Voiceovers: I'm really getting sick of hearing "Craig Na Dun". Like, we GET it. Standing stones. Craig Na Dun. Stop repeating it.

Menzies surprised me last night. I've liked him in other things but didn't see how he'd be capable of pulling off a Really Bad Guy. That glassy, almost cross-eyed expression while he was recounting the flogging — it was just fantastic.

Dammit I loved Saul Tigh.

I really loved that scene too. "History be damned" is the rational reaction to Claire's prophecies of doom.

Well, when they weren't accusing each other of being witches.

She makes him look bad. He's her guard but she keeps wandering off.

Claire never really fits in with ideas about womanhood in any of the eras she lives in.

Thanks for this. Claire was born in 1918. To expect her to have (or for the show to give her) post-women's-lib attitudes about sexuality is anachronistic to the extreme.

You have my permission to agree with me. ;)

Needed more Jamie.

Sorry, but this obsessive fandom, that idolizes the author with a title, instead of viewing her as a talented writer of entertaining-yet-not-perfect books, is not my cup of tea.

I agree with keeping the structure of the stories, but there is a TON of side plot that can simply be excised. Follow the lead of the showrunners for GOT: they have done an excellent job of adapting that similarly unwieldy series.

SPOILER

I agree that the whole oath conundrum was not really well explained. It might have helped if they'd given us some better idea Jamie's position in the McKenzie clan before tonight.

I'm a pretty dedicated carnivore, but if anything was going to nudge me toward vegetarianism, this discussion of pig anus was it.

Pretty minor stuff. I don't recall Claire trying to get her guards distracted — in fact I'm not sure she really has assigned guards at all.

"I think one of my main frustrations with this episode was that it just felt like a long series of things that happened"

Yeah, I keep having inappropriate Archer flashbacks when I watch the news these days.

Especially when you change the title lyric to "Big Ol' Hairy Vagina".

Not to mention that our most zealously Christian early settlers loathed Christmas as a paganistic abomination they associated with Catholics.