How Outlander's season finale brilliantly broke all the rules

Outlander's second season ended as it began: with a declaration of war on all spoilerphobes.

"Oh, you'd rather not know?" said the show in its winsome Scottish brogue. "Tough. Whit's fur ye'll no go by ye. Claire's back in the present. BOOM."

Having revealed Claire's fate in the very first episode of its second season ("Through a Glass Darkly"), there didn't seem to be much of anywhere for Outlander to go. It was a bold choice and it alienated plenty of viewers who bemoaned the lack of suspense.

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And if you remained a spoilerphobe despite the show's provocation, Outlander just kept twisting the knife. In the seventh episode, "Faith," the show mitigated Claire's despair at losing a child by showing us footage of Future Claire with Young Brianna. While this took the edge off the crazy-making grief of that particular episode, the bigger picture was hardly comforting: It confirmed that Claire would not be bouncing back and forth between past and present once we reached "Through the Glass Darkly." What's done is done: Motherhood is permanent.

This is what Outlander does. It sidles past our declared investments in the story, laughs a little at how silly they are, and knocks them down. It's a very sincere show armed with a satirical sub-woofer. You like watching gorgeous young people in fabulous costumes? Welp, they're middle-aged now! In it for the hot sex? Here's the worst rape you've ever seen. Oh look, it's Claire Beauchamp, a headstrong, proud, resourceful young woman. Or... a slightly bonkers weepy mom! Watching for the accents? Meet Brianna. She is — in a generic, uninspiring sort of way — American.

Here's another way of understanding the show's wry humor: This season, Outlander burdened us (the viewers) with the exact level of foreknowledge that plagues Claire. She will fail, and we have to know that.

Our reward is that Outlander's spoilery revelation from the first episode this season turns out to have only half-spoiled us. Time-travel stories are always ultimately about history-as-fate. They're about dealing with the kind of knowledge that commits you to an undesirable future.

The fantasy of Outlander (and Back to the Future, and every other such story) is that we might be saved from the ending we know. Claire hoped to stave off the Jacobite Revolution. We hoped to stave off her return to present. Both hopes are dashed.

But the finale turned out to have a final twist that made it every bit as disconcerting as the premiere: While the outcomes we'd obsessed over and feared came to pass, neither produced the ending we expected. The Jacobite Revolution happened, but Jamie isn't dead, and if our first shock was learning that Claire returned to the present, our second shock is that motherhood isn't the end of her arc. CLAIRE IS GOING BACK!

This is why fans love Outlander; it finds hope in the unlikeliest places. Even a middle-aged mom might have a story worth following!

At the beginning of the finale, however, this didn't seem so clear.

To rehash: The episode opens with footage of a woman on a black-and-white television set practicing fencing. She lifts up her mask to offer a guest some coffee. The camera pulls back to reveal the television set, the group of children watching the set, and, pulling back still further, an expressionless, vaguely professorial young man. Is he watching the children? The show? Both? Neither? He's interrupted by a long-haired woman who tells him his guests are asking for him. What guests? Who is this?

If you're a book reader, you know what's coming: This is Roger Wakefield, adopted son of the Reverend, descendant of Geillis and Dougal McKenzie. If you're not a book reader, you're unmoored, and the camera gropes around on your behalf. By the time the context becomes clear (someone has died), there's not much room to think about the children and the fencing woman in a skin-tight suit because look! It's Claire, in the background, lifting a glass. She looks different. Eyeliner! She's wearing heavy eyeliner! We're in the '60s! But there's more to it, of course: We realize, with a shock, that she's middle-aged.

If you're a savvy media consumer, this probably made your blood run cold. Middle-aged heroines are rare in fantasy, sci-fi, drama, and every other genre. She's beautiful still, of course, but we're well-trained enough to know that stories about women don't tend to follow them into their non-reproductive years. The time we thought we had with this story seems foreshortened. WHAT IS GOING ON? Is the plot being yanked away from us?

It is and it isn't: It's true that Claire will never again be our sole point of entry into Outlander's ecosystem, and if you've let the culture program you properly, this ought to worry you. The introduction of Roger Wakefield and Brianna should threaten your sense of Claire's centrality in Outlander's story. Are these the new gorgeous young things we're supposed to care about? But why? We weren't done with the old ones!

Luckily, the finale dedicates a reassuring amount of time to Claire. One of the main threads is her narrative struggle with Brianna as they try to hash out the latter's paternity — and it's pretty smart, actually, that their main obstacle isn't so much time travel as it is run-of-the-mill mother-daughter strife. Brianna isn't merely inheriting her mother's time-traveling mantle; this isn't a rote passing of the torch. Instead, we see the narrative expand — rather impressively — to include both our older, depressed heroine and her bright-eyed, confrontational daughter. Stories that deal intelligently with mothers and daughters at the same time are in short supply. This is a big deal.

Not being a book reader, I'd assumed that "Dragonfly in Amber," the title of this season's finale and of the second volume of the book series, was a reference to Claire herself. She was the dragonfly caught in amber: a thing frozen in life until she fossilized, perfectly preserved. Turns out that's not it at all.

The line actually is a reference to how children develop into the selves they'll finally become. "In the second year," Gabaldon writes, describing how an infant grows, "the bone hardens and the child stands upright, skull wide and solid, a helmet protecting the softness within. And 'I am' grows, too. Looking at them, you can almost see it, sturdy as heartwood, glowing through the translucent flesh." She goes on:

That suggests that Brianna is the dragonfly — she's entitled to some hefty protagonism in her own right, and we can expect to see a lot more of her in future seasons. But it also suggests that she can't replace Claire. Unlike her mother, who arrived on the scene experienced and hardened and capable, Brianna's defining metaphor is that she's not quite done. She's recognizably (and annoyingly) adolescent despite being in her early 20s. She still needs her mother, and so does the story.

This might be how Outlander keeps pulling off its sly-boots experiment with spoilers: Yes, it's a time-traveling sci-fi adventure yarn — the kind of thing that is generally nothing but plot — but it's at least as much about the ways people harden slowly from the center and find and fix the facets of the soul. That's the stuff it does best, and that stuff is spoiler-proof.

This will likely remain true as Outlander moves forward. History might remain unchangeable, but the questions we want answered aren't really about that at all. If Claire and Jamie evolved this much in three years, who have they become in the intervening 20 years they've spent apart? How do you tolerate whatever filled that missing chunk in someone else's life? Most importantly, "Dragonfly in Amber" asks as it prepares us for a third season, how do you fit a daughter from another time into this?

The Outlander finale was the series at its most mawkishly sentimental, but its emphasis on how paper genealogies intersect with lives as they're lived — and how ugly theories can get when put into practice (see Dougal's death and Gillian Edgars' husband) — also sets the episode apart as one of its most weirdly experimental and transgressive.