‘Outlander’ recap: Days of future past

The blessing of human existence is that we rarely foresee the moments that will change our lives forever, that force us onto paths we never would have anticipated.

The curse of human existence is that sometimes we do.

Throughout the second season of “Outlander” there has been an invisible noose around the collective necks of Jamie and Claire Fraser. Fight though they did against a historical record that dictated slaughter and mayhem at the Battle of Culloden, they were unable to prevent the future that history had already writ and the more they struggled, the tighter the noose drew.

As “Dragonfly in Amber” unfolds, it’s that sense of breathlessness that suffuses much of the episode, with the Frasers drawn toward a conclusion the audience already knew to be inevitable: Claire’s return to the present.

That feeling of dread is only underlined with the time stamps that accompany each cut back to the 1700s from the 1960s (more on this later), the minutes slipping away serving as a makeshift countdown to the heartache that’s been brewing since the first moments of the season and Claire’s return to Frank.

It’s as thrilling as it is devastating to watch the dominoes fall and seal the Frasers’ fate. They decide to poison the Prince to prevent the massacre at Culloden but are discovered by Dougal. They kill Dougal to protect themselves but are discovered by Rupert. They must flee to the stones to send Claire back, but to do so Jamie must swear to return to the camp and receive his punishment.

Even though the audience knows that this was always where the story ended up, it is deeply emotional because it was inevitable. It was always inevitable. Jamie and Claire just didn’t know it.

The relationship between Jamie and Claire has always been the bedrock of “Outlander,” and “Dragonfly in Amber” is no exception. The scenes between Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe, particularly their desperate and frantic goodbye, (replete with background rainbow for goodness’ sake) are heart-rending and it’s difficult to imagine what the show looks like in the future until the pair are reunited.

This is particularly true in light of how touch and go the scenes set in 1968 are. An older Claire, hair bobbed and tinged with silver, is a doctor now, drinking her way through widowhood and trying to maintain a relationship with her and Jamie’s grown daughter Brianna (Sophie Skelton).

Claire and Brianna have returned to Scotland, ostensibly to pay respects to the family of Reverend Wakefield in light of his death, but more accurately for Claire to sulk around and be sad about spending the last 20 years without Jamie.

That’s all well and good, because Caitriona Balfe could read the phone book and make it compelling but the same just isn’t true of the new characters 1968 introduces.

Along with Brianna, the series reintroduces a grown Roger Wakefield (Richard Rankin), last seen as the child being raised by the reverend in the season premiere. While Rankin is a warm and charming presence, even for as much as the episode purely uses Wakefield as a smitten would-be suitor for Brianna, Skelton seems profoundly out of her depth.

In fairness to Skelton, she’s stepping into a nearly impossible position.

Brianna’s a difficult character to embody, asked to be the perfect blend of Claire and Jamie, a combination of traits that could go really well or really poorly depending on the mix. But even beyond simple characterization, Brianna has the only American accent in a world full of Brits and Scots and a Bostonian accent to boot, an element that Skelton isn’t exactly nailing at this juncture. That said, she’s also not mastering the emotional beats of the character with any more aplomb.

But it’s early. It’s entirely possible that Skelton will grow into the role and the show will learn how to write for her as an actress. The much bigger question is how the show will write around not having Jamie and Claire together.

Really, questions of timeline are largely assuaged by the confidence with which “Outlander” rearranged their adaptation of Gabaldon’s “Dragonfly in Amber” for Season 2, regardless of how well those rearrangements did or didn’t work.

Unlike Claire and Jamie, we don’t know what the future holds. We don’t know if Skelton will ever grow into her role as Brianna. We don’t know how the show will handle a Jamie and Claire stranded on opposite sides of time. We don’t even know if, hundreds of years after the failed Scottish rebellion, dozens of years after Gillian Edgars/Geillis Duncan’s (Lotte Verbeek) White Roses of Scotland, the world might finally see an independent Scotland, thanks to the still unfolding drama of the “Brexit.”

We don’t know what the future holds. All we can do is wait and see, hope and pray, that seasons 3 and 4 of “Outlander” find a way to retain the beauty and magic of the first two seasons, all the while inspiring the passion, onscreen and for audiences alike, that served as the show’s calling card.