Outlander's final season gets off to a promising, characteristically busy start

Nailing a final season is no easy task. Just ask Game Of Thrones and Stranger Things. Nailing the final season of a beloved, decade-plus-old, time-traveling love story with hyper-opinionated fans might be nearly impossible. Only time will tell if Starz’s venerable Outlander can beat the odds. And as it opens its eighth and final season, the historical-fiction series has one foot in a tumultuous present and another in a foreboding future.

Now knee deep in the American Revolution, Claire (Caitríona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Heughan) are back in the North Carolina mountains and trying to live a quiet life in an untenable time. Lest we forget, he resigned his post as brigadier general (a resignation written in blood on the back of a poor messenger boy) at the Battle Of Monmouth, as Claire bled out from a gunshot wound. Adamant they were done living in a hail of bullets, the couple reacquaint themselves in the season premiere with a Fraser’s Ridge that has thrived in their absence. Their nephew, Ian (John Bell), built them a new home after theirs burned to the ground, and a busy trading post has brought a commercial heartbeat to the ridge. There are signs of life after war already showing for the Frasers. 

But an uneventful existence was never in the cards for their twilight years. Before they can even unpack, Jamie and Claire face crises on multiple fronts. First and foremost on the show’s mind is last season’s revelation that the Frasers’ oldest daughter Faith, who was thought to be stillborn in season two, actually survived without their knowledge and grew up to have her own daughters before being killed. This arose after the Frasers came to be in charge of Fanny (Florrie May Wilkinson), Faith’s only surviving daughter, and suspected that she is of their own bloodline. However, understanding how their daughter could have lived a life without them weighs heavy on the couple as the season begins, making them take drastic measures to grapple with what and who might have taken them farther from Faith. Not all fans, especially those devoted to author Diana Gabaldon’s book series, were thrilled by this twist, given it is a creation of the TV series. But showrunner and writer Matthew B. Roberts signals from season eight’s opening scene that they are committed to seeing this decision through. Their search for Faith and care for Fanny colors everything the Frasers do in the first three episodes provided to critics.

It isn’t the only crisis at hand. Tensions with new residents on the ridge, including retired Loyalist Captain Charles Cunningham (Kieran Bew) running the trading post, will force the Frasers to play offense on their own land. A visit from the future in the premiere also hands them something bigger to fear. As featured in the trailers, the Frasers come into possession of a book written by Claire’s first husband Frank Randall (Tobias Menzies) in the twentieth century that chronicles the history of the North Carolina Scots in the revolution. Tucked away in those pages is the acknowledgement that James Fraser will die at the Battle Of Kings Mountain in October 1780.