The Mackenzies successfully pass through the Stones, which we learn when they wake up and see a plane in the sky. Meanwhile, back in the 18th century, Jamie and Claire arrive back at the Ridge and things start to heat up in bed before Claire starts crying. She says every time she closes her eyes, she’s lost half her family. She tells Jamie she’ll never see them again, and he says he often thinks of Murtagh, as he knows they’ve lost a great many between them. Claire starts bawling. I’m bawling. Where’s a trip to Disneyland when you need one?
At least we then get a little montage of things going well at the Ridge. However, there’s too much time left in this episode for it to end on this uplifting note. Soon enough, Claire enters into the main house at night where she stumbles upon fellow time-traveler, Wendigo Donner. Claire wants to know what he is doing there and questions where he was when she needed his help before she was gang-raped. He says he would have been killed had he tried to intervene, but he’s not there to talk about the past. Instead, he wants to get back to the present day and needs her help on how to travel through the Stones. She’s reluctant, but just wants him out of her life, so she advises him to focus, have a clear conscience, don’t drink, etc. But this being Outlander, he then pulls out a pistol and asks for more gemstones. He and his men (who had also been holding Jamie in another room) start ripping apart the house, including Claire’s lab. While I love this entire house, it’s the demolition of Claire’s hard work developing ether and all that’s in her lab that leaves me the most devastated. But then it gets worse; Wendigo lights a match so he and his men can have more light to find the gemstones, but the fire from the match comes in contact with the ether, and the episode ends with the house blowing up.
“That was a really emotional, in part because it comes on the heels of losing Bree and Roger and the kids,” Caítríona Balfe (Claire) tells Glamour. “I think for Claire, she was trying to hold everything in and be the strong person who’s let them go for a really good reason…but it’s this thing of just losing your home [that breaks her]. It is such a destabilizing thing.”
The house going up in flames means it was also the end of a massive—and important—set piece that’s been part of Outlander for several seasons now. “We were saying goodbye to that place, the location that had been our home for the last couple of years,” Sam Heughan (Jamie) adds. “It holds a lot of memories for Jamie and Claire.”
But before we get too much into the aftermath of the fire, we hopped on a Zoom with executive producer Maril Davis to talk about the episode as a whole, and what the goodbye scene means going forward.
