Usually, the back-from-the-dead homecoming of a story’s hero is the stuff of triumphant season finales. But even though an alive-and-well Jamie Fraser burst back into the action in last week’s Outlander, we’re a long way off from a happy ending.
Fans of the Starz drama, we’ll understand if you’ve not yet recovered from the rollercoaster that was Episode 11. When Jamie was presumed lost at sea, his soulmate Claire and his pining gay bestie Lord John Grey married in an effort to keep her out of Redcoat custody (long story), then had drunken sex in an effort to lessen their mutual, crippling grief (longer story). And then, Jamie suddenly returned in the episode’s final moments, proving that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated.
All’s well that ends well, right? Not so fast, sassenachs. As the action picks up again in this week’s hour (which drops at midnight ET Friday on streaming and at 8/7c that evening on the linear channel), the Frasers’ romantic reunion gives way to tough conversations about what, exactly, happened while Big Red was gone.
“It takes a dark turn,” series star Caitríona Balfe tells TVLine, teasing a run of episodes in which a whole bunch of characters act on their bruised feelings, sometimes with grave results. An incident in Episode 12, in particular, “infects” Claire, Jamie and someone they hold very dear, she previews. “It hurts them all, and it’s very hard for them to get past.”
And that’s before we get down to how Claire and Jamie address how his absence affected their marriage. (Those who loved the couple’s feisty skirmishes circa Season 1 and 2, settle yerselves in!) “There is a reckoning between Claire and Jamie that’s quite heated,” Balfe says, chuckling. “It’s sort of reminiscent of those big fights of old. It’s that kind of laying down where your boundaries are, and not shying away from declaring your love, but also not accepting somebody taking advantage of it or treating it as less than it should be treated.”
None of us like seeing Kilt Mom and Kilt Dad argue, so we’re happy to report that the real-life vibe is loving and laid-back when, a few weeks before our chat with Balfe, she and co-stars Sam Heughan, Sophie Skelton, Richard Rankin and John Bell stop by our New York studio. The occasion: a photo shoot with TVLine and our sister site, SheKnows, to celebrate the time-travel drama’s decade of production.
Our conversations with the actors that day, and in the weeks that follow, tend toward what to expect in the run-up to the Season 7 finale on Friday, Jan. 17, 2025. But we’ve also been Outlander obsessives from Day 1, so we can’t help but look back on the cast’s 10 years together. We also peer ahead to the eighth and final season, which at the time of the shoot they are in the process of wrapping.
First order of business, disregarding the Frasers’ most recent troubles: Would Jamie even have survived to this point if Claire hadn’t been around to set dislocated shoulders, un-mangle hands and cultivate lifesaving penicillin from scratch? “Well, I don’t know,” Heughan starts gingerly, with a sidelong glance at Balfe (who, by the way, immediately answers: “No”). “Sorry, but a lot of the drama comes with Claire.”
Though we — and Balfe — heavily beg to differ, Heughan maintains that Jamie would’ve been alive at this point in the story, though “married probably to Laoghaire, and that would’ve been an unhappy marriage. It would’ve been not very comfortable, but I think he probably wouldn’t have been in all the strife that he’s been through.”
Balfe good-naturedly yet pointedly whispers, “I disagree.”
“I’ve always said,” Heughan continues, “when Jamie sees Claire, he sees his demise. He sees his death.” He laughs. “He’s like, ‘I will die for this woman’… and probably will. That’s love.”
The feel of the photo shoot is like a glam afterparty among friends: cozy, comfortable, a little silly. Skelton has fun posing with prop sunglasses and a colorful boom box; for a while, she and Heughan joke around in front of the camera, riffing on their father/daughter roles.
In what we’ve seen of the Starz series so far this season, the pair haven’t shared any scenes, and with good reason. While Jamie and Claire have been having near-death experiences in the 1700s, Brianna and Roger’s 1980s-set story centers on the kidnapping of their young son, Jem, by one of Bree’s Jacobite-gold-preoccupied co-workers. Except, after Roger follows some troubling clues and travels through time to find his boy — surprise! — he goes to the wrong era. And — surprise again! — the kidnapper never actually went through the stones with wee Jem, meaning Bree is fighting for her child in the ’80s alone.
As the show progresses toward the season finale, Skelton tells us later, the MacKenzie family’s multi-timeline drama comes more to the fore.
“Look, if anybody is equipped to handle brutal situations, it’s Brianna,” Skelton says. Still, she acknowledges, this type of emotional agony is new territory for Claire and Jamie’s daughter. “She’s definitely having to make her peace with the fact that the reality might be that she’ll never see her husband again and never see her son again. They don’t even know if Jemmy is alive, and now she doesn’t even know if Roger’s made it through. So there is just a sense of loss in all realms.”
It’s a relief, then, when Bree manages to brain the kidnapper, Rob Cameron, with a cast-iron skillet at the end of the most recent episode. “Over the next couple of eps, it escalates more, and we see some of the ways that Brianna had defended herself and had to fight in the past sort of crosses over into the future, as well,” she previews. “It definitely gets a little bit more action-oriented and a little bit more physical.” (Translation: Rob Cameron, may God have mercy on your soul.)
