Season 3, Episode 5: ‘Freedom & Whisky’

After last week’s time-and-a-half pace, this episode is a quieter affair. In fact, it’s structured around a single decision — whether or not Claire will return to the 18th century and rejoin Jamie.

The thing is, since we already know the answer, we’re just waiting for Claire to admit it to herself. And thanks to Claire’s current position as her own worst enemy, we watch her agonize over it all. This, as always, is really fun to watch. Much of the rest exists just to bring us back to the moment the season’s been waiting for, and it shows.

A lot of Claire’s early resistance to the inevitable comes from pure knee-jerk horror at learning that Jamie is still alive, and from being faced with a choice she’d written off as pointless to think about. (When Roger says, understandably baffled, “I thought you’d want to know,” Claire snaps back, understandably terrified, “Well, I don’t.”) And she’s so good at projecting her fears about the Great Choice that she manages to conjure Frank’s specter with Sandy (Sarah MacRae), as if Frank were goading her from beyond the grave.

Turns out, it’s only Sandy who rakes Claire over the coals. Some of the dialogue here is “Dark Shadows”-level stilted — is there a mistress in TV history who hasn’t had to deliver the “Sharing Him” speech? Yet there’s something cathartic about Sandy’s finally accusing Claire of everything Claire has ever feared about herself: “You were selfish. You wanted it all. So you lived a lie and you made Frank and Brianna live it, too.”