This post contains spoilers from the series finale of “Outlander.” Proceed accordingly.
You’ve watched the series finale of “Outlander.” You’ve pondered the questions it raised. Now, it’s time to hear from the series’ stars and showrunner for their take on the episode’s highly interpretive final moments.
In case you need a little refresher, the Starz drama’s finale found Jamie surviving the Battle of Kings Mountain… only to be shot in the chest by the British major he captured. Though Claire cried for him to stay with her, Jamie died on the mountain. Claire refused to leave his side, and eventually it seemed like both of them had gone to that great ceilidh in the sky. But in the very last moment of the finale, both of them opened their eyes and took in a breath. (Get all the details in our recap.)
An ambiguous ending, to be sure. So when I got the chance to talk with Sam Heughan, Caítriona Balfe, and showruner/executive producer Matthew B. Roberts, that was our jumping-off point.
‘We got through it pretty good’
Results were… varied.
“I think they’re either alive together on the mountaintop, or they’re alive, or they’re together somewhere else,” Sam Heughan says in the video above.
EP Matthew B. Roberts turns the question back on the audience. “I want you to have your interpretation, and it’s yours, and you get to keep it and hold it, and someone else gets to do the same thing. And I don’t want to explain it to anybody, ’cause I’m not going to,” he says, smiling. “You know me.”
Meanwhile, Caitríona Balfe gives us a sense of what it was like to shoot both Claire’s brutal grief over her soulmate’s death and the also highly emotional bedroom conversation earlier in the episode — the scene that wound up being Balfe’s last to film.
“You know, my face was doing weird s**t, because I was trying not to cry and I was trying to say my lines,” she says. “And the studio was filling up with people because it was our last shot of the series, like, officially. And so there was a hum and a vibration in the studio, and it was just like, ‘We have to get through this.'”
When she saw the finished product, though? “I was like, ‘Oh, we, we got through it pretty good,” she says.
