After more than a year away, Outlander returns with an emotional outing

For those keeping score, it’s been more than a decade and the better part of an American Revolution since the Frasers last planted their feet on Scottish soil, so it stands to reason that the greeting from some of their fellow countrymen will be chillier than a Highland morning.

After 15 months of the dreaded Droughtlander, Outlander is back to continue season seven, picking right back up where it left off as Claire (Caitriona Balfe), Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Ian (John Bell) return to Scotland to bury one of their kin killed in the American war for independence. But back home at the Lallybroch homestead, the trio finds that time hasn’t healed the wounds of their unfinished business (an appropriate title for the episode), all of which is dredged up just as Ian’s family braces for inevitable tragedy.

Let’s start with the good news, though. Before they can even reach the doorstep at Lallybroch, Ian’s mother, Jenny (Kristin Atherton), and his brothers are bounding out to see him for the first time since he was 14 and kidnapped by pirates. It is a remarkably stirring moment that decade-long fans of the show will feel the weight of. While we have seen a derelict Lallybroch in the 20th century in recent episodes, it has been some time since the show reacquainted itself with the Fraser family home in the 18th century, when many of the show’s greatest early moments took place. As Claire later reminds Jamie when they steal a quiet moment away, “The first time we said ‘I love you’ was in this room.”

But the bad news arrives just as swiftly as the flood of memories when they learn Ian’s father, the elder Ian (Steven Cree), is in the final days of his battle with consumption. Once the somber greetings have been shared, the two Ians share a moment as the son tells his dad about his reunion with his former wife Emily and the Mohawk and finally shares with someone that her son, Swiftest of Lizards, is actually his son, who he has given the Scottish name of Ian James. “The world can always stand to have another Ian,” his father says through teary eyes.

Ian also tells his father about Rachel (Izzy Meikle-Small), the Quaker apple of his eye back in America who is dog-sitting for Rollo while he is overseas. Ever the sage advisor, the elder Ian reminds his son, “A dog does not a wife guarantee.” He demands Ian write to her immediately to tell her to wait for his return, and then get on the next boat bound for the Colonies to make an honest woman out of her. But it’s not an order his son rushes to fulfill knowing good and well this will be the last time he sees his father alive.

Elsewhere, Jamie reluctantly returns to the telenovela that was his life after Claire went back to the future by visiting his former wife, Laoghaire (Nell Hudson), who is just as fiery and foul-mouthed as you remember. Who else is brazen enough to spit the words “your Sassenach whore” right at Jamie’s face without a second thought? Laoghaire has a valid roster of deep-rooted grievances to air against Jamie, which she unleashes the second he steps on her property. He’s the one who had told Claire he was going to see Laoghaire to bury the hatchet. But it’s Laoghaire who takes the opportunity to accuse Jamie of callously using her as a placeholder to cradle his cold heart when Claire left him behind. After she says her peace, Laoghaire then lobs a metal pot at Jamie’s head and manages to get in a solid smack across his cheek before her farmhand and lover, Joey Murray, breaks up the not-quite-lovers spat.

Back at Lallybroch, Claire is wrestling with her own desire to atone for her secrets, and informs Jamie that she would like to tell his family she is a time traveler from the future. Her knowledge of what’s to come couldn’t change the events at Culloden, but she can help save the Frasers from walking into danger. It goes about as well as expected in an era when Claire has been called a witch more times than she’s been called a woman. As Claire tells them that she was born in 1918 and has certain knowledge of the future, Michael Murray’s eyes appear as though they might pop out of his head. But she powers through their shock to offer a warning: He can continue to operate his successful Fraser & Company wine business in France, but he must leave before 1788 or he risks being swept up in the French Revolution.

Jenny, who has never hidden her contempt for Claire, reads a different message from her confession. If she is from the future, then she can certainly save the elder Ian from dying, right? Right?! Of course, Claire tells her sister in law that she simply doesn’t have the tools to make the 20th century medicines that could save him and, frankly, that time has passed. Claire would give her soul if she could help him, she pleads, to which a heartbroken Jenny bites back, “God, maybe you haven’t a soul.”

Meanwhile, Jamie gets a visit from Joanie (Layla Burns), Laoghaire’s daughter who he became close to while they were married. Joanie wants to become a nun but she needs her mother’s approval and her dowry to pay for convent school. The problem is that leaving home would leave Laoghaire alone, unmarried and shacking up with her farmhand, Joey, whom she won’t tie the knot with because it would end Jamie’s alimony payments off which she survives.

