Don’t Buy the Vase
In the opening scenes of the first episode, we see Claire standing at a shop window admiring a vase. Her voice-over says “…I realized I’d never owned a vase. That I’d never lived in any place long enough to justify having such a simple thing and how at that moment I wanted nothing so much in all the world as to have a vase of my very own.” After a nomadic childhood and an equally nomadic few years as a combat nurse, Claire desperately wanted a house and all it represented: stability, a place to be still, a place to set down a vase and let it collect dust. What Claire didn’t realize until she accidentally did the time warp through the stones is that what she truly longed for was a home. She found that home in Jaime and, if you’ve watched Dragonfly in Amber (S2 Episode 13), you saw what the loss of that home meant to her.
What’s my point? Don’t get caught up in the vase. The vase, the house, the mantel will never light your soul on fire like a tall Scottish warrior on horseback…er…I mean true love.

What’s the deal with the blue vase?
The rest of the finale is jam-packed with “lasts” that tick the quintessential Outlander boxes (including a super steamy and tender sex scene). Still, it is the two-hander of Claire and Jamie waking up for their (maybe) last morning in their Fraser’s Ridge bedroom that serves as the episode’s defining moment. Both Balfe and Heughan are terrific at conveying Claire and Jamie’s myriad emotions as they prepare for what is to come. There is an ease between a couple who know each other intimately (ditto the actors who have worked together for a decade), and it is this story of two bees sleeping in the same flower that leads to a W. B. Yeats poetry reading and Claire sharing the story of the blue vase from the pilot episode.

Claire tells Jamie about the item she coveted in an Inverness shop window, which represented, to her, stability. After Claire’s parents supposedly died (though Outlander: Blood of My Blood prequel watchers know otherwise), Claire moved around a lot and never had a sense of home as a child. “I never wanted something so much in the world as I wanted that blue vase,” Claire says. Jamie asks if she bought it, and Claire replies that she didn’t because that was the morning she went to Craigh na Dun to look for a “certain blue flower.” Everything is connected.

“I still don’t have the blue vase, but I have everything I never knew I wanted,” Claire tells Jamie. Home now has a different meaning. Claire might not have the vase, but it was given to Balfe at the end of filming the final season. “I was given Claire’s blue vase, which was very special,” Balfe told ELLE.