Outlander Homepage Originals
In Blood of My Blood, it’s often the women who prove the most resourceful—but just as often, their cleverness ends up being used against one another as much as against the men pulling the strings. Jealousy and broken alliances are common, to the point where no-one can be sure about whom they can trust. It makes the risks that Ellen and Julia take all the more perilous. They can never be sure that their plans won’t go awry, given that alliances are all too easily destroyed.
For Julia, her plan to accompany Brian to the Beltane Festival and help him to meet up with Ellen in exchange for passage to Inverness is thwarted before she can even leave the house. As the episode entitled “Needfire” begins, Davina catches Brian and Julia as they creep silently through the castle in the early hours of the morning. She forbids Julia to leave, and in doing so reveals to Brian that not only is Julia supposedly carrying Lovat’s child, but that a seer is coming to predict the child’s future. It is an announcement that causes Brian to doubt Julia’s motivations and he leaves the castle alone, much to Julia’s distress.
But just what are Davina’s true motivations? Is she jealous of Lovat’s attention towards Julia? Is she scared that she and Brian will be turned out when the baby is born? Is she resentful of being treated as a servant? Or is it a combination of all?
Meanwhile, Ellen is also dealing with a jealous woman, in the form of her sister, Jocasta. Although already married, Jocasta seems to resent the attention that Ellen receives and makes many barbed comments about her sister’s betrothal. She watches as Ellen is crowned Queen of the Festival and insists that Ellen accompany her to partake in the fertility blessings, thereby thwarting her sister’s plans to escape the gathering and go and meet Brian. During the ensuing argument, we learn other reasons for Jocasta’s jealousy, including her belief that Ellen had played a part in Jocasta’s arranged - and joyless- marriage to the sickly John Cameron. Ellen assures Jocasta that she had merely steered their father away from other less desirable suitors and finally manages to convince Jocasta to enter into a pact. They will each have time to do as they please for the afternoon, by using each other as an alibi. Even then, Jocasta demands a payment, in the form of a family necklace that had been left to Ellen. It is a price Ellen is willing to pay to avoid being, as she puts it, “a pawn in someone else’s game".
At Castle Leathers, the seer, Maisri proclaims Julia’s child to be a boy of great importance, who will unite clans. Maisri knows what Lovat wants to hear and tells him so. The boy will be a ruler, she says, leaving Lovat convinced that he has sired a King. While her true power comes from reading people and telling them that their desires will come to pass, Maisri also seems to have some psychic ability, when she speaks of another child: a girl with dark curls and blue eyes, whose time is yet to come. It is a description of Claire and this unnerves Julia even more.
Against the odds, Ellen and Brian manage to steal away from the festivities and waste no time in giving in to their passion. Unbeknownst to them, Murtagh has seen their passionate embrace: a discovery that fractures yet another allegiance. Having believed Brian to be putting in a good word for him with Ellen, Murtagh is devastated to see his cousin kissing her instead. His voyeurism ends shortly afterwards, so he is not privy to the couple’s hand fasting and consummation - an act that seems fraught with peril. Yet somehow the two lovers are not discovered by anyone as Brian accepts Ellen’s challenge to “ruin” her. It is a risk that Ellen is willing to take. She has had so little choice in her life, she tells him, with so many things being decided for her. If she has only one choice, she says, it will be to choose him.
Davina decides to risk telling Lovat what she knows about Julia, including her suspicions that Julia was already pregnant when she arrived at the castle, offering as proof the fact that Maisri had never actually called him the father of the child. But Maisri has done her work well and Lovat will not entertain any thoughts of the child not being his, chillingly threatening to slit Davina’s throat should she ever tell anyone else of her suspicions.
As the episode comes to a close, there is much heartache underneath the ritual and festivities. A drunken Murtagh, who has only ever wanted to be wanted, briefly finds a kindred spirit in Jocasta who has wanted the same, yet their one tryst ends abruptly when Murtagh says Ellen’s name aloud. Ellen has had no choice but to return to the festival and complete the formalities with Malcolm Grant by her side as king, even as Brian watches her from within the crowd. (How anyone hasn’t noticed their longing glances at each other, this reviewer will never know!) Ned Gowan and Henry Beauchamp (who is ironically at the very festival that Julia had planned to attend in order to escape and find him!) have shared a conversation about longing, with Ned cautioning Henry about pining away for a woman he may never find again, using his own story of lost love as an example. But while Ned ultimately chose to live again, Henry will not think about moving on. And back at Castle Leathers, Julia takes her wedding ring from its hiding place and slips it on her finger, as her voiceover reassures Henry that she will burn for him forever. It seems that no-one’s fate is to be a happy one.
