Outlander Book Club: The Scottish Prisoner Chapter 26 breakdown

After being saved from the water, Lord John Grey and Tom Byrd receive Quinn’s tonic in The Scottish Prisoner Chapter 26. That tonic includes opium.

I do have to question why anyone is trusting Quinn in this chapter. Jamie just allows John and Tom to be fed the tonic, and John is happy to let Quinn give him the tonic. It’s clear that this man is not interested in helping John. In fact, he wants to kill him!

And yet, that’s what happens in the chapter. I do have to scratch my head at the idiocy of the characters at times.

Breaking down The Scottish Prisoner Chapter 26

This is a short chapter. It picks up straight off the back of the previous one, with John and Tom in the water. Quinn and Jamie pull them out, and they head away to safety.

Quinn removes the tourniquet that Tom has to stop the bleeding so that he can assess the wound. This then leads to Quinn giving both Tom and John a tonic, which is laced with opium. The whole thing doesn’t make sense. If I was Jamie or John, I would have stopped this. We can’t trust Quinn.

John ends up in an opium-induced dream. When he briefly wakes, Quinn and Jamie are arguing. John can tell that Quinn wants Jamie to lead the latest Jacobite rebellion. Jamie makes it clear that he is not interested in doing this. Quinn is a man who really doesn’t want to take no for an answer, is he?

Lord John Grey succumbs to the opium again, though, thinking of Quinn as a rooster. I’m not sure why a rooster. It does seem like an odd choice, but then, it’s opium. A rooster is symbolic in Celtic culture for the Underworld, but I’m not sure John would put all that together. A rooster is also a symbol of arrogance, and that’s likely where the connection is. Quinn is an arrogant man.

When John wakes again, Quinn and Jamie are no longer arguing. John wishes that he had been awake long enough to know how that argument ended. Did Jamie eventually decide that he would join the Jacobites? Can John trust Jamie to stick to his word and not take part in the cause?

Could this chapter be used in a TV adaptation?

If The Scottish Prisoner is used for a TV series, I could see this chapter being used. After all, it shows how John and Tom are saved by Quinn and Jamie. We also get to see John deal with the opium, seeing flashes of the argument.

The problem is a lot of these arguments are partial. They are also the same argument over and over again. While that works for books, it doesn’t always work for TV shows. Viewers can get fed up of seeing the same thing over and over again. I still think the chapter is important enough to be needed, but the show would need to avoid getting too repetitive with Quinn’s storyline. I do think the book pushes it a little too much.

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