showdown will dominate much of next week's finale, but the overall balance of that storyline in the past few episodes has felt off and has affected the momentum leading into the finale as things come to a close.
Andrew Gower and Sam Heughan on Outlander
The Verdict
There's a lot of amazing elements in the second-to-last episode of Outlander: Season 2, but it didn't really fit together cohesively, preventing "The Hail Mary" from reaching "amazing" territory. Tobias Menzies continues to be one of the show's secret weapons, and giving him and Caitriona Balfe another chance to verbally spar as Black Jack and Claire was a highlight of the episode. Similarly, Graham McTavish shined as Dougal during his emotional goodbye to his brother -- even if he didn't quite know he was saying goodbye at the time.
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