[Warning: The below and video above contain MAJOR spoilers for Outlander, Season 7, Episode 10, “Brotherly Love.”]
Outlander‘s journey into a new timeline continues as Roger (Richard Rankin) and Buck’s (Diarmaid Murtagh) adventure in the past puts them in the path of Geillis Duncan (Lotte Verbeek), years before she’d meet Claire (Caitriona Balfe).
Eager to find his son Jemmy (Blake Johnston-Miller), Roger seeks answers about a “fairy man” he believes is Rob Cameron (Chris Fulton) who has been spotted in the area, and while Geillis doesn’t have all of the answers, there’s a promising lead from an unexpected source that ends up being Dougal MacKenzie (Graham McTavish). As Roger tries to comprehend the situation unfolding in front of his eyes, Buck is entirely unaware that they’re witnessing his parents’ first meeting.
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While Roger understands the gravity of this meeting and knows the figures involved, Buck doesn’t even know that Geillis and Dougal are his biological parents, having not been raised by the pair. So, why doesn’t Roger clue him in? “How do you prepare someone for that?” Rankin tells TV Insider. “There’s also just a whole interfering with the flow of time, which I think Roger has to reason out. I think he has to try and have a really great grasp of the potential consequences of that before he would ever dream of coming out and saying that,” Rankin adds.
“Especially where they are, and especially in the circumstances that they’re in,” he continues. “I think that could potentially backfire. It comes from a place of protectiveness and a place of love that he doesn’t.”
And that’s a fair point as Murtagh points out, “Things aren’t going well for their plan. They’ve overshot their landing zone by a few decades, which they didn’t think was possible. So yeah, there are many challenges which happen simultaneously.”
But that isn’t the only major moment for this duo finding their way through the 18th century as a new clue about the “fairy man” arises, revealing his identity to presumably be that of Roger’s father who was lost in action during World War II. “It’s an incredibly profound moment. It changes everything. It changes the very sort of idea of how they’re even there,” Rankin muses.
“I think when they see the dog tags, it’s a whole flood of emotions and sort of ultimate revelation that, ‘Hang on a minute, this could be the reason why we are in this time, why we are here, why something’s kind of not felt right,’” he adds. “We’ve just assumed that we’ve followed Jeremiah, Mackenzie to the time that he’s been kidnapped to… He thought his father died in a plane crash. So to see his dog tags… It just changes his whole perception of what happened to his father and where he might have gone.”
Will they continue to unravel that mystery? And what was it like coming face to face with Dougal in all his Highlander glory? Rankin and Murtagh discuss it all and more in the latest Inside Outlander Aftershow, above. And make sure to come back each week for insight into a new episode of Outlander from the stars themselves.
Outlander, Season 7B, Fridays, 8/7c, Starz (Midnight on the Starz App & On Demand)
–Additional reporting by Kelli Boyle
