Caitriona Balfe and Sam Heughan at the final season premiere

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “Soul of a Rebel,” the season 8 premiere of “Outlander,” now streaming on Starz.

There’s a first time for everything, and “Outlander” wastes no time checking a few off its list. Less than five minutes into the eighth and final season of Starz’s global phenomenon, Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Heughan) draw blood to get the dreaded answer to a question they never knew how to ask.

Last season, “Outlander” shocked fans — especially those loyal to author Diana Gabaldon’s books — by revealing that Faith, the Frasers’ first daughter who was thought to be stillborn in season 2, had actually lived. Between seasons, Jamie and Claire learned that Faith grew up in France and had two daughters of her own. But it isn’t until this opening scene, when they trap a smuggler named Vasquez (Miguel Álvarez), that they discover what happened to her. She married a ship captain and on one of the family’s voyages, Vasquez boarded their ship. He killed Faith’s husband and then her, throwing her overboard for attacking him when he raped Jane, their eldest daughter. He then sold Jane and their youngest daughter Fanny (Florrie May Wilkinson) to a brothel, where Jamie’s son William Ransom (Charles Vandervaart) happened to meet them last season. After Jane’s suicide, the Frasers agreed to take Fanny into their care, but they heard her singing a 20th century song that she could only know because Claire sang it to the daughter she thought had died years earlier.

Upon hearing the devastating story of Faith’s murder and the abuse of her granddaughters, Claire takes a knife and plunges it into Vasquez’s back. Before the opening credits (sung this season by the Scottish legend Annie Lennox), the good doctor took a life.

“She’s obviously forgetting her Hippocratic Oath!” Balfe says with a laugh in a recent interview with Variety.

But Balfe has now lived with Claire for thirteen years and realizes that the revelation about Faith, which is not in Gabaldon’s books, has had unexpected consequences.

“That action comes from a deep pain,” she says. “When you hear someone talk about your loved ones like that, I don’t think you can ever justify that kind of violence, but I understand where it comes from. I think Claire might be more ruthless this season. Maybe.”

While Claire may have tested the limits of her promise, showrunner and executive producer Matthew B. Roberts says killing the smuggler actually upholds her ideals. “You can rationalize it because what this man is telling Jamie is that he’s going to continue to do damage,” he says. “There’s going to be a lot more damage done to a lot more innocent people, so in a way I think she’s kept her oath by protecting those people from him.”

“Outlander” premiered in August 2014, and this season carries the weight of bringing Starz’s age-old epic to a satisfying conclusion without violating audience expectations built up over more than a decade. No pressure, right? Spilling blood in the hunt for Faith was the show’s explanation that, despite opposition from some fans, this final chapter will not return to the show’s version of Gabaldon’s books.

“We definitely wanted to show how much it meant, and the loss that they experienced, and the pain that they experienced,” Roberts says. “It’s clear that they’ve already been on a journey to get to this place. They’ve already felt the pain. Hearing this about your child, most parents would have a hard time holding back, and the fact that Claire is doing it before Jamie shows how much pain she’s carried over the years. It was important to start this season like this to show that this won’t be easy. We’re never worried about Jamie and Claire being together, but the world is tearing at them in so many different ways, and they to endure.”

The world continues to attack them in Season 8, even when they arrive home on Fraser’s Ridge. The community they built as a refuge from the Scots in North Carolina has flourished without them, as Jamie and Claire endured the American Revolution from the front lines. When they return, they are warmly welcomed by Ian (John Bell), who has called on neighbors to help build a house for the Frasers after their home was razed by a fire. But they are also greeted with a hint of tension from Captain Charles Cunningham (Kieran Bew), a supposedly reformed loyalist who now runs a powerful trading post on their land.

In some ways, Fraser’s Ridge has flourished exactly as they envisioned. “Despite this presence there that they may not be thrilled about, they’ve always hoped that it will thrive,” says executive producer Marli Davis. “Jamie offered this land to people in need, and they were able to make lives there.”

But success also leads to an inevitable power struggle. After renouncing the war that nearly killed him and his wife last season, Jamie isn’t eager to bring the fight back to the Ridge with him. Unfortunately, the premiere suggests it may already be here.

“These immigrants have come here and are trying to build a house for themselves,” Heughan said. “But it’s a bit rotten from the inside now, or it certainly changed at the beginning of the season. We don’t know yet what the intentions are of Cunningham and everyone there. But we will start to see that maybe not everything is as stable as we thought. For them, Fraser’s Ridge may not be a safe place, not a safe home.”

After years of fighting threats on multiple fronts, Claire and Jamie will have to consider that they may no longer be able to handle every battle.

“They are both older now,” she says. “Especially at that time, they both had a near-death experience not too long ago. I don’t think they have the same reserve to say they can fight anything. Any time it chips away at your armor a little bit, there’s a real vulnerability for them at this point in their lives.”

The bright spot in the premiere is the reunion of Claire and Jamie with their daughter Brianna (Sophie Skelton), her husband Roger (Robert Rankin) and their two children. After going back to the 20th century to get modern treatment for their daughter’s heart murmur, they discovered that they were safer in the past than in the present. They arrive bearing gifts, including the children’s book ‘Goodnight Moon’ (whose colorful pages confuse poor Fanny), a diary of medical advances for Claire and a copy of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ for Jamie to wrap his head around. But they also bring back the book written by Frank Randall (Tobias Menzies), Claire’s first husband, about the history of the Scots in North Carolina during the Revolution. Jamie flips through the pages and finds the last name he wanted to see: his, in a passage that claims he will die at the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780. This prophecy seems to suggest that the Frasers will violate their own plan to avoid war, but can that be trusted?

“What are Frank’s intentions?” Heughan asks rhetorically. “Is Frank coming back to torment him, or is Frank trying to help him? Personally, I’ve always felt that when Jamie sees Claire for the first time, he sees his death. He sees someone he will die for. There have been several times when Jamie has had to deal with death because of Claire or while he was with Claire. In some ways, it has finally happened. He has always been willing to die for her and for their family.”

This information about his own future, coming from the man who remains a sore subject for Jamie, will dictate much of his story this season. To really stir this raw nerve, Menzies returns to tell these passages from Frank’s book and mock Jamie’s subconscious.

“We wanted to bring Tobias back physically, but his schedule is just too busy,” says Roberts. “He was so gracious. He wanted to be part of it and having his voice really works because it’s haunting.”

But as Heughan notes, he doesn’t know what Frank sounds like. He can certainly deduce a few things from this, as Frank’s ancestor was Black Jack Randall, the cruel man whose obsession with Jamie left all kinds of scars. The book cover author photo is the first time Jamie discovers that Frank looked exactly like his abuser, which adds a whole other layer to this revelation. But ultimately, Menzies’ vocal presence this season is more about Jamie than Frank. “Basically it’s just Jamie talking to himself,” says Heughan. “It’s Jamie’s fears and his sanity that are being called into question this season.”

The threat of Jamie’s death in a battle they cannot deal with quickly will loom over the Frasers like nothing they have ever faced, Balfe warns.

“It’s almost like this kind of curse that Frank puts on them, because there’s nothing worse than the idea of ​​something popping into your head, and Jamie just goes with it,” she says. “They don’t really share with each other, which is one of the worst things — or rather, he doesn’t really share with her. It’s hard for them in these episodes because they allow it to poison each other and poison their own minds in different ways.”