The Outlander season-six finale airs on Sunday, May 1, and it’s one of those jam-packed episodes that will leave you breathless and on the edge of your seat. It’s also one of the best finales Outlander has produced to date and markedly different from the season-five finale, which ended on a very solemn, emotional note following Claire’s return to the Ridge after her sexual assault. This time Sam Heughan (Jamie Fraser) tells Glamour, “It ends on a really good cliff-hanger.”
The season-six finale episode, titled “I Am Not Alone” and directed by Jamie Payne, picks up immediately after Richard Brown arrives at the Ridge to arrest Claire for the murder of Malva Christie, and Heughan calls the hour-long episode “one of our strongest finales” and says there’s “everything” in this episode for viewers. “There’s a lot of action, but there’s some really sensitive, really intimate moments with the characters, and not just Jamie and Claire. Roger and Brianna have some beautiful stuff too.”
Adds Caitriona Balfe (Claire Fraser), “We didn’t necessarily plan on ending at this episode when we started this season, but it felt like a really, really good point to take that break.” She’s referring to her real-life pregnancy at the time as well as the challenges of filming during the pandemic, not to mention scheduling conflicts for the cast and crew. You’d never know it, because episode eight feels like the kind of finale that was always planned.
Heughan agrees. “Personally, and I think probably for Caitriona as well, this was the hardest season to shoot because of all the factors that are going on,” he explains. “It’s interesting that I think [it feels] really deliberate despite being half the size of other ones. It’s packed full of stuff.”
Speaking of that “stuff” that Heughan refers to, “I Am Not Alone” features a road wagon trip of sorts that gives the episode a unique, standalone feel. “It sort of has this very Westernish element to it, but also it’s that whole thing of that frontier man traveling through all these little towns and seeing what that was like at that point,” Balfe says. “It’s great.”
But does Balfe’s Claire even get to travel through these “little towns”? After all, she’s about to be arrested by Richard Brown and his committee, and her future doesn’t look great. In this exclusive clip, viewers will come to understand just how high the stakes are for Claire. Take a look:
As for what’s next, you’ll just have to tune in to find out (and come back to Glamour immediately after the episode as Balfe and Heughan break it all down), but the duo are already looking well ahead to season seven, which started filming a month ago in Scotland.
“It’s been really good,” Balfe says in our Zoom interview after wrapping filming for the day. “We’re almost finished with the first block [of episodes], but it’s been really fun.”
Source: glamour.com