Episode 716's ending, and Diana's response (SPOILERS!)

As many of you know, the season finale of OUTLANDER Season 7B ended with a very controversial plot twist, which has caused a huge amount of discussion and speculation among OUTLANDER fans over the past week. Diana Gabaldon has now weighed in with her reaction to the uproar, and her response is definitely worth reading! (See below for more about that.) But I wanted to share a few of my own thoughts as well.

My detailed recap of that episode is here if you missed it. I'm going to focus on the last part of the episode in this post.

*** SPOILER WARNING!! ***

There are SPOILERS for OUTLANDER Episode 716 ("A Hundred Thousand Angels") below! If you don't want to know yet, stop reading now.

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At the end of Episode 716, we're left with the following:

- Jamie and Claire's stillborn daughter, Faith, apparently survived into adulthood (!)
- It's strongly implied that Master Raymond had something to do with it.
- Fanny has a locket with the name "Faith" inscribed on it, with a picture of her mother inside. Is it possible that Faith grew up to be Jane and Fanny's mother?
- Fanny knows the same 20th-century song that Claire sang to the baby in that heartbreaking scene in Episode 207, "Faith". Fanny says she learned the song from her mother. So the strong implication is that Fanny's mother was a time-traveler like Claire.
- Claire says to Jamie, "I think Faith lived."

Now, let me start off by saying that the cumulative effect of these revelations in the last two minutes of the episode left me yelling, "No, no, NO!!!" at the TV on the first viewing. I strongly dislike this whole plot twist, for a number of reasons, but primarily because it ruins the devastating impact that Faith's loss has had on both Claire and Jamie for all these years. If Faith survived but Master Raymond never told Claire, why would he keep that knowledge from her? Who raised the child? Did Mother Hildegarde know? How could a stillborn fetus at around 20-24 weeks gestation (in a time without NICUs) somehow be resuscitated and survive long enough to grow to adulthood? etc. etc. The whole scenario raises a number of very troubling questions.

Having said that, it's true that the idea originated in the books. Claire and Jamie talked about it in BEES:

“So...um...I know this is nothing but pure fantasy, the sort of thing you think in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep…”

[Jamie] made a low noise, indicating that I should stop apologizing and get on with it. So I took a deep breath and did, whispering the words into his chest.

“Master Raymond was there. What if--if he found...Faith...and was able to...somehow bring her...back?”

(From GO TELL THE BEES THAT I AM GONE by Diana Gabaldon, chapter 24, "Alarms By Night". Copyright © 2021 by Diana Gabaldon. All rights reserved.)

That was my first reaction, too: The idea is pure fantasy! Claire held the dead baby in her arms. The nuns at L'Hôpital des Anges made her look, so she wouldn't imagine things, so she wouldn't torment herself with thoughts like this.

Jamie doesn't believe it for a moment.

“Even if everything ye’ve made yourself think was somehow true--and it’s not, Sassenach; ye ken it’s not--but if it were somehow true, it wouldna make any difference. The woman in Frances’s locket is dead now, and so is our Faith.”

His words touched the raw place in my heart, and I nodded, tears welling.

“I know,” I whispered. “I know, too,” he whispered, and held me while I wept.

(From GO TELL THE BEES THAT I AM GONE by Diana Gabaldon, chapter 24, "Alarms By Night". Copyright © 2021 by Diana Gabaldon. All rights reserved.)

So we're left with a Highly Improbable scenario in the show, to say the least!

Diana Gabaldon revealed in a PARADE interview last week that she was the one who gave them the original idea for this plot twist. But that revelation caused a lot of confusion among the book fans.

Yesterday Diana posted a very long explanation on her Facebook page. I encourage you all to take the time to read the whole thing!

Here are my reactions to Diana's comments.

"As this was a conversation, rather than a Meeting, I then mentioned casually that I had at one time considered doing a second graphic novel, and IF I HAD (WHICH I BLOODY DIDN’T AND I’M NOT GOING TO**), it might have included something about Master Raymond and what--if anything--he might have done following his visit to save Claire’s life at the hospital."

It makes sense to me that Diana's initial thought (in blue above) was what she refers to as a "kernel". It was just an idea; it hasn't (yet?) developed into anything concrete, and "quite possibly never will." OK.

So she mentioned this idea to Matt Roberts, the show-runner for OUTLANDER, and the show writers took this "kernel", this idea, combined it with the bit from BEES where Claire speculated (briefly) about whether Master Raymond might somehow have saved Faith, and ran with it.

And in so doing, they -- not Diana Gabaldon, but Matt Roberts and the show people -- created the set of Highly Improbable circumstances that we saw in Episode 716.

Diana may have provided them with the "kernel", the beginnings of the idea that perhaps Master Raymond might have intervened -- but it sounds like she had nothing to do with the rest of it. "The books are the books, and the show is the show," as Diana has told us for years. In the books, none of that ever happened.

You aren’t going to see any of those thoughts in Book Ten, because they don’t belong there. If you ever _do_ see them (and they aren’t even developed thoughts; just what I call kernels), they’ll be in Master Raymond’s own story (should I live that long…).

But the bottom line here is that No, Faith isn’t/wasn’t alive in the Outlander novels, she’s not going to be, and neither Claire nor Jamie will ever think so.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I find that last line reassuring. Diana Gabaldon may have given them the beginnings of the idea, the "kernel", but she's not responsible for the rest of it. (Despite what a lot of people in the fandom have been saying since the PARADE article came out on Friday.) That's what I take away from this.

The show writers went off and did something totally different from what Diana would have done. (As we've seen them do on multiple occasions.) Sometimes that works (Murtagh and Jocasta, for example, a change from the books that many fans loved), and sometimes it fails spectacularly (see my thoughts about the ether/PTSD subplot in Season 6). We'll have to wait for Season 8 to see where they're going to go with this.

If nothing else, this season-ending cliffhanger has certainly accomplished what they intended, in terms of generating a tremendous amount of discussion and speculation among the fans! We will no doubt be talking about this one for a long time to come.

In the meantime, if those last two minutes of this episode bother you, just do what I'm going to do: skip over them entirely on re-watching! And remember, it's just a TV show. Whatever they do in the show, the books will still be there.