I’m really glad that the Outlander season seven part two finale didn’t spend overlong on Denzell performing a dangerous operation on Claire following her gunshot wound. We know she wasn’t going to die, so making it the focus of the episode would have been disingenuous. And yet, it went so smoothly that I kept watching Claire’s first night of recovery for clues that she was hallucinating a better outcome (à la Yellowjackets’ devastating season two delivery episode) or that Chekhov’s kidney would burst.
But while Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser (Grey) was protected as the series protagonist, those in her orbit were not so lucky. “A Hundred Thousand Angels” is named for a lovely reason—young Fannie describing how their late mother told her and Jane to regard the aurora borealis, and to wave at the heavens—but death cast a dark shadow over this finale, with some truly bleak moments… followed by a bonkers cliffhanger for the final season.
Spoilers for Outlander Season 7, Episode 16 “A Hundred Thousand Angels,” as well as content warnings for suicide, pet death, and stillbirth/baby loss.
First, I’ll get the other timeline out of the way: Brianna and the kids reunite with Roger and Buck in 1739 (thanks to the letter he leaves her through the magic of time travel and secret desk compartments), and the MacKenzies contemplate whether they want to return to 1980 or find their way back to Frasers Ridge in 1778. The answer seems clear, and I think Jamie and Claire will gladly welcome back the only one of their children they seem to have a solid relationship with.
But first, Brianna must have her own winking conversation with a relative who doesn’t recognize her, being out of time as she is. Roger got a brief heart-to-heart with his soldier father (displaced in 1739) and even got the dramatic catharsis of whispering “I love you” before sending him back through the stones, even if it didn’t change his father’s fate or give them more time together in Roger’s childhood. But Bree can’t risk a paradox or any confusion for Brian, which might be part of what made their exchange not quite work for me. She’s holding herself at a clear emotional distance yet offering just enough warmth beyond what a stranger would and constantly pointing out parallels between herself and her grandmother Ellen, not to mention alluding to Brian as her namesake. What the scene best achieves is setting up Brian and Ellen’s love story for the Outlander: Blood of My Blood prequel.
Claire’s recovery dovetails nicely with tying up various loose ends (or at least resolving to), thanks to a revolving door of characters. She has a bizarre dream of Master Raymond, the time-traveling apothecary from Paris, visiting her bedside begging forgiveness. For what? “Someday you will know.” Hmmmm.
Speaking of more immediate forgiveness, Lord John Grey stops by. He and Jamie seem to have reached a detente in which they both agree they have nothing more to discuss, which hopefully means no more blows to administer. But bygones are far from being bygones, and there’s a clear distance between them now. Claire makes sure to thank John—in front of a twitchy Jamie, who nonetheless seems like he’s starting to get it—for saving her life, to which he responds that they saved each other’s lives. There’s no hug or even a hand clasp between the men; the goodbye feels very final, which would be such an upsetting note to end that friendship on.
And yet, I admire the show for sitting in that tension. It’s the least upsetting part of the finale, which picks up speed as William arrives to ask Jamie’s help in breaking Jane out of jail. Because of martial law, she won’t get a trial after confessing to killing Captain Harkness (to protect him from raping her little sister Fanny) so these two are her only hope. Except that when they get there, Jane is already gone; she’s slit her wrists with a glass bottle, rather than be hanged. In an inverse of the Claire sequence, I listened closely for a faint breath, but no—she’s gone.
It’s brutal, to see William confront his inability to protect both sisters as he had promised. To watch Fanny a few days later, searching wildly through the unmarked graveyard for her sister, unable to see her or properly say goodbye. To wonder if, had they succeeded in breaking Jane out in time, would he and Jamie have bonded? Instead, he tells him, “I will never call you Father.”
And then Rollo! Ian waking up to his beloved protector and friend dead, having passed sometime in the night. Of course our brains want to make sense of things, to create an exchange of hope for loss so that we can better cope with the absence, so Rachel and Ian comfort themselves with the knowledge that Rollo held on until they had each other and had just learned that Rachel is expecting. So, back to Fraser’s Ridge it is for them, too, even if their family has one fewer member.
“A Hundred Thousand Angels” does a lovely job of reminding us of what the dead leave behind, even if it’s just one object or just a sliver of their full self. Rollo’s protection. Ellen’s portrait. Jane’s account, presumably; while she initially rejected the journalist and his judgmental questions, he seemed to convince her by the end of the opening scene that he could record her telling the story in her own words, so that Fanny would hear it from her and no one else. Faith’s locket, but also Fanny’s memory of the three of them catching dragonflies. And—a song.
At the end of the episode, when they’re preparing to hit the road, Claire happens upon Fanny singing an eerie song: “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside,” which Claire sang to her and Jamie’s stillborn daughter Faith 34 years ago in Paris… and which won’t be written until 1907. When a shaken Claire demands to know where Fanny could have heard this song, the answer is simple but also entirely fraught: “My mother taught it to me.” Her mother, Faith. Her mother, whose resemblance in the locket made Claire do enough of a double-take. Her mother, who should have no knowledge of a song from over a century in the future.
And so Claire ends Outlander season seven by telling Jamie, “I think Faith lived. I think our daughter lived.”
I absolutely love this. It’s bonkers yet also poignant, and shakes up what we know about magic beyond time travel in the world of Outlander—and, honestly, maybe even the time travel itself. If we’ve reached the point where Bree can pretend that taking the kids to visit Roger is in some ways easier than boarding a plane or train, then it’s time to inject some more mystery into the mythos. I checked the timeline, and it would track for Faith to have been born in 1744, which would have made her 34 in 1778, had she lived that long—just enough time to have two daughters under 18. So it’s not as if she would have pulled a Geillis and bopped around the timeline, and yet Master Raymond might have protected her in some other way.
Author Diana Gabaldon did a finale postmortem with Parade in which she seemed to confirm that the Master Raymond visit was more likely a hallucination (they just ran out of the budget to shoot it more obviously as such). What’s more, she said that this plotline came out of an idea she threw to the writers but has not yet worked into the books canon: “When chatting with [showrunner] Matt [Roberts] about All Things plot wise, I mentioned that if I had written a second graphic novel (I didn’t, for assorted reasons), I would have shown what actually happened after Faith’s presumed death at the Hôpital des Anges, and how/why Master Raymond resuscitated and nurtured the baby secretly, but wasn’t able to come back with her before Claire and Jamie left France. So, they liked that idea and ran with it.”
That said, I want to hold space for the fact that if this is what happened, it could leave a lot of fans feeling like the rug was pulled out from beneath them. Back in season two, when Claire and Jamie lost their first child, the episode “Faith” presented the loss with such care, especially in the scene of Claire singing “Seaside” (which Gabaldon clarified was a detail from the showrunners) before saying goodbye. To retcon the past five seasons and three decades could invalidate the pain of not just the characters, but the viewers who saw their own experiences mirrored back.
That’s why I’m hoping there’s more to it than just a big soapy twist. But what I most like about this cliffhanger is that Outlander the TV series has caught up to Outlander the books. There’s only one current novel to adapt, 2021’s Go Tell the Bees I Am Gone, and I’m very curious to see if the show will stick to those plotlines or branch out on their own.
This Faith twist is an audacious swing for the final season, one final mystery to resolve for Jamie and Claire. France was such a traumatic chapter in their lives yet was so long ago that I had to pull up the fan wiki to refresh my memory, pivotal but also overshadowed by Culloden and their twenty-year separation. Whether the Faith mystery winds up being some big cover-up or just a bizarre coincidence caused by paradoxically intersecting timelines, it’ll lead us down the road to finally saying goodbye to these time-crossed lovers.