Outlander season 7 was originally going to be the last

The seventh season of Outlander, based on the popular books by Diana Gabaldon, premieres tonight! At 16 episodes, this is a monster-sized season. It’s so big that it feels almost like a finale for the time-traveling-romance series, and according to executive producer Matthew Roberts, it almost was.

“We thought season 7 would be our final season for the majority of the writing and the production,” Roberts told Entertainment Weekly. “It wasn’t until we were two-thirds of the way in that we had the announcement that we were going to get season 8. We had an idea of a contingency plan, ‘Hey, just in case we get it, we can adjust the last few episodes to carry on.'”

And that ended up being what happened. “We went into that writer’s room not having any idea and having to assume this would be our last season,” said executive producer Maril Davis. “We decided, ‘You know what? Let’s take all the material we have. We might not come back.’ We said, ‘Let’s take books 7 and 8, let’s combine them and take all that material and make the best season we can.’ And that’s what we did. This is the first time we’ve taken material from three books.”

Will Outlander adapt all 10 of Diana Gabaldon’s books?

Outlander will have one more season after this, for eight in total. So far, Diana Gabaldon has published nine novels in her series; the latest, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, came out in 2021. We can expect the eighth and final season to adapt that one.

That said, there are a total of 10 novels planned, so it’s possible the TV show won’t adapt the whole series, unless we get an Outlander movie to adapt the tenth and final novel or something. And hey, that kind of thing has happened, so don’t give up hope.

Caitriona Balfe will find it “very, very hard to say goodbye” to Outlander

Like the producers, the actors didn’t know for a while whether season 7 would be the end or not. “We didn’t know there were an awful lot of conversations going on about whether there would be another one or not,” said Caitriona Balfe (Claire Fraser). “What Sam [Heughan] and I personally felt was that we would like to see it finished up in a proper way and not wrapped up in two episodes or something. It didn’t feel like that was fitting.”

"It’s going to be very, very hard to say goodbye to it. But at the same time, it has to end at some point. Hopefully we’ll go out with a bang, and we’ll do an amazing season 8 and really do justice to what the journey has been thus far."

Outlander season 7 will have a more conclusive ending than usual

Because of the way it was written, the seventh season does have more of a conclusive ending than a lot of Outlander’s seasons have. “There’s a natural place in the books that you end,” Davis said. “If you’ve read the books, you know that there’s a natural place to end.”

But of course it won’t end there. “Now we’ve got book 9, and we’ve got more stuff to do,” Davis said. “I’m thrilled we’ve got another season, but I could easily see how it could have [ended].”

New episodes of Outlander drop every Friday on Starz.

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