FULL SPOILERS for Outlander: Blood of My Blood Season 2 Episode 3, “Rabbits Don’t Swim,” below.

This will forever be the Home Alone episode of Blood of My Blood. MacKinney takes Castle Leoch while most of the MacKenzie men are away, Ellen realizes that his biggest weakness is his complete inability to see the women as a threat, and suddenly Leoch becomes Kevin McCallister’s house in the Scottish Highlands. Secret passages, arrows, knives, bats and disappearing henchmen follow, and honestly, a lot of it is ridiculously fun.

Harriet Slater is fantastic. Ellen gets to be clever, dangerous and completely believable as Red Jacob MacKenzie’s daughter, while the women of Leoch turn MacKinney’s arrogance against him in increasingly satisfying ways. But this is also the first Blood of My Blood episode in quite a while that feels like a genuine misstep to me, because after all the fighting, death and chaos, I kept coming back to one question: what actually changed because MacKinney showed up?

That is where “Rabbits Don’t Swim” starts falling apart for me. MacKinney creates an enormous amount of activity, yet by the time Ellen kills him and the siege ends, Castle Leoch and most of the people inside it are remarkably close to where they started. The episode is constantly moving. I am less convinced that the story actually goes anywhere.

Highland Home Alone Is A Lot Of Fun

The basic setup is great. MacKinney has chosen a smart moment to strike because the castle is vulnerable, and his worldview immediately gives Ellen a way to fight back. He walks into Leoch assuming the absence of MacKenzie men means the absence of resistance, which gives the episode a wonderfully simple engine: every decision MacKinney makes is filtered through the belief that the women around him are incapable of becoming his real opponents.

That makes his slow realization that all of his men are disappearing incredibly satisfying. His exasperated “Christ Almighty, where are my MEN?” is funny because the audience already knows the answer. Ellen has figured out exactly how he sees the world, and she is using the castle, the women and his own assumptions to dismantle his occupation from the inside.

I especially like that Ellen’s strength here is intellectual. She isn’t suddenly the best fighter in Scotland. But she does understand MacKinney well enough to predict where he will look, where he will not look and what kinds of people he considers dangerous. That makes the siege feel like an extension of Ellen rather than a random action sequence dropped into the middle of the season.

Ellen Is A Badass Because MacKinney Cannot See Her

The strongest idea in the Leoch storyline is that while, yes, MacKinney’s sexism is an ugly character trait. it’s a tactical weakness. He has already decided what women are capable of doing, so Ellen never has to convince him to underestimate her. He does that work for her, and every vanished soldier becomes another consequence of the same blind spot.

That’s why Ellen telling him, “You see only what ye expect,” works so well for me. The line belongs to both characters. Ellen understands the mistake she has exploited, while MacKinney understands exactly what she is accusing him of in the final moments of his life. The episode has spent the siege demonstrating the idea through action, and that line gives the whole thing a clean emotional button.

The performances help enormously too. Harriet Slater can move Ellen from frightened to calculating without turning her into a superhero, and the other women feel like participants rather than props in Ellen’s victory. There is real pleasure in watching MacKinney discover that the people he dismissed are the reason his occupation is collapsing.

Then Janet Dies, And I Realized How Little The Siege Changes

Janet’s death is where my larger problem with the episode really crystallized. The scene is obviously meant to provide the emotional cost of the siege, and Ellen talking about someday naming a daughter Janet Fraser is aimed directly at an audience that understands what that name will eventually mean. I understand the intention, and I understand why that connection is supposed to hurt.

But try removing Janet from the episode. MacKinney still takes Leoch. Ellen still recognizes his weakness and organizes the women. Maura still invokes the Grant name. Ellen still fights MacKinney and kills him. Maura still asks Ellen to bring Dougal home. Colum still changes his mind about Brian, and Ellen still leaves the castle to find him. The episode reaches essentially the same destination.

That is a brutal test for a character death that is supposed to carry this much emotional weight. Janet has also received so little meaningful development that I found myself having the worst possible reaction to her death: she is basically Peggy Schuyler. Hardly knew ye. Barely care about ye. Don’t miss ye. That sounds cruel because the death itself is sad, but the show has not invested enough in Janet for the loss to land with the weight it suddenly demands.

More importantly, her death does not yet alter the story around her. It makes the siege more painful, but it does not force Ellen, Maura or Colum into a different choice during this episode. Janet becomes proof that MacKinney was dangerous rather than the cause of a new direction for the surviving characters, and that is the larger issue I have with “Rabbits Don’t Swim.” The siege creates a tremendous amount of pressure, but once MacKinney is gone, very little of that pressure appears to have permanently reshaped the people who survived it.