Meanwhile, back in 1740s Scotland, Roger is losing hope that he’s going to find his son… and starting to hope that he’ll run into his father, a Royal Air Force pilot who went missing during World War II. Did the elder MacKenzie accidentally slip through time? Will Rog, against all odds, reconnect with the dad he thought died when he was a baby? Starz will run us through with a sgian dubh if we spoil the outcome, but Rankin teases that what happens out there on the moors “changes Roger’s entire perception of his entire life.”
And when Roger isn’t chasing down the “fairy man” who may or may not be his pop, he’s serving as comic relief as the show brings back fan-favorite characters who happen to be his far-off ancestors, among them Jamie’s uncle, Dougal (played by Graham McTavish), and cunning murderess Geillis (Lotte Verbeek) — who happen to be far-off ancestors of Roger’s. “I had a stupid amount of fun doing the whole Geillis thing,” Rankin says, grinning. “Add all the numbers up, and he could very potentially be at his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s conception. It’s quite amusing.”
Outlander Cast Season 7, Part 2 Photo Shoot
On the photo shoot set, Skelton and Rankin look at a few of their just-captured images on a laptop at the back of the room. He praises her ability to connect with the camera, then self-deprecates about his own. She smiles and tells him he looks great. Their back-and-forth seems easy. Friendly. Lived-in.
Later, she happens to mention Rankin’s hobby of flying; he has his pilot’s license. She hasn’t flown with him, she tells us, but she’d love to: “I would trust Richard with my life, I have to say. I actually would. I wouldn’t trust many people, but I would trust him with my life.”
If there’s a life of the party at the shoot, it’s Bell. Hands down. And he’s aware.
He sings along to Chappell Roan and Taylor Swift as they play over the speakers. When photographer George Chinsee suggests that he jump for a shot, Bell puts serious air between his red-soled boots and the ground… then does it again.
Bringing the energy is “my role in the group-slash-my personality, right?” Bell says later. “Especially in moments like that, I’m like, ‘This is so cool, what we’re doing right now. We should be celebrating this!’ And I think I’m good at reminding people, like Caitríona and Sam who do this stuff all the time, just how lucky we are and how silly we can be and have fun. They’re good at that, but when I come on, I just bring it up to an extra level.”
Bell has played Young Ian Murray, Jamie’s nephew, since Season 3. The character started as a gangly teenager and has matured into a wise warrior. In the midseason premiere, Young Ian bids his parents farewell knowing he won’t see his ailing father alive ever again; the end of the hour, in which Young Ian tearfully waves to his dad as he leaves the family home once more, is one of Bell’s favorite interludes of the entire series.
“That was a moment where the goodbye and strength was in bravery, was in, ‘You’ve got this, kiddo,’” he says proudly.
On a brighter note, Ian has found love this season with Rachel Hunter (Izzy Meikle-Small), and it’s the real deal. “There’s definitely going to be some obstacles in their way to marriage,” he warns, “mainly due to Rachel being a Quaker and the complications that come up with that. But, in typical Outlander fashion, love conquers all.” He gives us a pointed look and leans in slightly. “So I think we will see a happily married couple with some intimacy” — a type of scene not often afforded to young Mr. Murray — “and that’s all I’m going to say.”
Ian also is very involved in what happens in the aftermath of William’s learning that he is Jamie’s biological son, a bomb accidentally dropped on the soldier in the kerfuffle that ended Episode 11. “Young Ian’s relationship with his uncle is father-son, let’s be real,” Bell says. “So for Ian, I think he has a hard time understanding anybody’s point of view that doesn’t hold Jamie as the ultimate father figure, the ultimate good guy, the person to model yourself on.”
When we consult Charles Vandervaart, who plays William, he assures us that his character will calm down about all of this. Eventually.
“William does somewhat come to terms with the fact that he is quite similar to his biological father,” he says. “I do think it’s going to take him a long, long time, though, to reconcile with that, truly, and to accept him as his father. That might be a little bit later down the line.”
He chuckles wryly. “We’ve got a Season 8 for that.”
That brings us to the plaid elephant in the room: Outlander will end with its eighth and final season, a fact that’s got the cast thinking about everything they’ve done and shared over the past 10 years of filming.
Heughan, for instance, notes that he’s proud of Balfe for making her directorial debut; she helms a Season 8 episode. “She was phenomenal,” he says. Seated on his right, Balfe gets a grateful look on her face and rubs his arm in thanks. “She’s such a people person, and,” he jokes, “she got out some great performances from some rather rusty actors.” He turns to her as he becomes more serious. “Honestly, I was so proud of you that day.” (To hear Balfe wax proud about Heughan’s finest on-set moment, make sure to check out our interview here.)
First, though, they’ve got to bring Season 7 to its conclusion, an hour Vandervaart describes as “bittersweet — maybe not what you hope for, but maybe it’s what was inevitable always. There’s good things and there’s really horrible things, but that’s the Outlander way, you know?”
We’re not going to lie: That makes us a wee bit worried about the Claire-Jamie fight Balfe mentioned earlier and how its repercussions may shake out in the near future. So naturally, we turn to the woman who plays the show’s resident healer to make us feel better.
“This is a marriage that has endured,” she says. “Their core is solid. There’s things that will definitely rock them, and there are wounds that may take a long time to heal, but it’s work, right?”
She smiles reassuringly. “From here on out, it’s about work. It’s not about ‘Will they/ Won’t they?’ It’s about ‘How do they?’”
Thirsty for more Outlander goodies? Make sure to check out SheKnows’ cover story here and video here!
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