Also, Sam Heughan hints at some upsetting fallout to come. Beware SPOILERS below!
The latest episode of Outlander, “A Hundredweight of Stones,” shocked the fandom. Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan), the long-time romantic lead of the series, was dead after his ship went down at sea. That left his wife Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and best friend Lord John Grey (David Berry) to mourn him in Philadelphia. But the process was tricky. Claire was being hunted by redcoats, so to protect her, Lord John offered his hand in marriage. Out of necessity, she took it, but the wedding was miserable; neither people are in love, but in mourning.
They expressed their conflicted feelings in a surprising, angry, tear-filled sex scene that was really more about Jamie than it was about their connection. “He’s so alone. No one’s there for him, and he’s shouldering all this grief and also trying to shoulder it for her. He reaches a breaking point where he is like, ‘I just need someone to hold me and to get me through this,'” Berry told Entertainment Weekly.
“It was always going to be a weird sex scene. I was excited by it because it was something that I’d never seen on TV before. The things that really excite me about Outlander are these moments of, ‘What the hell? How do you inject a humanity into this?'”
Outlander is famous for its sex scenes, but this one left more to the imagination than most. For his part, Berry wishes it had stuck closer to Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books, which described Claire and Lord John’s union in more detail. “On the page, it was written a lot more. I was really interested to explore that a bit further, and I would’ve been happy to push it a little further,” he said. “We ended up in a negotiated position where we didn’t do that, and I do feel a sense of curiosity and even regret that we didn’t challenge ourselves to do that a bit more.”
“What was written on the page is that there’s an animalistic passion, and unfortunately, I don’t really think that is translated to screen. There was definitely a passion component that I’m not sure that we quite captured in that moment. There is something that will forever haunt me — how do these two end up in a moment of intimate passion and union? It still confuses me, and I d on’t know that we completely solved it.”
Expanding on those thoughts to Variety, Berry said that he felt there were things about the scene he felt were “kind of missing” and that “wanted it to be more of an intimate moment.”
Is Jamie “reckless” for letting William find out the truth about his parentage that way?
Claire and John talk through their feelings the morning after and seem to achieve a kind of equilibrium with their new lives, but that all changes when Jamie comes through the door alive and well, revealing that he hadn’t gotten on the ship that sank. And immediately there’s a new problem: William Ransom (Charles Vandervaart), whom Lord John had been raising as his own son, learned that he was actually Jamie’s biological son. And then redcoats came looking for Jamie and the group had to split up lest they all be arrested. Things got wild fast.
“Lord John is very upset that Jamie has been so reckless,” Berry said of William finally learning the truth. “This is something they’ve been very careful to manage the entire time. It is a huge bombshell. For it to have come out in that way is the worst possible imaginable thing to happen to Lord John and to William.”
“Although Lord John is perhaps misguided in his own responsibility for the way that this happened. Perhaps he should have anticipated that this would be the result of keeping a secret. If you don’t have an honest relationship with somebody, then secrets have a way of finding themselves out, and then you have to deal with the repercussions of keeping a secret from somebody.”
And of course, Jamie still doesn’t know about Lord John and Claire sleeping together, which is yet another shoe that’s waiting to drop. And it sounds like it will hit hard when it does.
Sam Heughan was “surprised” by Jamie’s brutal reaction to Lord John and Claire getting together
It’s only a matter of time before Jamie learns about what happened between Claire and Lord John, and it doesn’t sound like he’ll be happy. “I was surprised by his response to Claire and John,” Sam Heughan said. “His brutality. But I guess that’s what makes him human, and I think the repercussions or the fracture in their relationship is really something Jamie and Claire have not dealt with in a long time.”
Heughan teases a scene coming in the upcoming new episode of Outlander where Jamie and Claire “really hash it out,” but it sounds like the aftershocks of these events will reverberate for a while, through “much of the season, and into Season 8.”
Berry implies much the same thing, saying what happened between Claire and Lord John will “have massive ripple effects moving forward.” It sounds like everyone is going to walk away from this situation unhappy. “It unleashes a lot of anger and resentment in Lord John,” Berry said. “It damages their relationship in a fundamental way.”
That could make for a rough watch. Caitriona Balfe sounds like she found playing all this material pretty exhausting. “It was a tough week of work, I’m not going to lie,” she said. “I would wake up in the morning and think, ‘Oh, we are going to have to do this again.’”
If that all sounds fun, new episodes of Outlander air Fridays on Starz!