Sophie Skelton (Brianna) teases not only what to expect from the season 7 finale of Outlander, but the eighth and final season beyond that.
The seventh season of Outlander will finally come to an end this Friday with an episode entitled “A Hundred Thousand Angels.” We’ll catch up with Jamie and Claire Fraser, obviously, who are having a rough time of it on the Revolutionary War battlefield, but also with their daughter Brianna, who has been facing her own struggles a couple hundred years in the future.
“She’s been through so much, but I think losing your child tops it all,” actor Sophie Skelton told Town and Country Magazine about Brianna’s plight. “She’s just been a bit of a hot mess this season, really. It’s just a horrific thing for her to be going through.”
“She’s a tough nut to crack, but she’s an exceedingly loyal person. She defends other people better than she defends herself. And I think if you hurt somebody who is close to Brianna, that is actually the biggest pain that you can inflict on her.”
With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Brianna was willing to move heaven and earth to find her son Jemmy, who was kidnapped by Rob Cameron and taken back into the past. “She’s very Jamie-esque, at this point; I think she really would kill Rob,” Skelton mulled.
Sophie Skelton promises that Outlander will “end on a high”
After season 7 wraps up, Outlander fans will get to enjoy one more block of episodes before the show ends forever, although Starz is hoping to plug the hole with a new spinoff show called Blood of My Blood, which airs this year. The eighth and final season of Outlander will air sometime after that.
Skelton describes the final season as “ensemble season” with more people “coming in and out,” as opposed to a season that drills down on just a few characters. “I’m really proud of season 8,” she said. “I’m excited for people to see it because I think it’s because we weren’t sure if 7 was the end or not. I think 8 really does justice to the entire story as a whole.”
“We’ve been through the five stages of grief on a little bit of a merry-go-round, because it’s been very stop-and-start as to whether it was going to be the end or not. So it feels good. I’m proud of where we’ve left the season. I think it’s always good to end on a high.”
Of course, whether or not Outlander actually ends on a high will be up to the fans to decide, but it’s great that the cast members are behind the series. “The final season is going to blow people’s minds a little bit,” Skelton said. “The fans have been put through the wringer coming into the second half of this season—we’ve really played with the emotional heartstrings. But I feel like the end of the season is just a bit more of a nice sigh of relief, maybe a little bit more peaceful. But then season 8 we’re just going to mess you up again emotionally. I think it’s a really big and a really magnificent season. I’m excited for the fans to get to see it.”
By this point, Outlander fans are used to being messed up emotionally; hopefully season 8 meets their lofty expectations, whenever it comes out. However the show ends, it’ll likely be a little different from whatever ending author Diana Gabaldon has in mind for her Outlander book series. She’s working on the tenth and final Outlander book as we speak, but the show is only now adapting the eighth book. Unless the eighth season squeezes in both the ninth and tenth books, there will likely be some daylight between these two different versions of the story. Just how much is something we’ll discover when the final episodes (and the final book) roll out.