EP Maril Davis also gives details on Season 8
As Starz’s Outlander enters its seventh season on June 16, it stands on the precipice of two seismic events — the American Revolution and its own endgame.
In the two-part, 16-episode new season (streaming Friday on Starz apps or on Starz at 9/8c), Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Heughan) will march into the revolution that has been teased since Season 4 when they first arrived in the American Colonies. The series has never been shy about conflict and bloodshed with battles like Culloden and Alamance, but all-out war will be a whole different beast, according to executive producer Maril Davis.
“We will see some battles, yes, but war touches everything this season,” Davis tells TV Guide. “We have so many storylines this season. I think this is the most storylines we have ever had that are in parallel with one another and that’s because war does touch everyone. Jamie and Claire talk a lot about how if they just went back to the Ridge or moved somewhere else, maybe they could escape this. But it is inescapable. This is the birth of a new nation.”
It will also serve as the opening salvo for the end of the Frasers’ story. In January, Starz announced the series would conclude with a 10-episode eighth season. It means that as Outlander goes to war, it will also begin to accelerate its storytelling and lay the groundwork for the rest of Diana Gabaldon’s books, on which the show is based.
Outlander Season 7: Everything we know
But first, it has to address some unfinished business. Season 6, which adapted Gabaldon’s sixth book, “A Breath of Snow and Ashes,” was initially given a 12-episode order, but COVID delays scaled it back to eight. The orphaned four episodes will open Season 7 to finish off the storyline that last saw Claire arrested for the murder of Malva Christie and taken to Wilmington for trial and probable hanging. After briefly facing forced deportation back to Scotland at the hands of Richard Brown (Chris Larkin), Jamie escaped and charted a course to save his wife.
Once the series concludes that story, the rest of Season 7 will do something no other Outlander season has attempted –– cover two full books, “An Echo in the Bone” and “Written in My Own Heart’s Blood.”
“Season 7 is actually a melding of Books 6, 7 and 8,” Davis says. “It is unbelievably supersized, and we did have to change some stuff. We had these four episodes that really close out last season and Book 6. But when you are opening a new season, the energy is different and our trajectory is different. So we kind of had to alter them. Then we worked our way into the next two books.”
Davis also confirms the eighth and final season will focus almost exclusively on Gabaldon’s ninth and newest book, “Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone.”
“Season 8 will be all Book 9 pretty much,” she says. “We might bring in some stuff that we didn’t do in Books 7 and 8. But it will mostly be us doing Book 9.”
But the ninth book isn’t the conclusion of Gabaldon’s novels, so the show will have to put its own period on the story. Even though work has only recently started on Season 8, Davis isn’t dismissing the possibility they could return someday to properly adapt whatever happens in Gabaldon’s subsequent books.
“Could we continue telling this story 10 years down the line when we are all much older? Maybe,” she says. “We have started on Season 8, but once we know where that ending is going to be, we will have to see if there is room to continue.”
But with so much happening in this new season, fans are going to need a breather to digest it all before they even get to the final season. So Starz will roll out Season 7 in two parts: the first eight episodes will air this summer through early August, the final eight episodes will arrive in early 2024.
The network has also begun work on a prequel series, Blood of My Blood, which was announced with the news of the final season. It will follow the love story of Jamie’s parents, Ellen MacKenzie and Brian Fraser.
Even though Outlander will take its final bow in Season 8, Davis says there was never a guarantee it would even get that chance. So don’t be surprised if Season 7 feels like it could have been the end.
“We didn’t know that Season 8 would be our last or that we would even get a Season 8 until almost halfway through Season 7,” she says. “So we had already figured out what the story would be and we put everything we had into this one season. To find out we would get another season was pretty exciting, but these new episodes are still jam packed.”
