There are series finales and series finales and by that, I mean that some series finales come and go and then there are those like Lost and The Sopranos that continue to engender conversations as viewers try to decipher what really happened.
The Outlander finale appears to be in that vein as longtime fans of the series try to conclude whether when Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire Fraser (Caitríona Balfe) open their eyes and gasp for breath in the last second on screen, they are alive on earth or somewhere else, like heaven.
For showrunner/executive producer Matthew B. Roberts, he explained to the industry audience attending the Outlander FYC event at the Linwood Dunn Theatre in Hollywood the night the finale aired on STARZ that he wanted to leave the ending “open to interpretation.”
The Battle of Kings Mountain ends with the Patriots emerging victoriously and Jamie very much alive. He has knocked Major Patrick Ferguson (Charles Aitken) off his horse, and while Ferguson is sitting on the ground, Jamie asks him, “Do you surrender?” Ferguson yells, “I will never surrender,” and pulls a hidden pistol out and shoots Jamie in the heart. He is promptly killed by Buck (Diarmaid Murtagh), Ian (John Bell) and one of the Beardsley twins (Paul Gorman), who are justified in their overkill.
Then Claire, who was making her way down the hill to the medical tents to tend the wounded, clutches at her heart, realizing something has happened to Jamie, and she makes her way back to him, where he’s lying dying on the ground. He tells her, “I’m sorry,” and she begs him not to leave. But he dies…or does he?
Claire refuses to leave him, despite Roger (Richard Rankin) telling her they need to take him home, there are things that need to be done, but Claire refused saying, “He’s home.” She lie with him for hours and she appeared to die, too.
There’s a montage of their life together and we even go back to the ghost at the beginning of the series, where it all began, and now we see it’s Jamie, who caused the Forget-Me-Nots to bloom that attracted Claire to the stones in the first place.
Then, just as the screen fades to black, Jamie and Claire open their eyes and gasp in a breath of air, and you can see that Claire’s hair has turned completely white, which means she’s fully come into her powers as the La Dame Blanche, aka the White Witch.
So, what does it mean?
“I wanted the whole show, the whole series, to mean something,” Roberts added, expanding on the idea of leaving the finale open to interpretation. “It was important that the finale was a part of that. I didn’t want to do a very special episode and make it something different. I wanted it to fit, but also over the years, I’ve learned there’s fan interaction. They get something out of it when they watch it. It felt like a different kind of show. They want things that they can watch over and over. They felt something when they were watching and we felt something when we were making it, so at the end of the day, you wanted it to mean something to someone.
“Over the years, I’ve heard the comments that you should have done this and you should have done that, and that’s great because they’re interacting, and so now [with the finale] you get to participate. You get to make your own ending. What does it mean to you? If you want the sad ending, it’s sad; if you want the happy ending, it’s happy. Do they live on forever? Maybe they do. Did they die? Maybe they do. Are they in heaven? I don’t know. You tell me. That’s what the ending is to me.”
For Balfe, the key is that they are always together, she said, “We’ve always said that their love is metaphysical. It’s beyond anything we can imagine it and I think you know in the world of mysticism and energy and what lives in what kind of context, I think it’s nice that they exist everywhere.”
Heughan passed on the question.
Of course, the final book in the Outlander series has yet to be released. Bestselling author Diana Gabaldon, who created the world where Jamie and Claire exist, is currently working on it. So the question was broached, “Would you return to the Outlander world when the book is finally released?”
Initially, Heughan joked, “I can’t go through this again.“ But then added on the more serious side, “Never say never.” And Balfe, echoed that, saying, “Our eyes opened, so never say never.”
All eight seasons of Outlander are currently streaming exclusively on STARZ.