Seeing the opportunity to bury that aforementioned hatchet, Jamie calls Laoghaire to Lallybroch with a proposal. He will sign over the deed to her land and home, Balriggan, if she releases Joanie and her dowry to the nunnery. Then, Laoghaire can marry Joey and live out her days on her own land, without Jamie’s hold over her. She agrees to the terms, but not before firing one last contemptuous comment in Claire’ direction, in true Laoghaire fashion.

While he’s on a roll with the women in his life, Jamie also finds his sister screaming at the heavens in the middle of the forest, already overcome with grief over her husband’s impending death. She fears she doesn’t know what she will do when he is gone, to which Jamie assures Jenny that she has never been anything less than the steady hand of the Fraser family. 

Emboldened by her brother’s words, Jenny finds Ian and rips up the letter he has written to Rachel in America. She then brings her son outside to the family cemetery to show him the small grave marker they erected for his late daughter, Iseabail. She says he will always have a place at Lallybroch and a place to visit the memory of his daughter. But now he must go back to America and ask for Rachel’s hand in person. He protests, saying it will mean missing the rest of his father’s life, to which Jenny says, “Your da wants you to go live the rest of your life.”

Mother has spoken, and fortunately Ian won't be alone on his journey. Claire has received a letter from Lord John Grey (David Berry) requesting she come to Philadelphia at once to perform emergency surgery on his nephew, Henry, who has been shot in the war. Doctors can’t seem to retrieve the bullets from stomach, but he is certain Claire can. Jenny even grants her consent for Claire to take her leave, admitting that, no matter her century of origin, she trusts in Claire’s deep love for her family.

Jamie will stay behind in Scotland and tend to the elder Ian in his final days, separating the Frasers by an ocean yet again because the show knows how much fans love when that happens. As Claire and Ian pack up for their journey, the elder Ian comes out dressed in his Highland best to send them off. It’s a heartbreaking bookend to Ian’s thunderous reunion with his mother at the top of the episode.

Thus ends Ian’s short time back home. But he hasn’t been the only one traipsing around the Scottish Highlands. Earlier in the episode, Roger (Robert Rankin) and his ancestor Buck Mackenzie (Diarmaid Murtagh) made it back through the stones in search of he and Brianna’s (Sophie Skelton) son, Jemmy, who was kidnapped by Rob Cameron earlier in season seven in the hopes the young boy would lead him to some fabled Scottish gold. Roger’s search led him to the past, but he can’t seem to track down his son. He suspects Jemmy would go home to Lallybroch, where he has been raised in the 20th century, but when Roger knocks on the door, he is greeted by Brian Fraser (Andrew Whipp), Jamie’s long-dead dad.

Unless he’s communing with ghosts, Roger suspects he overshot his time travel and ended up in 1739 or 1740, where an 18-year-old Jamie is away at university. He’s in the wrong time, and maybe Jemmy is too. He is informed by locals of reports that a traveler in strange clothing has been seen around the moors. But his search is interrupted by Buck’s continued bodily resistance to time travel. His heart barely made it through the stones and now he is desperately in need of a healer. The best a young, de-aged Jenny Fraser can offer is directions to an herbalist nearby, on whose doorstep Roger and Buck find themselves in the episode's final scene. Unfortunately, on the other side of that door is Gellis (Lotte Verbeek), the time-traveling practitioner of dark magic who also happens to be Buck’s mother. So don’t put away the welcome mat just yet. It looks like the family reunions are just getting started.

Stray observations

• • As anyone who has watched this show for more than a decade can attest, there is something genuinely moving about seeing Jenny again. She hasn’t been seen since season three (in 2017!), when she was played by Laura Donnolly. And having her back even with a new performer gives this episode an emotional heft that the changing landscape of Outlander has found itself divorced from more and more.
• • Between Jenny, Laoghaire, and Gellis, this episode is really playing like a greatest hits of people who hate Claire. No wonder she got out of Scotland the first chance she had.
• • We have seen Claire tell a handful of people her secret over the years, but Jenny and Michael Murray’s mouth-agape, eyes-bulging reactions while she is speaking was one of the absolute funniest responses yet.
• • The scene where Jamie pretty much asks Claire’s permission to go see Laoghaire was the kind of playfully flirtatious banter we often lose as the Frasers find themselves in one bad situation after another. “But if you do find out who she is sleeping with and you don’t tell me, I will kill you,” Claire says with a grin. Who doesn’t love a good-hearted death threat in order to get some good small-town gossip?
• • “Home is where the heart is, but it is also where it can be broken.” Talk about a metaphor for this show’s entire existence.
• • “I thought you would want a place to come and visit her, to mark that she had been here on this earth and with ye.” This is why you bring Jenny back! Delivering a gut-punch line like this, after showing her son that she had a gravestone made for his infant daughter back in America, is Outlander at its best.