Outlander Boss Teases the Biggest Season Yet After Season 6 Finale Cliffhanger

[Warning: The following contains spoilers from the Season 6 finale of Outlander. Read at your own risk!]

Another season of Outlander has come to a close, which means Claire Fraser is not doing well. At the end of Season 5, Claire (Caitriona Balfe) had been brutally attacked and raped. At the end of Season 6, she's been thrown in prison by the brother of one of her attackers, awaiting a "fair trial" for the crime of killing Malva Christie (Jessica Reynolds). It's a crime she obviously did not commit, but you try telling that to the angry townspeople throwing stones. She's already a witch, so she might as well be a murderer too. 

Unfortunately for Claire, "fair" is probably not a way to describe whatever trial is coming her way, despite what her captors keep telling her. "No one gets a fair trial in this time, let's be honest," showrunner Maril Davis tells TV Guide. "They're lying." Well this will be a fun wait for Season 7! 

The sixth book, A Breath of Snow and Ashes, does not end with Claire's arrest, and in a different world, Season 6 wouldn't have ended there either. Davis explained that instead of the usual 12 episodes, the ongoing pandemic meant that they had to reduce it to eight, and find a convenient cliffhanger somewhere in the middle, while also stealing a few things from other parts of the book to make sure the full story got told.

"We obviously ended Season 6 in a slightly different area than we'd originally planned, because we originally planned for four more episodes, but due to COVID and everything else, we quickly realized we couldn't accomplish everything that we wanted to," Davis explains. "Eight seemed like the perfect place to stop, on a little cliffhanger moment and a literal shoot-out." 

While Claire is in dire straits, we can at least breathe easier for her husband. Jamie (Sam Heughan) was about to be shipped off to Scotland, until Ian (John Bell) and the Cherokee arrived to save him, meaning they can all now go save Claire. 

"It leaves Jamie and Claire in this position of they're separated, what's going to happen to them?" Are they going to see each other again?" says Davis. "But you know, Outlander is not for the faint of heart. It's Claire and Jamie, and trouble follows those two, so you can't expect them to be sitting on a beach somewhere, just relaxing." 

Davis promises that Season 7 will finish out the stories laid out in Season 6, including the mystery of who actually killed Malva and that fire that will apparently destroy the Fraser home, while also finally diving into Outlander's version of Game of Thrones' most lasting catchphrase. 

"Season 7 is just a huge season. Huge. I say that every season, but this season truly is the biggest," she says. "I mean, we've talked about the revolution coming, like winter is coming. We're finally going to see it." 

That means, Davis teases, that we might be in for some familiar historical faces next season, though she refused to say any more than that. 

The finale also spent a lot of time with Bree (Sophie Skelton) and Roger (Richard Rankin), who spent the season building themselves a new life after their unsuccessful trip through the stones in Season 5. They were, in this finale, alarmingly happy. A hereditary birthmark on Jemmy's head confirmed the fact that he's Roger's son, and they were making plans for when they planned to tell him about the whole time travel thing. They had some sex (accompanied by way too many car puns) and took a jaunty wagon ride through the forest, completely unaware of what Jamie and Claire were going through back at the Ridge. If you know anything about Outlander, you know happiness never lasts long, and Davis confirms that Bree and Roger's joyful contentment is very temporary. 

"I think we are going to see in Season 7 some turbulent times ahead for them," Davis says. "We did kind of set the table, in a way, that things are coming, but we also thought it was an interesting juxtaposition in this episode, of Jamie and Claire's backs against the wall, totally isolated, all of their friends and family gone, and Brianna and Roger completely oblivious to what's going on and being in their own world." 

While Season 6 primarily stayed near the Ridge, that will not be the case in season seven. Outlander will return to its roots as a "traveling show," and will cover more terrain and more story than ever before, Davis teases. "It's just a wild ride, and I'm just looking forward to putting our characters in more turmoil and craziness," she says. "No one's going to be getting a rest, let's put it that way."

For the book fans who have been thrown off by the way the sixth book had to be divided up into three seasons essentially, there's some good news: Davis doesn't want to do that anymore. 

"We don't enjoy diverting from the book," she says. "I think our writers do such an amazing job of adapting these books, picking out the parts, hopefully, that are most important, and figuring out if we've left something behind that's important to us to do, finding places to fit them back in. It's a big puzzle, and it's much more complicated than I think people realize in terms of trying to figure out what we can film, what we can accomplish, what we can't and trying to make a cohesive storyline." 

Unfortunately, that good news is also bad news for Jamie, Claire, and all their loved ones, because the future is absolutely chock full of danger, trauma, fire, and a pretty big war. So for now, we'll just bask in that one scene where the Frasers had sex during the break in the siege on their house, then sat and reminisced about all the times they've almost died—the pinnacle of romance. 

Outlander has been renewed for Season 7. Seasons 1-6 are available on Starz.