Outlander Season 7 has only been back for two weeks and already it feels like the Starz show has given fans a season (or three) of wild plot twists, reunions, and losses. Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire (Caitriona Balfe) have returned to Lallybroch and left Lallybroch. While they werer there, they buried dear old Ian (Steven Cree), made peace with Laoghaire (Nell Hudson), and even waxed nostalgic about the place where they first fell in love. Roger (Richard Rankin) and Buck (Diarmaid Murtagh) have arrived in the past, only to discover they overshot their trip through the Stones by a few decades. They come face to face with Jamie’s dad, a young version of his sister Jenny (Kristin Atherton), and even watch the iconic moment when Dougal (Graham McTavish) met Geillis (Lotte Verbeek)!
In Outlander Season 7 Episode 10 “Brotherly Love” alone, Claire arrives in Philadelphia, performs live-saving surgery, turns spy, and learns Jamie is dead — all while Young Ian (John Bell) is reunited with Rachel (Izzy Meikle-Small) in a deadly showdown that includes Arch Bug (Hugh Ross) and William (Charles Vandervaart).
The insanity continues in this week’s all-new episode, Outlander Season 7 Episode 11 “A Hundredweight of Stones,” which flits its way through some of Diana Gabaldon’s most polarizing storylines in just under an hour.
Needless to say, Outlander fans might be experiencing some emotional whiplash. After patiently waiting for more than eighteen months for new Outlander episodes, this latest run of the Starz series is delivering nonstop adventure at full throttle. It’s a stylistic choice that Outlander executive producer Maril Davis chocked up to the fact that she and co-showrunner Matthew B. Roberts didn’t know if Season 7 would be their last chance at finishing Claire and Jamie’s story.
“When we started Season 7, we thought that was potentially our last season,” Davis said. “So we had two books left and we said, ‘Let’s just use them all.'”
Davis gave a “huge compliment” to Outlander‘s writers for “crafting a season that felt so smooth…like it was one story,” noting that being able to condense the material offered in two books into sixteen episodes is “pretty impressive.”
“So I just think it is jam-packed because, you know, we’ve got a lot of material to cover,” Davis said.
As the overall story of Outlander stands now, we not only need closure on the whole “Jamie lost at sea” storyline, but also Jemmy’s (Blake Johnston Miller ) kidnapping, Roger’s hunt for a mysterious “fairy man” he believes could be his missing father, and the Revolutionary War. (Though, I think we already know how the Revolutionary War ends. Right, folks?)
Then there’s one final, poignant mystery that has haunted Outlander since Episode 1. If the mysterious Scotsman observing Claire from afar in 1945 Inverness is Jamie, how did he get there? Did Jamie time travel? Was he a ghost? How much magic is binding Claire and Jamie across the ages?
When Decider asked Outlander executive producer Matthew B. Roberts what part of Season 7 Part 2 he was most keen for fans to see, he said, “The whole thing.”
“Because it’s of a piece,” Roberts said. “I think once you take in the whole season, once you watch the whole thing, and you get to the end and you let it envelope you, I think you’re going to be excited to go, ‘Where are we going to go from here?'”
Of course, Outlander Season 7 isn’t the end of Outlander. Outlander Season 8 will wrap up Claire and Jamie’s saga at some point in the future, explaining how their epic love story eventually does or doesn’t end.
However, Outlander‘s final season won’t even be the end of Outlander. Besides the fact that Diana Gabaldon is still working on novels about Claire and Jamie and their friends, Starz has already filmed the entire first season of a prequel series, Outlander: Blood of My Blood. That new show will tell the story of how Claire’s parents Julia Moriston (Hermione Corfield) and Henry Beauchamp (Jeremy Irvine) fell in love against the backdrop of World War I and how star-crossed 1700s Scottish lovers Brian Fraser (Jamie Roy) and Ellen MacKenzie (Harriet Slater) finally found their happily ever after at Lallybroch, eventually having Jamie.
So it might feel a little bit like Outlander is burning through story at the start of Season 7 Part 2, but that could just because there’s still so much story left to tell.