Caitríona Balfe Doesn’t “Fully Understand” The Outlander Ending Either

Spoilers ahead for the Outlander series finale. After eight seasons and more than a decade of storytelling, Outlander has come to an end. Granted, prequel series Blood of My Blood ensures that there’s plenty of time-traveling lore to come, but Jamie and Claire’s story as we know it drew to a close in the May 15 series finale.

And if you have questions about what exactly went down, you’re not alone: Caitríona Balfe has a few, too.

As foreshadowed at the start of the season, Jamie — who read about his own demise in Frank’s history book — was indeed killed in the Battle of King’s Mountain. Heartbroken, Claire lies by his body all day and night. She almost appears to die by his side after one dramatic exhale. “He is her home,” Balfe told Entertainment Weekly, likening the scene to Romeo and Juliet.

But unlike those star-crossed lovers, Jamie and Claire get a second chance to change their fate. After a full-circle sequence that revisits their journey thus far, starting with Jamie’s apparent ghost watching Claire in Inverness, then causing forget-me-nots to bloom at Craigh na Dun, the two simultaneously gasp awake (er, alive).

The hopeful moment immediately cuts to black, so viewers don’t get to linger on the specifics of what happened. “I’m not sure that I fully understand the ending,” Balfe told EW. “I don’t really know what happened, but I thought it was really cool that they went and did the Jamie ghost thing again, and that in some way, maybe, he was calling her, or he pulled her into his orbit. But as to what happens when they’re lying on the stone, I don’t know.”

It does seem, at least, that Claire has reached the healing potential foretold by Adawehi’s dream in Season 4, which predicted that when Claire’s hair is “white like snow,” she will have “wisdom beyond time.” In those final moments of Outlander, Claire’s hair is suddenly pure white.

Balfe told EW that originally, prophecy “was going to be sort of a thread of this season. Then they decided to take it out.”

While hints — like Claire’s hair — made it to the final cut, Balfe said she would have loved to see the “mystical” element a little bit more, and that “Claire had more agency in bringing him back. I think in some way, yes, she does. But then it’s like, are they alive in this time? Are they alive in a different time? I don’t know.”