‘Outlander’ Review: With The Revolutionary War Looming, The Fraser Clan Splits Up In Season 7

A lot has happened on “Outlander” since the show first premiered in 2014. The time-traveling romantic drama has set plots in motion that have spanned centuries, continents, multiple wars, and multiple imprisonments. Unspeakable horrors have happened, as well as unspeakably steamy love scenes. And so, with the arrival of season seven, you naturally have to ask: Where does the show go from here?

As always with “Outlander,” with season seven the answer appears to be “a whole lot of places,” at least considering the four episodes that were provided to critics. The season opens with Claire (Caitriona Balfe) facing her fate atop the gallows, ostensibly for the murder of Malva (Jessica Reynolds) last season. It’s a fake-out, fortunately, and we quickly find Claire not fighting for life but fighting for her freedom inside a women’s jail. From there she’s whisked away to a ship to help an ailing pregnant colonial governor’s wife, where eventually she’s met by Jamie (Sam Heughan), who’s come to rescue her. Somehow he convinces Tom Christie (Mark Lewis Jones) to take the murderous rap—probably because he’s in love with Claire—and Jamie and Claire are off again back down to their home at Fraser’s Ridge. 

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She’s greeted there by Brianna (Sophie Skelton) and Roger (Richard Rankin), and she helps Brianna welcome her second child. That child eventually comes to need dire medical care beyond Claire’s colonial capacities, and so Brianna, Roger, and their two kids travel through the stones back into the modern era. You can’t blame them, really—who wouldn’t want to raise little kids with all the modern conveniences?—but it fractures the Fraser clan a bit, as well as the show. The episodes that follow bounce back and forth between 20th-century MacKenzies and the colonial Frasers, with the only overlap being a box of letters Claire and Jamie have apparently written to their daughter so that she knows what’s gone on with them and how they met their end.

Speaking of that: Some time ago, a member of the family found an ancient newspaper clipping that said that Jamie and Claire would perish in a fire at Fraser’s Ridge. That, as it turns out, was falsely reported, the result of Tom Christie hearing about a devastating fire at the home caused by Wendigo Donner (Brennan Martin) and some thieves. The house was a total loss but Claire and Jamie survived. How they’ll actually perish is still anyone’s guess, but they’re Lallybroch bound before Jamie is conscripted into the Continental Army mid-season, so one can only assume they’ll end up there eventually, dying entwined in each other’s arms. After all, haven’t we come far enough with these two to know that they won’t meet some anticlimactic end on a battlefield in a silly fire? The show wants us to think mortality is imminent, going out of its way to occasionally put Jamie and Claire in fairly hairy situations (including one particularly gross one with Claire and Allan Christie (Alexander Vlahos) in episode two) but if these star-crossed lovers have survived everything they have to this point, you’ve got to assume they’re just going to make it, no matter what.

A few old characters crop up in season seven, including Lord John Gray (David Berry) and his “son,” William Ransom (Charles Vandervaart), who is actually Jamie’s illegitimate child. He’s all grown up and is hell-bent on fighting for the British army, though when he gets a little screen time in episode four, we see him becoming friends with some patriots and being reintroduced to young Ian (John Bell), who has volunteered to help bring Native Americans around to the colonists’ side, so it seems pretty clear that he’ll end up flipping sides at some point. As always on “Outlander” there are a lot of moving parts and references to past storylines and characters, so any season seven viewer could benefit from, if not a whole series re-watch, at least a season six re-watch in the run-up to the premiere.

While it might sound like the new season of “Outlander” is full of frantic energy and swirling storylines, it somehow doesn’t feel that way. The show seems as slow and serene as ever, full of familial love, sly smiles, and a lot of winding paths leading to foregone conclusions. (We all know who wins the Revolution, for instance. Even Jamie knows at this point.) 

It’s also worth noting that, in the season’s first four episodes, there’s only one steamy sex scene between Jamie and Claire, though it is a pretty good one. It’s anyone’s guess why that is—perhaps Heughan and Balfe wanted to focus on their characters’ stories instead. Perhaps it’s just a representation that the characters are getting older, and are therefore more interested in caressing than carousing—but it feels emblematic of the season as a whole in some way. In its latest iteration, the “Outlander” team has decided to show a little restraint and dial back on the action a bit. 

When episode four ends, Claire, Jamie, and their unit are arriving at Fort Ticonderoga to muster up for the Continental Army so it’s very possible things could get a bit more hair-raising in the back half of the season, but at least for now it’s safe to say you can just sit back and enjoy the show’s smooth, Scottish ride. [B]

New episodes of “Outlander” debut Fridays on Starz.