The days are counting down until Outlander Season 7 arrives on Starz in the 2023 TV premiere schedule, and Starz is slowly but surely shedding more light on what’s in store for Claire, Jamie, and the rest of the extended Fraser family this summer. Even with the American Revolution brewing and the potential looming crisis at Fraser’s Ridge, a new scene from Season 7 (seen above) shows a sweet and intimate moment of Jamie telling Claire about his dream of the future… and it reminds me of a less sweet and intimate moment from way back in the beginning of the series.
Unless this Outlander moment in Season 7 is a flashback, Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe will get to perform a quieter scene between their characters after the rush of Jamie presumably trying to save Claire from how the Season 6 finale ended for her in Wilmington. According to Jamie, he had a dream of Claire in her “proper time” when she was sitting at a desk in a room lit by electricity. Claire questioned how he could dream of something he’d never seen in real life, but he was absolutely certain that he could dream of electric light in the future, just as he could dream of the past.
While this could just be a whimsical moment of Jamie dreaming something he’d heard described by Brianna, Roger, and Claire herself, him talking about seeing her surrounded by the light of electricity immediately had me flashing back to a mysterious moment from the series premiere that aired all the way back in 2014.
Why Outlander Season 7 Already Has Me Thinking About Season 1
As longtime fans may remember, the very first glimpse of Sam Heughan as Jamie Fraser didn’t happen after Claire accidentally traveled back in time to the 18th century, but in the 20th century when Frank spotted a ghostly man in a kilt gazing up at the window where Claire could be seen brushing her hair… and she was visible thanks to electric light. While the scene didn’t show the man’s face, the lights went out over Claire as soon as Frank approached him and he disappeared.
Now, Claire was brushing her hair in the pilot scene and Jamie’s dream was evidently of his wife at a desk, so we shouldn’t take this as a sign that Jamie's dream is a flash-forward to that specific moment in a ghostly future when he would see electricity around his wife. If he is dreaming of his ghostly future, he would evidently see her in different moments instead of just that one in the premiere.
This may seem like a long shot born of Droughtlander speculation, but could it really be a coincidence that Jamie related this story about electricity to a skeptical Claire, when the very first shot of Jamie in the whole series involved looking at her through electric light, which promptly went out when his ghost disappeared?
What This Could Mean For Season 7 And Beyond
Coincidence or not, the new Season 7 scene certainly had me flashing back to what happened in the first 30 minutes of the series. Outlander author Diana Gabaldon confirmed on Twitter in 2016 that the mysterious figure in the pilot was indeed the ghost of Jamie, not a Jamie who figured out how to travel in time like his wife and daughter, and said on her website that “All Will Be Explained” about how ghost Jamie fits into the story in the last book.
This strikes me as particularly interesting in light of the news that Outlander will end after an eighth and final season. Unless Starz intends to wait until after Diana Gabaldon pens and publishes the tenth and final book, then the show will presumably either spoil the end of her plans for the novel saga or not end with an explanation for ghost Jamie. In a way, this is a situation similar to how Game of Thrones outpaced George R.R. Martin’s written material, but Gabaldon is only one book away from finishing.
Plus, she revealed in 2021 that she had already started writing Book 10. On her website's page about Book 10, she also said that she doesn’t know when she’ll finish the book, “much less when it will be published,” and gave a “very rough guess” of “perhaps about three to five years” after the ninth was published in 2021. Is it possible that Book 10 with the answer about ghost Jamie will be released before the TV show ends?
Well, it’s not impossible, and Gabaldon doesn’t have a history of publicly making and then breaking goals for when her books will release like George R.R. Martin. (Remember when he was hoping to finish The Winds of Winter by 2016?) It’s also possible that Outlander just won’t rush through the last couple of books, will simply end without telling the whole story, and therefore not need to address ghost Jamie. Still, the new Season 7 clip has me ready to keep an eye out for any clues!
For now, what is known for certain is that the wait for the end of the latest Droughtlander is nearly over. Season 7 of Outlander will premiere on Friday, June 16 on Starz, for better or worse for the Frasers.
