Laoghaire is a genre thing. It’s very common in smut novels to have these would-be obstacles disposed of with very little drama. It’s just a bit of “scandalous” plot filler before another sex scene. The Outlander books are exquisite smut, but they are still smut. It is what it is. No point in forgetting genre here.

I fill in my patchy areas with a brow pencil and then hit the entire brow with Boy Brow. I love it for the fronts of my brows. Now you can actually see those hairs, without me trying to shade it in with a pencil and getting boxy edges half the time. It’s also an alcohol-free formulation, so you don’t get stuck in that…

Yeah, it ultimately boils down to “just go with the grain.” Gabaldon most likely went with the time travel element because it allows for a more modern voice in a historical setting. It’s just easier to write. Plus, as things progress, it gets more apparent that she moves her characters around to places she just…

I’ve read the books, and they follow a similar pattern that TV shows do. The best plots occur within the first 3 seasons/books, while the actual writing continues to improve. Book 2 had my favorite plot, but book 5 was probably the easiest to read. The writing was smoother and more balanced. I lose patience with the…

I have a life. It’s wonderful!

It’s a bit of a problem with the whole concept of the story that Claire always has to give up her whole life for Jamie, who is somehow more inextricably linked to his time than she is to hers. However, Claire is from an era where she’s seen a global war have devastating consequences for three generations in a row.…

I don’t disagree with you. But knowing where the story is going and that Jamie eventually gets to know a certain character, I don’t really mind that Gabaldon saved time on cutting out that particular branch of introspection. Jamie gets his own first hand experience, which is a richer story even though it allowed…

I love the Ian actor. After a John Grey who I loved but was frankly too handsome, I like that Ian looks mostly how Gabaldon described him. Fergus is supposed to be handsome, though I can’t be the only one wondering why they didn’t cast Richard Madden.

Yeah you really don’t want to ask because you don’t want to know. It’s a plot turn that doesn’t make sense on any level unless we’re talking about the specific “genre” of manipulative book/TV writing. Gabaldon created a really constricting set of circumstances so she could present a bizarre consequence as being…

I’m gonna fanwank a bit and speculate that it might not even occur to Jamie to wonder about those things. He’s from a time when, if a daughter moved away from her parents at 17 to marry, she might never have seen them again. Even if he’s sure that Bree hasn’t gotten married, the idea of a parent being beholden to a…

I think the script tried to draw parallels between Claire leaving Bree and Jamie leaving Willie.

The hot actors are obv the least realistic part of this time travel show.

Cait addressed it in an EW interview. The showrunners know that the actors don’t look older but no one really cares. It’s a fantasy show based on a series of smut novels.

Claire reminds me of Olivia from Fringe. She was ambivalent about motherhood but she grew to love the notion of making her own family. I think that’s what Claire was missing. She lived so long with the misinformation that she couldn’t have children, and I think that (plus Faith) plays into why she couldn’t just fall…

End ummmmm did you miss the part where Fergus alluded to something that Jamie adamantly avoided telling Claire? Come on, that’s crucial. Pay me, AV Club.

Once again you miss the point. Do you really think that all of the details of Jamie’s new life won’t come up later? (What do you think the rest of this season will be about?) They reunited and had a bit of a honeymoon phase. There will be shit that emerges that will frustrate Claire endlessly. It’s not a spoiler to…

Christina’s delivery really takes you out of the song though, and her vocal placement is way too far back. She’s a great singer, but she’s not a great communicator. She shows off instead of translating the meaning of the song.

I agree, it would have been brave to depict Claire’s ambivalence toward motherhood. Here was someone who had been sure she couldn’t conceive, then conceived and lost one child, then had to leave the love of her life in order to save their second child. It’s completely understandable that Claire would struggle to raise…

It was definitely a problem with the show that we didn’t see Frank being a good father to Bree. In the book, Frank’s love for Bree was what kept Claire present in that marriage. She was grateful that Frank treated Bree like his true daughter, and she loved him for that. Frank was obsessed with genealogy and he…

Frank’s death seems too easy because of the other things going on in the story, not because of the broader plotting, so yes, it’s sloppy writing more than it’s bad storytelling (and yes yes, there is a difference). In last year’s finale, we saw that Claire only started looking into the Jamie stuff a decent amount of…