Caitriona Balfe and Sam Heughan in 'Outlander' Season 8

Preview
Starz

“Fans should brace themselves. The question of whether Jamie dies at [the battle of] King’s Mountain is the question this entire season has been building toward. We don’t avoid it. We walk straight into it,” previews executive producer Matthew B. Roberts of the time travel romance’s series finale featuring the Revolutionary War clash. “The battle itself is everything you’d expect from Outlander at its best: visceral, emotional, and not quite what anyone is predicting. We don’t do anything the easy way, and we’re not starting now.”

But there’s a lot more to anticipate in the farewell to brave Scottish Highlander Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) and 20th century doctor Claire Fraser (Caitriona Balfe), whose epic love story has swept us away for eight seasons from Scotland to the American colonies since debuting in 2014.

“Fans will step into it already carrying something — a kind of grief,” Roberts acknowledges. “What I hope is that they set that aside for just an hour and let Claire and Jamie carry them somewhere unexpected. These two characters have outrun fate for 100 episodes. The finale might just answer the question whether this has all been fated or is their story being guided by a hand greater than their own.”

Closing the chapter won’t be easy for viewers, and it was emotionally complex for Roberts. “That last day on set wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t a funeral. It was more like reaching the end of a journey — except you didn’t quite know it was the end until you were standing there,” Roberts says. “When you start a show like this, you hope it never ends. In the hard middle years, you think about the ending, and it feels distant, almost abstract. But when it actually comes, you’re not ready. You think you will be. You’re not. For 13 years, I knew where I was going the next day. I knew where to put my feet. And then suddenly… the only things left were the footprints we made.”

Multiple endings were shot. Part of that was practical for script security. “It also felt right for a story where Diana [Gabaldon, who wrote the source novels] hasn’t even finished writing yet,” Roberts says. “The cast does not know which ending made the final cut. They’ll find out when you do. Honestly, I think that’s a beautiful way for it to end. Bring the Kleenex. Bring the whiskey. And maybe watch it twice.”