Does Jamie Die in the Outlander Finale?
The Outlander finale is still months away (Friday, May 8, to be exact), but the question on everyone’s mind is, Does Jamie die? It’s morbid, but it’s a valid question, given that Frank has written in his book, Soul of a Rebel, that Jamie won’t survive the battle at Kings Mountain. (There’s also the fact that the show is coming to an end.) Still, is it too much to ask a show like Outlander, one that has never shied away from some very tough and tragic scenes, to let Jamie and Claire live out the reminder of their days peacefully and in love?
“He’s been told [about his possible impending death], and I think he has to work out whether it’s the truth,” Sam Heughan tells Glamour. “Is Frank tormenting him? Is Frank trying to warn him? But also, if it is the case in the past, we know that Jamie and Claire have not been successful in trying to change fate and history, and therefore what do they do about it?”
Author Diana Gabaldon, whose Outlander books have been the basis for the Starz series, has not finished writing the Outlander series; therefore fans have no real blueprint to know how the Outlander finale will play out. The show has not always followed the books but has been pretty close, for the most part. So, do executive producers Maril Davis and Matthew B. Roberts have a message to worried fans who are tempted to google, “Does Jamie die?”
“Well, it’s Outlander. Stories have to end,” Davis says. “In the last episode, I’d be lying if I didn’t say there was grief. It is bittersweet. It is an ending.”
“I’ll say this,” Roberts adds. “It’s an ending because there isn’t anything on the other side. That’s it. People ask what was challenging about this [season]. The challenging thing about the last few episodes is people come into the last episode knowing that’s the last episode. Every other season, every other episode other than episode 101, has something after it. I think that’s the thing. When viewers tune in [to the finale], they’re going into the end and they know that. The emotions are already there.”
Roberts says the only goal was to do a really good season and make sure that it fit the series as a whole. Still, he acknowledges he doesn’t know how fans will feel when they watch the Outlander finale. “It’s hard because you’re going to feel one way, and someone else is going to feel another,” he says. “When we showed a small group of people the ending, everybody had different feelings about it. I mean emotional, but they had different feelings about it.”
The EPs agree that whatever comes in Gabaldon’s books, the finale will feel like a funeral in a way. “Whatever the books are going to do, the books are going to do,” Davis says. “But it is a funeral in some ways…all the emotions surrounding that kind of thought.”
That doesn’t mean that anyone major will die in the finale. No one major died in the Stranger Things finale (well, at least we think), but fans were still grieving because it was the end of a monumental piece of their lives. However, Davis and Roberts aren’t ready to say the Outlander finale is at all similar to the Stranger Things finale in which everyone gets out pretty much unscathed. “We’re not saying there’s no deaths,” says Davis. “This isn’t Stranger Things. So prepare yourself.”
“Yeah, we’re not saying no,” Roberts adds.
There’s also the question of which finale script Roberts and Davis decided to go with: multiple endings were shot, and even the cast doesn’t know how it will end exactly.
“Caitíona and Sam have an idea of how it may end; they just have never seen the final cut,” Roberts says. “Only a handful of people have seen the final cut. When it came to what that was going to be, I know I had a very definitive idea of how I wanted to show to end. Of course, when I finished cutting it, the people who saw it, saw it, and I don’t think we had a lot of discussion in [regards to whether it] should be something completely different, or it should be this, or it should be that. We put out multiple endings in the scripts for sure. We filmed as much as we could, given the time, because if the scripts got out, we didn’t want people to know what was going to happen. So that’s why the faux scripts were written and even read during read-throughs and stuff.
“But when the final cut came out, we showed it to the people that needed to see it. I don’t remember there being a ton of conversation about, ‘Oh, should we go for in another way,’ at all, to tell you the truth. I think that’s because the people who were in the inside of how it was going to end, already previously, it was already told to them, ‘This is where we’re going.’”
