This post contains frank discussion of Outlander Season 3, Episode 3, “All Debts Paid.” If you’ve not yet watched the latest episode of Starz’s time-traveling Scottish romance, now is the time to leave.
Most actors working in television these days would kill to have one morally complex death on a well-watched, well-regarded series like Outlander. But Tobias Menzies got to have two. The actor stole the show in the Season 3 premiere, especially when Menzies improvised his villainous character, Black Jack Randall, reaching out in futile yearning as he collapsed into the arms of Jamie Fraser (Sam Hueghan) during the Battle of Culloden. And this week, it was Claire (Caitriona Balfe) who wrapped a dying (well, already dead) Menzies in her arms as Outlander fans said a final goodbye to poor Frank Randall.
The showrunners have spoken at length about expanding Claire’s story in Season 3 from the books so that she and Jamie can share equal screen time during their long separation. But in the end, they also wound up creating a compelling and emotionally rich story for Frank—at times, at the expense of sympathy for Claire. It was a risky move, but one that paid off beautifully in Frank and Claire’s final moments.
In the novels, the twenty-year-long marriage of Claire and Frank Randall is told largely in flashback. As show watchers did last season, readers learn that Frank died suddenly in the late 1960s via a passing comment from Claire. But in Season 3, Outlander wound back the clock to show us the long slow death of the Randall marriage. Claire, it’s clear, is never able to let go of Jamie. (This would hardly be a story about star-crossed soulmates if she could.) During a series of confrontations that spool out over decades, Frank observes, accurately, that their bedroom is “far too crowded” with the memory of Jamie. In his final confrontation with Claire, Frank theorizes that it was their daughter Brianna, with her bright red hair, who kept the memory of Jamie alive all these years. Without Brianna, could Claire have forgotten Jamie and found happiness with Frank over time? Claire dramatically responds: “That amount of time doesn’t exist.”
Her steadfast devotion to Jamie is romantic, sure, but it also makes her outrage towards Frank often feel unjust. She lashes out at him for an instance in which his mistress, Sandy, shows up at the house and embarrasses her. But it’s hard for Claire to have the moral high ground when, time-travel-induced excuses aside, she cheated on Frank and gave her heart away, forever, to another person. She then chose to continue to live with Frank. Denying her husband both love and his right to achieve that kind of happiness for himself makes Claire seem enormously unsympathetic. At least for a time.
Adaptive changes also weigh this long, slow conflict in Frank’s favor. As he is in the book, Frank is devoted to young Brianna while Claire absents herself from the family and buries herself in her work. But the Starz series also turns Frank’s multiple infidelities from the book into one long-running affair with a woman whom he claims to love. There aren’t a string of “betrayals”—just one relationship which both he and Claire agreed he might pursue. Also gone is his repugnant racism. In the book, it’s easier to write Frank off as a bad person after he says some nasty things about Claire’s friendship with her African-American colleague, Joe, and his son Lenny. (This is far from the only change from the books in this episode, and you can read showrunner Ron D. Moore discuss Murtagh’s unexpected survival here.)
Instead of a racist philanderer, the show version of Frank becomes a heartbroken man who stays with a woman he still loves for fear of losing his daughter. Even during their most heated confrontations, Frank is fairly gentle. “This is why we were never good at charades, darling,” he wryly observes. This more nuanced Frank not only creates a far more complex fallout from Claire and Jamie’s love story, but also establishes yet another parallel for the separated Frasers. In his timeline, Jamie encounters a heartbroken man who (eventually) loves him: Lord John Grey (David Berry). Much like Claire and Frank, Jamie and John alternatively spar and find common ground and mutual understanding. Berry’s take on Grey, like Menzies’ on Frank, is enormously sympathetic and compelling. He also has a much easier job; Lord John Grey is a hugely popular character in the novels.
But for Frank, that extra dimension comes at the risk of making Claire somewhat unsympathetic—which constitutes brave storytelling from the Outlander team. We can feel for Claire and her heartbreak while also acknowledging that all-consuming heartbreak renders her selfish and occasionally unkind to Brianna and Frank. The swooning romance of Outlander might be its most broadly appealing feature (as in, even those who have never watched the show know it’s about sexy times in Scotland), but it won’t necessarily be its most enduring. In order to survive past the heady rush of the first few seasons and follow down the long and winding path laid by Diana Gabaldon’s books, Outlander will have to continue to build up its supporting players. Given what we saw this week with Frank on his way out and Lord John Grey on his way in, that shouldn’t be a problem.
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