Outlander star John Bell talks Young Ian’s grim future
By Dan Selcke
As it often does, tragedy struck on the latest episode of Outlander. This time it visited Young Ian (John Bell), Jamie Fraser’s headstrong nephew. Jamie and Ian came to learn that Arch and Murdina Bug, employees on Frasers Ridge, had stolen some Jacobite gold. The pair confronted Arch when he was digging up the gold under the burnt-out remains of the house. In the confusion and the dark, Ian kills Arch…but it actually ends up being Murdina. Oops.
“He loved Murdina,” Bell told Entertainment Weekly. “He is going to be wrestling with a lot of emotions that I think he probably thought were behind him. It’s all coming up again, this idea of ‘Am I a good person if I kill so easily? If I murder so easily, is there something wrong with me?’ Maybe there is a little bit, but he did it to protect Jamie. That’s at the core of it — it’s protecting his family. It’s protecting his loved ones by any means possible.”
And inner turmoil could be the least of Ian’s problems going forward. When he shows up at Murdina’s memorial, Ian offers Arch the chance to kill him, which seems the least he can do for killing the guy’s wife. But Arch isn’t satisfied, saying, “When you have something worth taking, you’ll see me again.”
Threat will “loom large over Ian” for the rest of Outlander season 7
So that’s ominous. What could Arch mean? Ian will surely lose some nights thinking about it. “It’s going to hang over Ian’s head,” executive producer Maril Davis told EW. “For Ian, that’s a weight he carries, and we are going to see the ramifications of that relationship as we move forward.”
If Arch wants to hurt someone close to Ian, you’d figure the obvious contenders would be Jamie and Claire. But Bell hints at something more unexpected. “[A]s somebody else appears, that changes everything,” he said. “That threat is going to loom large over Ian. He’s going to have to get the hatchet out.”
Great, so Ian is going to get a new love interest or surrogate child or something only for Arch Bug to leap out of the shadows and threaten them. The wheel on Outlander keeps turning. New episodes drop Fridays on Starz.
Next. Outlander review, Episode 703: “Death Be Not Proud”. dark
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