Once upon a time, in the year 1991, Diana Gabaldon published the first book in her epic series, titled Outlander. Here in 2026, 35 years later, book readers are eagerly awaiting the tenth and planned final installment of the series. We got eight seasons of a TV show, and much like the loathed final season of Game of Thrones, the creators of this show had the unique challenge of ending their story when the source material has yet to conclude. Do we think Gabaldon told them something about the ending-ending as she imagines it? Do we think something in this finale is born out of the seed of Gabaldon's ultimate intentions with these characters?
Welp. I certainly hope not, anyway. This was a nearly unwatchable episode of TV. Let's dive in!
Cons:
Where to start? I just feel like... shrug. The whole thing had me vaguely irritated and bewildered. I was not swept up into the drama and emotion of this and it made it, frankly, painful to watch. The whole first thirty minutes of this episode is all just one long painful preamble of Jamie solemnly contemplating his mortality, talking to Claire about it, talking to Bree, writing his will, talking to the bees... everyone is so solemn and slow and repetitive, and they're all saying generic shit like "I love you I hope you don't die" and it's just... yeesh.
You know, going into this finale I hadn't thought they'd really kill Jamie, but after the first fifteen minutes or so of everyone acting so solemn like he was already on his death bed, I thought... oh, so they are killing him? I mean, they are really belaboring the point here if it's all going to be a giant nothingburger so now I guess they do have to kill him? Which is kind of ridiculous and way too depressing?
I have a theory about why so many finale episodes are so divisive and hated, and I think it's that writers and creators of shows feel this overwhelming pressure to change the status quo: we must end our epic story with something that rocks the foundation of the story that came before, that disrupts the patterns we've always followed. Sometimes this works great, and it does make a certain amount of sense. You want a finale to feel unprecedented, you want it to go out with a bang, you want it to be something that means you can never go back to how it was before.
But here's the thing. The cold hard truth about Outlander the TV show. The first few seasons were excellent TV, and then it went seriously downhill, and the effort decreased and the budget decreased and the overall tone and vibe and skill decreased. Here, hanging on til the bitter end, I think most fans just wanted to feel some sense of closure, you know? Just something where we could sigh and say, okay, cool, that's done with. Last week's episode, which closed up William and John's time on the show, felt like that. Was it a stellar episode of TV? Probably not. But it wrapped things up, there were hugs and chess games and peace, and we had our last image of those characters knowing that they were going to be okay. I would have taken that, and taken it gladly, with Claire and Jamie. I would have taken a scene of them sitting around the big dinner table with their whole family, looking ahead to what might come next, their old age spread before them. It's kind of a low bar, and I honestly do believe most viewers would have preferred something kind of anticlimactic to... what we got.
The thing is, this show would like me to forget about that time they killed Fergus Fraser, and I will not be forgetting about it. The thing is, I was right, it was a footnote. The THING IS, the long, belabored, sentimental scenes of Jamie facing the end of his life were so insulting to me, because Fergus was not even mentioned by name, not once, as Jamie talked about living long enough to see his grandkids, or whatever. You'd think he might say, I lived long enough to bury a son, or something. You'd think when we were hearing Jamie writing his will, he'd write some sentimental note about Fergus or something. But no! Because his death didn't matter. And Fanny being a blood relative of Jamie and Claire didn't matter either. I can't stop banging that drum, I just can't. It's too stupid.
Many people have pointed out that this season has really under-utilized Claire, our supposed protagonist, and I really felt that in this finale. She has spent the whole season wandering around, waiting, with a few tiny sparks of getting involved. Here, in the finale, she goes with Jamie to King's Mountain where he is fated to meet his end. She is there, ostensibly, to help the wounded. Great. Then, while the fighting is going on, she decides to go into the thick of it. Why? I mean, I guess to be there to help Jamie if he needs it, but she spends the whole time just kind of gasping and hiding as the chaos erupts around her. I guess maybe the idea is that it matters she was there because she was able to scream a warning at Jamie and prevent him from being cut down by an enemy on horseback right after the surrender of the Loyalists. But then of course Jamie gets shot by a prisoner that they... forgot to disarm or something? Just a couple minutes later after Claire had turned to go back to the field hospital so... again, what was she doing? Why was she there, in the thick of it, other than just the show not wanting its main character to sit on the sidelines in the final battle? She didn't save a single life, she just put herself in harm's way for nothing.
