Paul Levinson's Infinite Regress

reviewing 3 Body Problem; Black Doves; Bosch; Citadel; Criminal Minds; Dark Matter; Dexter: Original Sin; Dune: Prophecy; For All Mankind; Foundation; Hijack; House of the Dragon; Luther; Outlander; Presumed Innocent; Reacher; Severance; Silo; Slow Horses; Star Trek: Strange New Worlds; Surface; The: Ark, Day of the Jackal, Diplomat, Last of Us, Way Home; You +books, films, music, podcasts, politics

George Santayana had irrational faith in reason - I have irrational faith in TV.

Sunday, December 22, 2024

Outlander 7.13: Good Scenes, Ad Hoc Metaphysics

Lots of good scenes in Outlander 7.13, but the story -- or, more precisely, mostly Roger's story in 1739 -- was a little muddled, at least to me.

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

Here are the scenes that I really liked:

Young Ian and Rachel getting married, and later that night in bed. Both were handled with sensitivity, intelligence, and passion.
Jamie and Claire in bed together was good to see, too.
Roger and his father in 1739 was excellent, too.

But speaking of Roger in 1739, although I was glad to see him at the end of the episode realize that Jem was likely no longer in the past -- important, because we need to see him get back to Brianna in the 1980s -- the time travel, the conduit through time via the stones having never been crystal clear, was even less clear as we hear Roger musing about it. The way the stones are now working, or maybe always worked that way, is if you think really hard about someone when you touch the stone, you're more likely to end up in that person's precise time? I got that Roger said the stones brought you in general back and forth over a 200-year period between the 1900s and the 1700s. We knew that already. But this fine tuning ... I don't know. As I've said lots of times in these reviews, I haven't read the books. Maybe that fine tuning is made more clear on those printed pages. But it seems a bit like some kind of mind-over-matter hocus pocus in the television series.

Time travel of course is science fiction, and not real either. But I guess I like my science fiction to be governed by a somewhat discernible series of cause-and-effects. You have these stones in places on both sides of the Atlantic, and touching them in the right place can get you back and forth in time, 200 years either way. But giving the time traveler the power to affect the exact arrival date or year, that's quite a lot more.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing how all of this plays out in the remaining episodes in this second half of the seventh season.

See also Outlander 7.9: Powerful Separations ... Outlander 7:10: The Nature of Deaths on TV Series ... Outlander 7.11: The Rough Night ... Outlander 7.12: The General

And see also Outlander 7.1-2: The Return of the Split ... Outlander 7.3: Time Travel, The Old-Fashioned Way ... Outlander 7.7: A Good Argument for the Insanity of War ... Outlander 7.8: Benedict Arnold and Time Travel

And see also Outlander 6.1: Ether That Won't Put You to Sleep

And see also Outlander 5.1: Father of the Bride ... Outlander 5.2: Antibiotics and Time Travel ... Outlander 5.3: Misery ... Outlander 5.4: Accidental Information and the Future ... Outlander 5.5: Lessons in Penicillin and Locusts ... Outlander 5.6: Locusts, Jocasta, and Bonnet ... Outlander 5.7: The Paradoxical Spark ... Outlander 5.8: Breaking Out of the Silence ... Outlander 5.9: Buffalo, Snake, Tooth ... Outlander 5.10: Finally! ... Outlander 5.11: The Ballpoint Pen ... Outlander Season 5 Finale: The Cost of Stolen Time