The Outlander Series Finale Proved It's About the Journey, Not the Destination

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains major spoilers from "And the World Was All Around Us," the series finale of Starz's Outlander.

For more than a decade, the Outlander television series has left fans with lofty questions. Will Jamie (Sam Hueghan) and Claire (Caitriona Balfe) be reunited years after the Battle of Culloden? Will a fire claim them and the Big House at Fraser's Ridge? Can they ever shake the looming cloud of Black Jack Randall? Will she bleed out after being shot at the Battle of Monmouth? Will he escape Ardsmuir Prison? Will they ever catch a break?

But the May 15 series finale left viewers with an all-too-familiar concern: Will Jamie and Claire live to see another day? It's a question that, frankly, has always felt like it answers itself. This is Outlander, and there is no story and no TV series without Claire and Jamie. But asking it in the final moments of the series finale is, admittedly, a bit more precarious. All season, the Frasers have been wading through the foreboding thicket of Jamie's possible death at the Battle of Kings Mountain, a prediction courtesy of her first husband Frank (Tobias Menzies) and his 20th century research on the Scots during the American Revolution. They tried to avoid it; they said goodbye about three dozen times in the lead up to it; and he, at least, had made peace with it by the time they stood in the shadow of the Kings Mountain ridge.

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But what happens will likely divide fans, as so much has in the eighth and final season. After barely being able to focus on the task at hand because of their supposed date with destiny, Claire storms the upward sloop of the battlefield to find that Jamie has survived the firefight. They rejoice as his men round up the Redcoats and declare victory. But when he demands unconditional surrender from their leader Ferguson, the sniveling commander pulls a pistol out and shoots Jamie in the chest. Claire, already halfway down the mountain, feels the pain dead center in her own chest, a call back to Season 7 when she said she would know in her heart if Jamie ever died. She rushes to him, but all he has time left to say is "Forgive me." 

Devastated isn't strong enough a word to describe what she — and the audience — feel in this moment. She can't bring herself to move, despite the pleas from Roger (Richard Rankin) to clear the battlefield and bury the dead, including Jamie. She merely clings to his body as night comes, holding on for dear life. Only when Roger makes his final request to take Jamie home, does Claire muster enough strength to say, "He is home."

Then, something happens. What exactly? It's all up to us, the viewers, to determine what transpires after a lengthy montage of Claire and Jamie's greatest hits. As the camera hangs over them, each sharing the slab of stone that he died on (Titanic, much?), Claire's hair has grayed completely in a matter of moments. Her hand rests limp on his cheek. She, too, seems to have died of grief or resignation to the moment. And then, they both open their eyes and gasp for breath. End of series.

This almost certainly has something to do with the magical "blue light" healing abilities that Claire has long suspected she might possess, which took a toll on her earlier this season as she saved an otherwise doomed baby in childbirth. Did she save Jamie? Did they both awake in another plain of existence? Or is it all just magical wish fulfillment to help the diehard fans sleep at night with a glimmer of hope that the Frasers aren't really gone? And frankly, does it matter? 

At the end of the day, Outlander is over. The weight of this question that has hung over the Frasers all season ultimately doesn't carry much weight at all because they were gone regardless of whether they lived. In past seasons, there were stakes to the mortal danger they lived through and survived. If they had perished then, the show would have not been the same, nor would it have been of much interest to viewers once the lovebirds were separated by more than just time.

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What matters in the end is how we got here. Whether they died on a rock or lived until they couldn't get out of bed from old age (which is exactly where they would want to be), Claire and Jamie Fraser's story was never just its final chapter. It was the whole book. As evidenced by the coda to the episode, which featured author Diana Gabaldon signing copies of her original book in the 1990s, with Claire's journal next to her as her "wee bit of inspiration." It was always the breadth of their story, not a single event on the jumbled timeline of it. 

Putting too much pressure on ourselves as viewers and the show's creators — specifically current showrunner Matthew B. Roberts — going into a finale is an exercise in futility because deciding an ending can define a story that negates all that came before it. So much of what makes Outlander great is trudging through the darkness to find the light, the hope.

What audiences got in the series finale of Outlander wasn't an answer to the question of life or death, but rather the validation that Claire and Jamie's story mattered enough for the question to even resonate in the first place. The episode, titled "And the World Was All Around Us," isn't the biggest in the eight seasons, nor is it the best. It has its moments (Jamie telling their daughter that she looks like her mother in love was particularly beautiful), but in the end, it is a moment in time. An inevitability in the lives of two people who feel like they have lived several lifetimes within a single one.

Fans will be dissecting the end of Outlander for years, even decades, to come, not because of what may or may not have happened on that stone atop Kings Mountain, but rather what brought them there. Dinna fash, Outlander fans. Like the finale or not, one thing is for certain: We learned long ago that Jamie and Claire were always going to be greater than their end.