Before I talk about that ending, I want to talk about the choice made here, to have this finale mostly focus on Jamie and Claire, and not the larger ensemble cast. We don't see John and William, we don't see Marsali and the kids, we get only brief little moments with the other characters on the Ridge, and for the most part it's in the form of Claire speechifying to Fanny or Jamie speechifying to Bree, just lots of long drawn out goodbyes. I think, ultimately, it makes sense to narrow the focus, to say that this finale is about them, Jamie and Claire, the center of this show and the beating heart of it. But then on the other hand, there's something... anti-climactic about it, something thin, about not having more of a full feeling. If they'd ended it unambiguously happy you could do a big cheesy montage where you're watching Fergus and Marsali's children grow up, see baby Davey take his first steps, see Lizzie with her husbands laughing with Bree while they help out in the garden, you could see William coming by for a visit with a letter from John for Jamie, you could see the bustle of the Ridge, the life Jamie built for himself there. Maybe bits and pieces from Lallybroch, seeing Jenny there, I don't know. This is more of a critique of this season as a whole, which felt like it had a lot of... hurry-up-and-wait to it. Like the only thing they could think of for Jamie this season was this idea of his doom waiting for him in this battle, and the only thing they could think of for Claire was to sit there and be witness to it. I wanted more. If this is our big cheesy send-off for the characters, then go big with it, I guess is what I'm saying.
The battle sequence itself was kind of underwhelming, lots of shots of people rolling down small hills after being shot lol. It didn't feel grand in scope, and the stakes of this situation, of why this battle in this place at this time was so important that Jamie felt ready to give his life for it, just never really landed. I spent the whole battle flinching every time I saw Ian or Roger because after what they did with Fergus I figured all bets were off and they might go ahead and slaughter any damn character they chose.
So. The ending. The thing is, I literally don't get it. The equivalent scene in the book features Claire saving Jamie's life, and as I recall there's an ambiguously supernatural element to it, all this stuff about when Claire's hair turns fully white she will be at her full power, and the blue light energy healing stuff we first see back in Paris with Master Raymond in season/book two... there's this idea that Claire stops fate, by not letting Jamie die. And sure, fine, I'm honestly cool with that idea, that here Claire has reached her ultimate purpose, has found the "reason" she came into the past. It wasn't to change history, it was to save Jamie Fraser's life, to love him well and grow old at his side. A really cheesy, romantic idea that I could totally get behind.
But... that's not really what... they showed us? Instead, Jamie dies. Like, he's pretty unambiguously a corpse. Claire lies by his side in a field all through the night, you have Roger trying to convince her to let them take him home so he can be buried, and then Claire says "he is home." Meaning... with her, I guess? That they are home with each other? Then we get a flashback all the way back to the beginning of the story, with ghost!Jamie visiting Claire outside her window in 1946 or whatever. And I guess the implication, carried forth from Jamie and Claire's conversation at the start of the episode, is that Jamie is looking in on her as a ghost. And that maybe some essence of him, his younger self, the person he was when they first met, is calling to her as she was back then, calling her to him to begin their journey. And again, sure, that's... fine.
But then we get the final shot of the show, and it's Claire lying by Jamie's dead body and her hair is fully white now, and then Jamie opens his eyes and takes a breath. Gasp! The end.
What? How long as Claire been lying there? Her hair changed color over night? Or is this sort of a metaphorical moment, implying that this is Claire having grown older, and that's not Jamie's literal body, but a manifestation of his soul, and Claire's soul? Is it magic? Did she use magic witch healing energy to bring her husband back to life and doing so made her hair change suddenly? Or is Claire dead too, did she pull a Quasimodo and curl around Jamie's corpse to die with him and now they're waking to a shared eternity? I mean I'm kind of kidding, I don't really think that's what I'm supposed to think, but what I am supposed to think is just so... what? What is the thing that is meant to happen after this? Jamie stands up and he and Claire go home to the Ridge, and Roger and Ian and everybody else who saw Jamie's corpse just goes... yep, I guess Claire is a necromancer now. Anyway, moving on.
