Outlander season 6 has arrived! After a long wait, yesterday we were finally able to enjoy the first episode of season 6 and we loved it! What is promised is due and, after the first part of our interview with Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe, we bring you the second part that we prudently decided to save until the premiere so that you could fully enjoy the episode. Ready to head back to Fraser’s Ridge?
Here we go!
As we could see in the premiere, Claire is using ether on herself, as a way to avoid her trauma — a trauma that Outlander was right to show — she hides this from Jamie, insisting that she’s fine but secrets don’t stay buried forever, and Jamie’s reaction promises to be…intense.
“I think it’s not something that is necessarily a conscious decision of hers. I think she begins to self-medicate in a way that she’s lulling herself into this thought that it’s purely for medicinal purposes and experimental purposes, but it does offer her an escape. And as we see, Claire is dealing with PTSD from the events of last season, and this is something she’s never really had to face in the same way before. And her ability to compartmentalize and to continue on it’s not serving her anymore this season. So she begins to unravel. And it was really interesting to explore her in that way. And definitely, she started to lean on the ether, and I think it takes an intervention from Jamie for her to really realize how far down that rabbit hole she’s gone,” Caitriona Balfe shares.
“I think Claire and Jamie always have each other and they always have that honesty between each other. So the fact that she doesn’t tell him and she starts to self-medicate, grows this dependency on it… Jamie’s aware that there’s something wrong, but he can’t obviously put his finger on it, but he also doesn’t want to pressure her. I think having been through something similar himself, he wants to give her space and time to come to terms or to deal with the trauma. But it’s Outlander. It’s explosive as well. And I guess the fact that they reconnect and they bond is beautiful. It’s a tough storyline, I think, for Claire, and Caitriona [Balfe] beautifully played it. I think also she pushed the writers as well to really make sure that it was an honest and rewarding storyline,” Sam Heughan confessed.
Claire and Jamie came to an agreement long ago that their love allowed secrets but not lies, so now secrets don’t fit between them. Every time they’ve had one…it’s almost destroyed them.
Claire doesn’t know how to deal with what she’s feeling because nothing she’s done before works for her and she has to rebuild herself. Ether is the solution that she finds to escape when everything becomes too much for her, because she wants to continue being the one that is there for everyone as she has always been but sometimes it’s very difficult to do so.
And Jamie knows her so well that he knows something is going on and he’s trying to give Claire the space that she needs but when he finds out what’s going on, this big secret that Claire has…yeah, his reaction is going to be explosive and we think a lot of that explosion will be due to the fear that Claire will disappear. In every sense. But they will work it out, together, like they always do.
The arrival of the Christie family turns everything upside down at Fraser’s Ridge, especially Jamie and Claire. Jamie and Tom, the patriarch of the Christies, have an open animosity for many reasons and the arrival of Tom’s family at the Ridge is regarded with suspicion by Jamie, knowing from the beginning that they will cause trouble, and more with a budding revolution, although without knowing how or when.
“Lukewarm is very generous. Yeah, we find out or have a flashback to, I guess, the origin of Jamie and Tom’s relationship. It goes back to the prison they incarcerated, it in, the two sides that they were on in their belief system of being a Protestant or staunch Catholic. And yes, Christie’s come with the Fisher to settle. There is this real power play between Jamie and Tom, which really starts to unravel the status quo in Fraser’s Ridge. There’re a lot of other stories with the Christie’s as well, which I think yeah, it really is sort of the beginning of, I guess, the end of the Fraser’s Ridge the way we know it. And the popularity of the Fraser as well, up until this point, the Fraser are pretty affluent and pretty popular. And I think Tom is certainly the rotten apple,” Sam Heughan comments.
Oh yeah, this is going to be amazing, ma’am! Ready for some competition for Jamie on all fronts? We are. #TeamJamie forever!
After talking at length with Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe we’re still in awe of them and how they’re able to understand their characters, to put themselves in their shoes. Jamie and Claire indeed.
Outlander season 6 airs Sundays on STARZ.