Throughout episode 6, “Birthright”, there is a prevalent overtone of desperation. Julia is desperate to protect her child until she can be reunited with Henry; Davina is desperate to protect her and Brian’s position within the house; Lovat is desperate to marry before the baby is born, and Henry is desperately searching for Julia, having begun interviewing midwives in the hope of finding one who has recently delivered the baby of a “sassenach.”
Desperate feelings lead to desperate actions. Davina accuses Julia of seducing Lovat and attempting to seduce Brian, an action that turns the entire group of women brought in for the confinement against her. It is all the more shocking when we see in flashback the horrible assault of a young Davina at the hands of Lovat and her own treatment at the hands of the confinement women when Brian had been born. It seems that these women are just as judgemental now as then. Having initially come to support Julia, and fawn over the yet-to-be-born future King, the women become a screaming mob, calling Julia a witch and a jezebel, threatening the baby and mimicking Julia’s labour pain cries in a bizarre scene that would have been more at home in The Handmaid’s Tale.
Desperate to protect her child, Julia continues to claim under duress that Lovat is the father. The only person to whom she has told the truth is Brian, desperate to have one ally in the house. Fortunately, Brian (who has been desperately trying to understand his parentage and how he can both gain and give respect to his father) is truly a decent man, coming to both Julia and Davina’s aid to protect them from Lovat - but then bizarrely consenting to be whipped as punishment for his actions.
Desperate to have a legitimate heir, Lovat appears in the birthing chamber with a minister in tow, determined to marry Julia before the child is born. Further flashbacks reveal him to be a truly vile individual and we can only hope that karma makes an appearance before too much longer.
Desperate to find his wife, Henry’s interviewing of midwives ends in tragedy when one of them recounts the deaths of one Julia Beauchamp and her child about a week earlier. We know this to be a lie, and soon see the truth of the situation - the woman has been bribed by Arch Bug to tell the story to Henry. The news is enough to shatter Henry’s last grip on sanity. Desperate for the news not to be true, he runs back to the prostitute he had earlier befriended, although this time he believes her to actually be Julia and makes love to her accordingly.
We finally see some redemption when Julia’s pleas and Davina’s memories of her own trauma are enough for her to come to Julia’s aid, banishing the confinement women, refusing to allow Lovat to force a marriage in the midst of a birth and then helping to deliver the baby. Brian is once again Julia’s ally, promising both her and the baby that they have a friend in him. He is truly the only kind light in an otherwise dark and disturbing episode. And as to what will happen in the future now that Claire supposedly has a brother is anybody’s guess - particularly when Henry may just have impregnated another woman with another half sibling…
Overall, there are very few bright moments in episode 5 and 6. This iteration of the Outlander story seems to be full of deception and darkness, with heartache at almost every turn. Both Julia and Ellen continue to push against the roles expected of them, but their defiance comes at an enormous cost. Ellen chooses passion and self-determination over an arranged marriage, knowing full well that her family—and rivals like Jocasta—will see it as betrayal. Julia, on the other hand, dares to protect her unborn child and carve out her own agency in a hostile household. Yet in doing so, she draws the scorn not just of men but of women, too. Davina’s jealous accusations spark a mob of judgment that nearly crushes Julia during her most vulnerable moment. Though Davina redeems herself at the last second, Julia’s position remains perilous—the goodwill of one woman does not erase the deep hostility of many.
What emerges from the two episodes is a striking paradox. In a patriarchal world, women seem to wield power most dangerously against other women, their rivalries and jealousies every bit as consequential as the dictates of fathers, brothers, and lairds. Julia and Ellen’s courage makes them remarkable, but it also leaves them perilously exposed—not just to the wrath of men, but to the judgment of their own sex.
One can only hope there is some joy coming from somewhere soon.
This episode was reviewed by Susie Brown, a writer and teacher librarian who lives in Australia. She is still trying to be openminded, but can’t help comparing the writing of this series with the original and would love to know what Diana Gabaldon really thinks…