Huh? How is this a satisfying ending to the show? I'm all for a melodramatic near-death experience, I'm all for Claire clawing Jamie out of the jaws of death with the sheer desperation of love and her amazing skills as a healer, and then we flash forward to Jamie, maybe disabled in some permanent way, back at the Ridge surrounded by his family... I don't know. You could do this, you could still do the flashback montage of all these romance moments, you could still show some piece of Jamie's consciousness splintering off and going back to find Claire at the start of their shared story... but I'm just wicked distracted by what we actually saw on the screen, which is Jamie dying, lying there as a corpse for many hours, and then miraculously waking up. Why? For what? Huh?
I'm not supposed to think about it this hard. I'm supposed to be swept up in the emotion of it. But as discussed at length above, I never was. I wasn't connected, I wasn't emotionally moved by anything happening, so instead I was just left scratching my head. Killing Jamie off would have been a really stupid thing to do, in my opinion, so I guess I'm glad he's not dead? I think? But that's about as much as I can say.
Pros:
I don't really feel like I have much positive to say about this episode. At most, there are moments that on their own made me think "sure, okay." The big long scene of Jamie and Claire lying in bed together at the beginning had its moments, I liked the image of the two bees sleeping together in the flower, and Claire saying she hopes Jamie has had everything he's wanted. I thought it was kind of a lovely display of intimacy, and could have done without the later sex scene, which felt perfunctory. It was there because everyone expected one more sex scene from these two in the show, not because it added more to the texture of the story. We got the texture, the closeness, the love, from that opening scene, you know?
The exception proves the rule, in that whole long opening to the episode; the most that I was moved by any of it was when Rachel stops walking with Ian towards the group heading off for this battle, says "that's far enough" and they share a wordless goodbye kiss before Ian continues on. Like, right there, that was a couple communicating without the need for a bunch of words, it was sweet and short and tender and it made me believe in them as a couple. I also didn't mind the cheesiness of Fanny coming up to the women waiting back at the Ridge, and telling them that they needed to be strong for Jamie and Claire so they'd come home. A brief little scene, did what it needed to do, in and out. I don't have a problem with Fanny, I think she's cute, I just have a problem with her needing to pass a fuckin' DNA test to be worthy of being part of the family or whatever.
Roger had some good moments, I really liked him and Claire left behind and waiting for the fighting to start, and then when Claire rushes off she's like "don't you fucking try and stop me" and Roger, wisely, does not try and fucking stop her lol. They've always had an interesting dynamic from the minute they meet, they are almost colleagues on a shared project of history before they ever become mother and son-in-law, you know?
I'll praise Caitriona Balfe's grief acting, she is good at the wailing and weeping and such. I was mostly busy being annoyed that Jamie was dead but I was still impressed by her performance, I guess.
Man, this is such a bummer, that this is what the finale of this show ended up being. So lackluster! I have this little fear in the back of my head: which piece of this, if any, is from Gabaldon, what did she tell Ronald D. Moore or other creators involved in this project, about how she envisions the end of this story? Is it Jamie's death, really, that closes things out? I know the books aren't a traditional romance series in the sense that's usually meant, but still. I don't know, I kind of doubt that's where we're going in book land. I think the ending of the series will be both messier and somehow still more cogent and clear than what we got here.
In the end, I'm forced to be grateful that this show's decline in quality over time made me far less emotionally invested than I once might have been. I'll miss John, I'll never ever forgive them for Fergus, the cowards, and in the end, Jamie and Claire's love story just kinda... petered out into a weird, amorphous nothing. It feels like they could have taken an easier route and left people satisfied while perhaps slightly underwhelmed. Instead, this finale left me incredibly dissatisfied and... still... underwhelmed. So. Good job team.
2/10
The show as a whole had so many high highs and low lows. So much of my favorite material from the books, the Lord John stuff, made it into the story in ways I'll always be grateful for. And those earlier seasons, gosh, the sheer effort and skill, the historical accuracy of the costumes, the grittiness and reality of it all. Slowly that all gave way to subpar wigs and phoning-it-in set design and muted acting delivering flat dialogue. But those earlier days really were magical to me. My deep affection for these characters inclines me to be charitable, but I have to remember what a bad note we went out on, too. Overall, I'll give this show...
6/10
No comments:
Post a Comment
I'd really appreciate hearing what you think!