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Outlander Recap: “Monsters and Heroes”

By Rueben | April 22, 2020

The latest episode of Outlander aired on Sunday night, focusing more on family drama than action and adventure. With the changing of the season, the Ridge was going to need supplies to get them through the winter. Jamie interrupted his daughter and son-in-law post coital because he needed all able-bodied hunters (Bree can hold her own with a rifle as we’ve seen); but she told her Da that she was looking forward to helping the women of the Ridge with the dyeing of the cloths. It was decided – albeit reluctantly – that Roger would join Jamie and a few of the other men in the hunt.

Josiah led Jamie and the men to where he had seen game at the edge of the border of the property; and as it turned out, it was a herd of buffalo. Jamie and Roger split off from the rest of the men in an attempt to chase some of the herd toward them; but just as Jamie shot one of the herd, he was bit on the leg by a snake; a snake that turned out to be venomous.

The bulk of the episode was then centered on Roger doing all he could to help Jamie – cutting Jamie’s leg, sucking out as much of the poison as he could, trying to find the other men, helping to keep Jamie as warm as possible since they had to spend the night in the woods and then struggling to carry him back to the Ridge on a makeshift travois. Thankfully, Jamie’s and Roger’s horses made it back to the Big House, being found by young Ian, which causes Ian, Fergus and one of the other men from the Ridge to set to find their wayward Laird and his son-in-law.

Luckily, they are found and brought back to Claire, who is shocked by the injury to Jamie’s leg. She tells her husband – who thankfully hasn’t quite lost his sense of humor – that she only ever saw a snakebite on the body of a man during an autopsy. Jamie knows that is what Claire did to the body of Leith Farrish, and he’s none too pleased. He even berates her for her lack of bedside manner.

A plan was set in motion for everyone on the Ridge to find maggots to eat away at the dead flesh on Jamie’s leg; Claire would give Jamie the penicillin broth – since she couldn’t inject him with the antibiotic since that damn Mr. Brown broke the needle – and hope that Jamie could fight off the venom in his blood. But it was the infection that most worried Claire. Soon enough it became clear to Jamie that Claire might have to amputate his leg; that was something he did NOT want her to do. While Claire agreed not to perform that procedure, she confided in Brianna that she might not have a choice.

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Meanwhile, Jamie want to moved from the infirmary to his own bed – after all, if he was to perish, he wanted to be in his own bed; and perish is ALMOST what he did. As his body staved off the venom, the infection nearly took his life, in fact, he eventually told Claire that he saw a passageway of sorts (don’t go into the light, Jamie!), but he was brought back to Claire not only because of his deep love for her but because she literally willed him back to her, lying naked on top of him as he nearly died in her arms.

Facing death yet again, Jamie knew that he would have to lose his leg and just as Claire was ready to perform the excruciating surgery, Brianna rushed in with a makeshift syringe – thank God for her engineering education from the 1970s – created from the fang of that damn snake that bit Jamie (Roger was smart enough to bring the cut-off head back with him in case Claire to determine what kind of snake it was in order to help heal Jamie). That fang worked well enough that Claire could inject the penicillin directly into Jamie’s bloodstream, allowing him to heal.

That near-death experience wasn’t the only action that the Ridge held for the Fraser clan. Marsali gave birth to her third child – a daughter named Felicity – with Fergus and their two children in tow and Brianna stared down the ire of a wayward buffalo that somehow made its way onto the property, scaring the crap out of not only poor Lizzie but also wee Jemmy as well. Thanks to Brianna’s bravery – don’t get in the way of Mama Bear when the safety of her child is in jeopardy – and a well-aimed rifle by Claire, the buffalo was brought down, providing plenty of sustenance for the Ridge for the impending winter.

What did you think of the episode? Please share your thoughts in our comments section below.

The next new episode of Outlander will air on Starz on Sunday, April 26 at 8/7c.