If you are anything like me, you simply canna believe that we are still very much in a Droughtlander. Our favorite time travel-based romance, Outlander, is still several weeks (possibly months) away, seeing as how we only know that it will return in early 2022. We also know that, because of a certain pesky international health crisis, the new season will only have eight episodes. But! Star Sam Heughan has now revealed why he thinks Outlander Season 6 is still so good, despite having far fewer episodes than usual.
Obviously, when we Outlander fans heard that the season would be shorter when the show finally comes back to Starz for new installments, many of us were quite disappointed. Shortly after wrapping production on Season 6, Sam Heughan tried to ease our worries by saying that we can expect the episodes to have “an early western vibe” and that the season as a whole will be “small but mighty” in terms of action and storytelling. Now, he’s told The Scotsman a bit more, and it doesn’t seem like viewers will be let down even a little bit. Heughan said:
It’s a shortened season of eight episodes, but the episodes are much longer – the first episode runs for around an hour and a half. That extra time spent with the characters means they are really strong episodes and there are a whole load of new characters coming in.
Ooooh. See, we knew that the Outlander Season 6 premiere was going to be roughly an hour and a half of (hopefully) dynamic television, but Heughan has filled us in on the fact that many, if not all, of the episodes in the new season will also be longer than usual, and help make up for the low episode count. This also means that, as he said, we’ll get to spend more time with Jamie, Claire, Ian, and everyone else on Fraser’s Ridge, including those new characters he spoke of.
While I don’t know, overall, how many new folks we’ll be seeing in the New World when Outlander returns, we do know that Tom, Malva, and Allan Christie will be coming to stay up on the Ridge. And, with Jaime having known Tom in Ardsmuir and having some conflicts with him, things are already expected to be tense. On top of that, if the show is going to bring most of the drama this family caused in the books to the small screen, well, it’ll be good for us to get a decent amount of time with them as they interact with everyone we’ve come to love over the years.
As fans know well, the drama is never lacking on Outlander, and as the show gets ever closer to the Revolutionary War, that’s not going to change. Jamie will still be dealing with having divided loyalties forced upon him. Claire will still be recovering from the vicious attack she suffered at the end of Season 5. Even the usually sunny and A-OK coupling of Marsali and Fergus will find themselves “at their most tested.”
Basically, there’s going to be trouble all around, you guys, and according to Sam Heughan we’ll still get to lose ourselves in more than enough of it, even with a short Season 6 for Outlander.
Luckily, Outlander has already been renewed for Season 7, which will rebound with a whopping 16 episodes, and it sounds a lot like the stories that they couldn’t incorporate into the upcoming season will be moved there, so we don’t have to worry about them speeding through the action one bit.
