The Outlander series finale comes out this Friday, May 15 on Starz and I’m beginning to wonder if Sam Heughan — Jamie Fraser himself! —spoiled a major part of it for me during the Season 8 junket.
**Potential spoilers for the Outlander series finale ahead!**
Let me explain: Starz sent journalists, like yours truly, the first three episodes of Outlander Season 8 before the press day. So I knew that original Outlander star Tobias Menzies had returned in the final season to provide voiceover as Jamie Fraser imagined Frank Randall in his head, taunting him about his impending death.
I asked Sam Heughan about Menzies returning for voiceover scenes in the final chapter of the show’s run, wondering if they got to work together, and what it meant to have one of the original stars come back for the last season.
“Well, I guess it would be giving it away if I tell you what happens towards the end,” Heughan said. “So, well done in trying to kind of get spoilers out there.”
I then clarified I was only talking about the voiceover in the episodes I had seen and his demeanor shifted.
“Oh, the voiceover. Well, I mean, who knows? You don’t know what happens in the other episodes, but I don’t know,” Heughan said before sharing that he wasn’t initially a fan of the creative choice of having Frank’s voice in Jamie’s head.
Heughan wrapped up his answer by saying, “But it’s cool that Tobias got to come back and do that. I wish we had seen him on set. That would have been super fun.”
Now, at the time, I thought perhaps Heughan had misspoke at the start of his answer. However, the more and more I replay this exchange, I feel like Heughan might have initially let it slip that Menzies will be seen on screen once again, not in a flashback, but a brand new scene for the finale, and that he was trying to cover up his tracks with that final comment.
If there’s a chance that Menzies returns as Frank Randall in the series finale, then I have a very specific fan theory for how and why he would do so.
There’s a scene in the very first episode of Outlander that I’ve thought about often over the years and I know I’m not alone. Frank Randall is walking through Inverness on a dark and stormy night and he spies a man dressed like an 18th century highlander staring up, adoringly, at Claire (Caitriona Balfe) as she brushes her hair in an electrically lit room. Frank approaches this mystery man and says, “Excuse me, can I help you with something?” Only, this man turns and vanishes into the night.
I bring this up because Outlander author Diana Gabaldon has always owned up to the fact that the mysterious Scotsman Frank sees in Episode 1 is in fact the ghost of James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.
Last week’s Outlander ended with Jamie being called to battle, specifically the Battle of Kings Mountain. It is a battle which, according to Frank’s own Revolutionary War history book, will claim Jamie’s life. If Jamie does indeed die in the final episode of Outlander, there could be an opportunity for the show to circle back to this moment in either a specific or thematic way. Maybe we could see this interaction with Frank from Jamie’s perspective or perhaps Jamie will meet the ghost of Frank in a way that ties a bow on the supernatural original interaction.
Another reason why I think this could be a real possibility comes from Diana Gabaldon herself. The author spoke with DECIDER’s Caitlin Gallagher last week about writing the penultimate episode in the series and she confirmed that this week’s finale is a “definitive” ending for the series.
“I thought they should not leave any loopholes because it is the end of the season and they’re not getting another one, so there’s no point in leaving open possibilities… well, not leaving many possibilities open. There’s always some that are going to exist,” Gabaldon said.
“[Matthew B. Roberts] and I agreed that it should just end very conclusively. And what he did … works effectively.”
Over the course of Outlander Season 8, we’ve seen most of the show’s ongoing mysteries solved. We discovered what Master Raymond (Dominique Pinon) did with baby Faith and how Jane (Silvia Presente) and Fanny (Florrie May Wilkinson) found themselves in the colonies. We saw Young Ian (John Bell) reunited with his firstborn son, Swiftest of Lizards (Nikosis Saginaw Kingfisher), and discovered that Fergus (César Domboy) really was the Comte St. Germain’s (Stanley Weber) son the whole time. Heck, we’ve even seen Jamie bond with his biological son, William (Charles Vandervaart)!
What the show has not clarified yet is how and why Frank Randall saw Jamie’s ghost in Episode 1. If Jamie dies, I fully expect a scene where the two men who married and loved Claire broker some sort of peace in the afterlife.
Just one woman’s fan theory!
The Outlander series finale premieres on Friday, May 15 on Starz.