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.”