What’s in store for Jamie, Claire, Roger and Brianna when ‘Outlander’ returns? A lot of time apart

When you ask the cast of “Outlander” to scroll through their mental camera roll and select a standout memory from the making of the historical saga’s seventh season, their answers pleasingly mirror the characters they play.
Sam Heughan — who plays Jamie Fraser, the noble 18th-century Scotsman whose passion for his time-travelling wife is matched only by his towering saviour complex — remembers shooting an emotional moment with the actor who plays his brother-in-law, Ian Murray.
“For me, it’s probably that scene with Steven Cree up on the hillside up in Kinloch Rannoch,” said Heughan, alluding to a poignant conversation on a windswept highland ridge whose contents we can’t reveal because they’re a major spoiler. “It’s a pretty magical place, and a really special scene between Jamie and Ian.”
His co-star, Caitríona Balfe, who plays a 1920s-born British woman named Claire who’s transported through a magic stone circle and has spent the last seven seasons pinging between the 20th and 18th centuries as history and her tumultuous love affair unfold, went for something a little lighter.
“I don’t know why this is popping into my head, but one of the funny memories is Sam trying to row us all out into the lake,” said Balfe of a scene from the first part of Season 7 when Heughan struggled to wield an oar with quite the same mastery Jamie Fraser might have.
“You did very well eventually,” she added kindly to her co-star.
And while they were paired for interviews, Heughan and Balfe’s characters actually spend much of the second half of Season 7 apart, courtesy of the cruel twists of fate that make “Outlander” such a compelling but tense viewing experience for anyone even vaguely invested in this couple’s epic love story.
“I think (separation) is quite a big theme in the second part of the season” — premiering Monday on W Network — said Balfe. Heughan, agreeing, pointed to the fact that distance — physical and emotional — is also a key factor in the tension between Fraser and William Ransom (Toronto actor Charles Vandervaart), a now-adult child he fathered when he and Claire were apart, and who doesn’t yet know that Jamie’s his birth parent. (Do keep up.)
“It’s about hashing it out, coming to terms with it,” Heughan said of that particular dynamic. “You know, ‘Why were you not there?’ With all these relationships, it’s coming to terms with the separation …”
“It’s the breaking apart and then the resolution,” said Balfe before Heughan drily added, “Resolution through a hell of a lot of drama.”
Among those separated couples are Brianna, Jamie and Claire’s daughter, and her husband, Roger. As you’ll know if you watched the first part of the season, he’s gone back in time to the 18th century to look for their kidnapped son while she’s staying back in the 1970s with their daughter.
“Everyone’s scattered, that’s for sure. Everyone is off on a very different journey,” said Richard Rankin, who plays Roger. “It helps to give us a fresh dynamic across the characters because we see them with other people, establishing new relationships. It just opens up the world a little bit more.”
Logistically, this meant that Sophie Skelton, who plays Brianna, filmed most of her scenes separately from the rest of the ensemble cast.
“I definitely felt that parallel,” said Skelton, who filmed most of her scenes with the child actors who play her kids in the show. “That’s always an interesting dynamic, because the kids have their own working hours. They leave and go on their breaks, and you’re just sat on your own in a corner of the studio.”
It can’t have helped the situation that, per Skelton, the flat she was living in while filming in Scotland was filled with decidedly unwanted company.
“It was haunted to smithereens and then when I got my dog it was 20 times worse,” said Skelton. “My dog’s a Great Dane, essentially Scooby-Doo, so the ghosts even more definitely came out to play.”
Rankin, for his part, is less certain of the existence of the supernatural phenomena (not least time travel) that drive much of the action on “Outlander.”
“I want to be more of a believer,” he said. “I’m too much of a logical thinker, which kind of annoys me.”
For Heughan and Balfe, the thing that stretches belief the most, however, might just be the fact that “Outlander” is approaching its eighth and final season.
“I don’t think any of us thought past Season 1. We were all just so grateful to get that show and be given a job,” said Balfe of the series that premiered a decade ago, based on Diana Gabaldon’s bestselling books.
“We had no idea what the reception was going to be. We knew that it was a popular series of books, but whether those people would embrace us or not was a totally different thing.”
It is amazing, she said, that they’re still here 101 episodes later.
The cast has actually finished shooting the eighth season, although Heughan says there are still a few “pickups” to do — film speak for small bits of footage that need to be shot or reshot. 
“We’re still coming to terms with finishing it,” he said. “But fans needn’t worry, because there’s still a lot more to get to before they get to the end of the journey.”
“Outlander” Season 7B premieres on W Network Nov. 25 at 9 p.m. and can be streamed on StackTV.