Episode 716: A Hundred Thousand Angels

The heart is a curious thing. Let’s discuss the finale and Season 7b.

Warning- Contains spoilers from Outlander Episode 716: A Hundred Thousand Angels. This article also discusses suicide.

Heaven, a child close to me once mused, must be very crowded. With all the people who have ever lived on Earth, he reasoned, it must surely be overflowing…hundreds of thousands of angels, if you will. Thus, he concluded, people we have lost must be among us…they likely come down to the world when Heaven becomes too crowded and visit their families. It was a nice thought—the sort of deeply poignant and beautifully simple thought only a child can have—and I’ve held onto it. We all host angels unawares.

The heart, like Heaven, sometimes feels as if it is overflowing. When we are young and experience love when it is new, it seems unimaginable that we could ever love any harder or any deeper. And when we are young and experience grief when it is new, it seems unimaginable that we will ever love again.

The trick is learning the heart always has room for more love. We can hold space for past love with new love, and we can make space for grief around happiness. It is the only way we can navigate the world with the highs and lows of being human. And thus we finally arrive at our Season 7 finale. Here, in this episode that is both joyful and sorrowful, our characters learn to make space.

I shed more than a few tears with Rollo’s passing this episode, and for personal reasons. In my non-Outlander life I am a veterinarian, and part of the job is serving as a witness to grief. We watch as pet owners say goodbye to an animal that provided them with unconditional and uncomplicated love, and very often as they leave they will tell us, “I don’t think I can go through this again.” And yet, a few months later, we will see them with a new animal. The grief from losing their old pet is not gone, but their heart has expanded to find a new love. Space has been made.

And so it is with this season of Outlander. Rachel makes space for her love of Ian alongside her Quaker beliefs. Denzell holds both fear and courage as he operates on someone he loves. For Ian, the joy of Rachel’s pregnancy exists with the pain of Rollo’s death. William, John, and Jamie—painfully and often clumsily—make space for each other around twenty years of friendship, hurt, and love. The MacKenzies and Buck make space for their expanded family that now exists across generations. Jamie and Claire have an endless supply of love and benevolence, and so they make space for Frances. And finally, in the last moments of this episode, Claire’s grief allows a little space for hope…and Faith.

And when we make space we have to make allowances. That is, we decide where this new love or grief or hope can exist in our heart and lives. And in doing so we determine what we give of ourselves to others and what we keep. Such is the case with our characters this hour—they decide what they will give and what they cannot. Sometimes the space they make is for others, and sometimes the space they make is for themselves. There is no other way to process the emotions of war, loss, and love.

The episode opens with Jane on the eve of her execution, as an inquisitor of the press attempts to capture a story for his readers. Like nearly every character this hour, Jane makes a decision about what she will give this man. While she initially declines to take his journalistic bait, claiming she will never give anything to another man again, she eventually thinks of Frances and decides to talk.

For others the night is not so lonely, as we see Claire making a slow recovery while Jamie sits watch. Jamie’s monologue about blood transfusion was very sweet (and that’s not a sentence one writes everyday), and again we see our characters speaking aloud of what they would give to others. Jamie would give every ounce of his blood to Claire, but such a gift will not be possible for at least another hundred years.

In the British camp, William is distraught over Jane’s fate and seeks help from his father, a man who has managed to save people from impossible situations many times before. But even Lord John’s powers have limits, and he cannot save Jane from a world in which the Fifth Amendment does not yet exist. As much as he would, Jane’s release is not something he can give William.

The MacKenzie family is finally reunited in 1739, safe and together at last. Diarmaid Murtagh did a really nice job with the character of Buck, convincingly conveying both joy and sorrow in witnessing the reunion. The Roger/Buck arc is nearly complete (and I’m not sure how much more we will have in Season 8), but in the finishing of this story we see how these family members have journeyed from life-and-death moments of jealousy and anger to one of love and familial transcendence. Everyone has made space for one another.

Lord John visits Claire during her recovery in a touching scene that mirrors the one in Blood of My Blood (Episode 406), in which Lord John was the patient returning from the brink of death. But while Lord John and Claire parted on respectful but still somewhat wary terms in 406, now there is genuine affection. And although John and Jamie’s relationship is strained at best, there is far too much history to dismiss this friendship completely…and they know it. Such is the way with family. We make space for hurt, and then we make space (eventually) for love again.

Brianna’s conversation with Brian was very touching, especially in the realization that this may be the only time she ever meets her grandfather. Like Roger meeting his father, there is so much to say with such little time to say it. And, honestly, there is no good way to say it at all. How do you tell a person who has no idea who you are that you love them? You can’t, really. All you can do is hope to live a life that is worthy of their love.

Equally as touching was Denzell’s goodbye to Claire. I’ve had mentors in my own medicinal career, and there comes a time when everything seems to click—you find you are no longer afraid to move forward on your own. I’m not sure how much of Denzell we will get in the relatively short final season, but I’d like to imagine him in thirty years, mentoring a new doctor and remembering Claire. Doctors surely know that humans are mortal, but in teaching the next generation we find a way to live forever.

It’s a comforting thought to hold onto as William, having enlisted Jamie’s aid, discovers Jane has died by suicide. The eighteenth century was an unjust place for many, and abused and trafficked women could seldom save themselves. Like Malva, Jane was a smart woman who undoubtedly would have found a better place in a world two hundred years in the future. They had everything to give this world, but they were bright lights darkened too soon.

Jamie offers to help William because, as he tells Claire, William has never asked him for anything. But I suspect Jamie would have helped William even if it was his thousandth request, because that is what parents do. And when William declares that he will never call Jamie “father?” It hurts but it’s understandable; with rare exception, our children owe us nothing.

Depending on the cultural folklore, herons have historically symbolized a link to other worlds and as messengers from the gods. So it’s no surprise that Claire has repeatedly dreamt of herons in regards to Faith (herons are to Faith what rabbits are to Brianna). And those final moments of the episode? Well, I wrote about it at length here, and I suspect this story will have a broad arc in the final season.

Outlander—both the novels and the series—has meant many things to many people over the years. It is sometimes hard to explain its appeal to outsiders (to the outlanders of Outlander, if you will), and it is even more difficult to place it in a single genre. Is it romance? Science fiction? Historical fiction? A combination of the above?

But I think its appeal exists in its most definitive genre: the beautiful pain of humanity. And such is what we saw in this season finale. A young woman takes her own life as ethereal aurora lights shine above. A girl finds a new home with loving strangers but will forever be haunted by her sister’s anonymous grave. A son returns to both his fathers, but the reunion is complicated and painful. The premise of the story—time travel— is supernatural, but day-to-day love and hurt and anger are deeply common. We see ourselves in these characters, because humans behave in very much the same ways no matter the century.

And since the final season will surely see the final acts of the American Revolution, let us reflect on what it is to make space. Let us remember the promise of what this country can give to its people: freedom to love whom we want, be what we choose, and worship how we wish. There is room enough.

Sláinte.

Screencaps provided by Outlander Online.