By all means, Outlander, keep ripping those bodices if you’re gonna find that kind of quiet insight underneath. Jaime goes down on Claire with the same earnest eagerness and insistence with which he does pretty much everything in life Claire is relaxed and languid on the receiving end, comfortable and confident in her own skin, just as she is in virtually every situation she encounters. But once you’ve finished fanning yourself, you realize it communicated character, too. And from Claire’s high-pitched sighs of pleasure, to Jaime’s refusal to answer the door until they’re finished, to the non-TV-standard positioning of their bodies at the beginning of the scene, that chemistry burns hot. Let’s start with the sexy stuff, because hey, if the show can do it, why can’t we? Unmoored from the overhyped wedding-night episode and the baffling tone-deafness of last week’s sex-and-violence cocktail, Jaime and Claire’s chemistry is at last free to just kind of establish itself as its own thing.
If it’s entertainment value you’re after, you could do a whole lot worse than “By the Pricking of My Thumbs,” this week’s installment in the ongoing unstuck-in-time adventures of Claire Beecham. A duel at ten paces devolving into a bloody swordfight over “yo mama” jokes.Morbid Game of Thrones–style magic baby abandonment.