Season 7 Episode 11 of Outlander titled “A Hundredweight of Stones” focuses on Claire (Caitriona Balfe) facing one of her most challenging trials yet: the grief of losing Jamie (Sam Heughan). At the conclusion of the previous episode, viewers discovered that the ship Jamie had scheduled to travel from France to Philadelphia, the Euterpe, had vanished at sea with no survivors. Amidst this devastating news, Claire not only grappled with profound sorrow but also found herself unexpectedly married to Lord John Grey (David Berry). Despite these hardships, the latest episode of the Starz series ends on a note of optimism…
**Spoilers for Outlander Season 7 Episode 11 “A Hundredweight of Stones,” now streaming on Starz**
Jamie lives! He was not on the Euterpe after all! He has finally arrived back in Philadelphia and gone straight to find his wife!
“Do any of you ever really believe that we would kill off Jamie Fraser? No,” Caitriona Balfe said, back when Decider asked about her incredible performance as a grieving Claire in Season 7 Part 2. “But to do this storyline, Claire has to believe it and she has to really sell that.”
“It was difficult because I think it’s hard sometimes when you kind of feel like the audience isn’t necessarily going to be in the same place as your character, you sort of have to work doubly hard to convince them. And it’s a tough storyline.”
It was indeed tough for Outlander fans to watch Claire resign herself to the reality that she was Lord John Grey’s wife. The two not only slept together in a drunken fugue, but wound up entertaining Redcoats in this week’s episode.
“Do any of you ever really believe that we would kill off Jamie Fraser?”
Caitriona Balfe
By the time Jamie shows up to reveal he’s still alive, he’s also in a bit of a bind. Our hero pretends to kidnap Lord John Grey as a hostage in order to safely flee from a group of British soldiers. He also, inconveniently, lets it slip that William Ransom (Charles Vandervaart) is his son right in front of the young man! It’s a wildly dramatic moment and Sam Heughan broke it all down for Decider.
“Look, the first thing is he just wants to see Claire and be reunited with her, and I think that he’s completely shocked by the situation that he walks into.” Heughan said. “I think there’s so much for him to assess or compute, but I think he doesn’t really do that. I think he’s just acting on instinct.”
Heughan went on to tease that as the dust settles, Jamie’s “very complex” friendship with Lord John Grey might be tested once it emerges what Lord John and Claire have done.
“I think Jamie doesn’t understand it and it leads to their relationship being an even darker place, which then probably plays out through most of Season 8,” Heughan said.
“A very dramatic moment between Jamie and Claire…You know, how they get over it, how they reconcile, is very much an ‘Outlander moment.’”
Sam Heughan
“Then, of course,” Heughan said, “add to that, William finding out the truth about him being his father.”
Jamie doesn’t just confirm to William that he’s his bastard son. He informs the young man, raised to be a perfect model English lord, that he’s a “bloody papist.”
“It’s brutal and it shocked William,” Outlander star Charles Vandervaart told Decider. “William’s entire identity is now in shambles. He doesn’t know who he is. He thought he was raised to be this person to serve ‘King and Country’ and to kind of uphold his lordly status. And then now it’s all fallen away.”
“He must just be a very confused person,” Vandervaart mused, laughing. “That’s probably why that’s probably why he’s so angry when he finds out Jamie Fraser’s his dad because he’s like, ‘Everyone says the most confusing things all the time. Who am I? What is this world I’m living in!?’”
This dramatic Outlander ending will certainly have huge reverberations throughout the rest of the series, in Season 7 and Season 8.
“I mean, it’s a huge moment for Jamie,” Heughan said. “And I definitely think a very dramatic moment between Jamie and Claire, as well.”
“You know, how they get over it, how they reconcile, is very much an ‘Outlander moment,’” he said, teasing they’re taking the reconciliation “pretty much from the books.”
“I think the fans are really going to enjoy.”
(function(d, s, id) {
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = “//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&appId=823934954307605&version=v2.8”;
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));
