Are Cliffhangers Good? Outlander Season 6’s Ending
SPOILERS for Outlander Season 6
Outlander Season 6 ends in a very…interesting place, from a narrative perspective. Claire and Jamie are separated yet again, with Claire imprisoned for murder, Jamie has just been rescued by Young Ian, and they are riding off across the beach, presumably to find Claire and in some way or another, rescue her and keep her safe.
Season 3 ends with a surprisingly similar shot, of Jamie and Claire together as the camera pans out across a beach and a family walks away from them. They both end with a sense of hope out of difficult circumstances. Both are, depending on your definition and perspective, a kind of cliffhanger. One, though, is done exceptionally well. The other, not so much.
Let’s start with defining what a cliffhanger actually is. In the broadest sense, it’s something that leaves the audience wondering what will happen next. But that’s very broad. Shouldn’t every episode of TV, every season of TV, leave the audience with a desire to see more? More specifically, it tends to be a big revelation or a major choice set before the character that will need to be answered in the next installment. That is when it’s used well. When it’s used poorly, it simply leaves a person dangling at the edge of the cliff. Nothing has really changed, it’s just mid-story.
Outlander has often been a prime example of the cliffhanger used well. The end of season two with Claire’s iconic “I have to go back” after discovering Jamie is alive is the use of a cliffhanger at it’s finest, as is the end of season 3. In both, a huge revelation has been made: Jamie lived through Culloden, and they have landed in America. Both are conclusions to long arcs, looking for Jamie and sailing across the ocean to free Ian, and they both provide conclusions to that narrative. They know what happened to Jamie and they’ve saved Ian, especially as we find out the ship made it safely to shore. But it asks questions, too. We’re left wonder if Claire will actually go back and how that will happen. We are dying to know if Claire and Jamie will make their new start in America, a good idea with all the pressure on them in Scotland. It provides a satisfying wrap up to the season while still making us wonder what’s to come.
Let’s contrast this with the ending of Outlander Season 6 which is also being called a cliffhanger and, in the broadest sense, of course is. We want to know what’s going to happen to Claire, if there will be a trial and how that will go. We want to know who killed Malva. But we wanted to know that at the beginning of the episode, too. The last few minutes posed no new questions for us, and it certainly didn’t wrap anything up. Claire is still in custody, but the threads of whatever is going on with Tom is just left hanging, as is the identity of Malva’s murderer.
It’s all right to have a loose end or two that carries from one season to the next. Outlander does this masterfully with Stephen Bonnet at the end of Season 4. He’s still out there, a spectre haunting them as they move into season 5. But there was no central element to his story with Bree that was left unattended. She got some closure with him in the jail, had the baby, and her and Roger are together. Bonnet himself is a loose end, but the story beats were all concluded. The opposite of that is they mystery around who killed Malva. We know no more about that then we did when it happened, except maybe that Claire herself wasn’t the one to do it, which was a wasted misdirect. If it was an actual question that she did, make it an actual question. Claire being terrified that she did while the audience and everyone around her, who knows her at least, are wholly unconvinced, is a pale imitation of dramatic irony.
But on point, we have almost no clues as to who actually did it. Moreover, we have almost no SUSPECTS, no one even with a real or clearly presented motive. If you aren’t going to make it a mystery, then let the audience in on who it was and let actual dramatic irony work. If we as the audience know the truth, then let us feel the tension of every moment the murder is passing with the others, every time they are vocal about their own suspicions, throwing everyone off their scent. Let us know that there’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing among them. That’s dramatic irony done right. That’s suspense.
The King of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, explains it perfectly, so I’ll add his words here.
“There is a distinct difference between “suspense” and “surprise,” and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean.
We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!”
In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.”
The point of me including this illustration is that this storyline en masse is being botched. The breadcrumbs aren’t there to make a strong mystery or powerful suspense. We have to know details, to be clued in. You shouldn’t have to have read the books to figure out who it is.
This relates to the cliffhanger because we don’t have any suspense to fuel us. We don’t have breadcrumbs to track or ideas to unravel. It seems to me that the writers decided that who Malva’s murder was isn’t important because all the book readers know anyway, and most anyone who hasn’t read the books probably has heard the spoilers. So they tossed that aside, and the story is much poorer for it. We have to be with the characters, and their struggles and questions should be our own. I felt no actual urgency about finding the killer. Wouldn’t the best way for Claire to be sure she wouldn’t be accused of murder to find the actual culprit? Or at least to try? Yet we see none of that.
Regardless, the way the last episode plays out makes it obvious that it was never meant to be a finale. Behind the scenes details, Covid, a shortened season, strains on Caitriona and her pregnancy, all are reasons for this. I am of course sympathetic to all these details and would never want the show to come before the safety of anyone. That’s not what I’m saying in the slightest.
However, just because there are reasons that something is bad doesn’t magically make it good.
Yes, this episode wasn’t meant to be the finale. But it is. And it doesn’t work as one. Moreover, it wasn’t the lack of group scenes, influenced by Covid, that hurt this season. It wasn’t the lack of skin from Caitriona as she had a baby bump to hide that brought a lack of intimacy. It was that characters were incorrectly used, acting out of character. It’s that storylines were started and then abandoned, or drug on to the point of exhaustion. It’s that the tone was too like a horror movie at some points, and too like an action movie in others, to let the deep, emotional beats land.
And fundamentally, I believe it was fear. I believe the creators were terrified to take too big of swings with season because things were so up in the air. They held our hands through too much, worried too much about audience response. They didn’t serve the story first, but instead tried to gauge how we would react, which is never a good choice. It’s how Game of Thrones went off the rails.
Because of that analogy, I’ll add a quote from the writer of the Game of Thrones books.
“If you have planned in your book that the butler did it, and then you read on the internet that someone’s figured out that the butler did it, and you suddenly change in midstream that it was the chambermaid who did it, then you screw up the whole book.”
Now, do I think they’re suddenly going to pull a rabbit out of a hat and change who Malva’s killer is? Of course not. But they made the same fundamental mistake Martin is describing. They decided that, because people already knew who the killer was, it wasn’t worth creating suspense around it.
That just isn’t the case. My larger lesson here, for myself as a writer, I hope for Outlander into Season 7 and possibly beyond, and to anyone who tells stories, is to serve the story first. Craft your narrative how it deserves to be created, serve your characters and stay true to who they are and what they need, use devices like cliffhangers and suspense sparingly and well, and when they’re called for. And, more than anything, don’t worry about what the people watching are going to think.
Make something good. Make something strong, powerful, emotional. Make something true, and the audience will follow you.
