That scene—Claire in the bathroom, Frank outside, the door locked—is a . The original signal (her love for Frank) has been overwritten by a newer keyframe (her love for Jamie). The decoder (Frank’s heart) tries to render both simultaneously, resulting in a pixelated, unwatchable mess. Temporal Resolution vs. Spatial Resolution OpenH264 forces a choice: do you want high spatial resolution (sharp details) or high temporal resolution (smooth motion)? You cannot have both with limited bitrate.

But watchable is not the same as whole.

Claire chooses temporal resolution. She needs the past to move smoothly—to replay Jamie’s hands on her waist, the crackle of Lallybroch’s hearth, the wet thud of a sword entering flesh. To keep that timeline fluid, she lets spatial details decay. She forgets the name of the innkeeper. She blurs the pattern of Frank’s new tweed jacket. She compresses her 20th-century life into a thumbnail.

When Claire looks into the mirror at the episode’s end, she sees not two faces (1948 Claire, 1746 Claire) but a single, poorly rendered composite. The codec has done its job. It has compressed her grief into something watchable.

S02E01’s SEI message is the ghost of Faith, the daughter Claire lost. Faith appears in the opening nightmare, a stillborn image with no motion vectors. She is not a full frame. She is a —a corrupted packet that the player keeps trying to re-request.