Season 6’s previous episode, “The World Turned Upside Down” (which premiered on Sunday, April 10) was one of the darkest this season so far, as settlers on Fraser’s Ridge fall victim to a dysentery epidemic. Claire becomes sick as well, but it seems that her illness—as well as Tom Christie’s (Mark Lewis Jones)—is strangely different from the sickness that struck the others. Malva (Jessica Reynolds) drops a bombshell on Jamie (Sam Heughan) before meeting a tragic fate, which Claire may or may not have had a hand in. With just two more episodes left in this short season, Claire and Jamie will soon find themselves unsettled in the very settlement they created at Fraser’s Ridge, with rumors and accusations spinning around them—and maybe even an arrest for murder. How will Claire get out of this one? We’ll have to wait an extra week, until April 24, for the next episode to find out. Here’s everything we learned from the promo for Outlander Season 6 episode 7, “Sticks and Stones.”
Is there an Outlander Season 6 episode 7 promo preview?
Yes! The trailer for “Sticks and Stones” picks up almost exactly where episode 6 left off, with Claire standing over Malva’s body. Tom Christie, Allan Christie (Alexander Vlahos) and Jamie are with her. “Your wife stands before us up to her elbows in blood,” Tom says to Jamie, clearly accusing her. “With a knife,” Allan says. “What are you implying, lad?” Jamie asks coldly, wanting Allan to say whatever he has to say to his face. “Everyone on the Ridge has questions,” a settler tells Jamie and Roger (Richard Rankin), as we see Claire getting dirty looks from some villagers. “Chose your next words carefully,” Jamie warns in voiceover—just who he’s talking to, we’re not sure. Dirt is thrown on a grave containing the coffins of Malva and her child. “Who would do something like this?” Claire asks Jamie. “Whoever it was, we’ll find them, we’ll keep looking,” Jamie answers her. In the next shot, we see a large group of armed men riding—could all of them be coming to arrest the murderer? Or are they on the hunt for the culprit? More likely, given their number, they could also be colonists gearing up to rebel. Then Ian (John Bell) approaches Lizzy (Caitlin O’ Ryan) in the stable. “Have you seen the Beardsleys anywhere?” he asks her. “Surely you couldn’t think that they—,” she cuts off, maybe realizing that they, could, in fact, have done whatever she doesn’t want to ask. This looks to be a tense one!
What happened on Outlander Season 6 episode 6?
Season 6 episode 6, “The World Turned Upside Down,” was not an easy one to watch, and took viewers to some very dark places up until its final devastating moments. We open with Roger giving a sermon—seems he’s turning into a real minister—and afterward, he mentions to Claire and Jamie he hasn’t seen the MacNeills lately. Claire says she’ll check in on them, so she, Brianna (Sophie Skelton), Lizzie, and Malva go to their cabin. The family wasn’t deceased as the preview led us to believe—not dead yet, anyway. It almost would have been better for viewers if they were, because instead, we witness this family pass away in front of our eyes. Turns out, the family had the “bloody flux,” dysentery caused by an amoeba, which Claire shows Malva under her microscope. Claire prepares to help the sick, but unfortunately, her homemade penicillin won’t work against amoebic dysentery. Jamie sets out to find the source of the problem, which is often contaminated water (he later discovers a dead elk in the river upstream). As more of the Ridge settlers succumb to the disease, Claire also becomes ill. Malva doesn’t want to leave her side, so she stays at the big house, comforting Jamie with willow bark tea. They talk, and Malva tells him that some people think Claire is a witch—an accusation Claire’s heard before. As they chat more, she tells Jamie he seems like a fine gentleman to her, with that sly look she has. As Claire lies in a feverish state, she hallucinates, picturing a snake, storm clouds, a heart and the amoeba. Then through her haze she sees Jamie standing by the window, slugging from a whisky bottle—and then Malva comes to him, touching his shoulder. Claire fades into sleep again. A week later, Claire wakes up to find her hair cut off by Malva and Mrs. Bug, apparently because it’s supposed to help cure a fever (Malva totally has no ulterior motives with this move). Unfortunate haircut aside, she and the rest of the settlers are on the mend. Brianna rushes in, choosing this special moment to reveal to her mother she’s pregnant. Claire realizes she and Tom Christie, who had also fallen ill, didn’t have the same malady as the rest of the settlers: They both had no flux, just fever, headache and hallucinations. Strange… As Jamie is planning to leave for the colonists’ Provincial Congress to plan action to take against England, the Christies appear and Malva makes a startling accusation. She is pregnant, and claims Jamie is the father. It seems that Claire didn’t imagine Malva coming to Jamie by the window while she was ill—but Jamie says he refused her advances. The scene turns ugly and Claire slaps Malva, then leaves the room. She can’t possibly think Jamie was unfaithful, can she? The couple then has a tense exchange in the stable, in which Claire seems almost like she might believe Jamie slept with Malva because she saw them at the window; yet she says she trusts him, especially because she knows he’s never turned his back on his child. Jamie does reveal, though, that he didn’t tell her about someone he was “unfaithful” to her with—20 years ago! Remember Mary MacNab, who he slept with in the cave in Season 3 when he and Claire were apart? Claire says she wishes he’d told her before, which seems a little unfair considering she had just gone 200 years back to the future to her other husband, Frank. And not to mention that during that period, Jamie had also fathered a child, William, with another woman; and married yet another (Laoghaire, Marsali’s mother)—both of whom Claire already knows about. As Jamie leaves to attend the congress, Claire faces the scorn of the village because of the rumors. Ian admits to Claire that the child could be his, because he slept with Malva. But Roger told Claire she was also canoodling with Mr. Henderson; so it seems there are a number of possibilities for who the real father could be. Two months later, Claire’s hair has grown back into a much more flattering bob that recalls her 1940s look from Season 1. But the craziest and most disturbing part of this episode is still to come. While Claire is taking some ether, she thinks Malva comes to her, calling her “of the devil,” ugly and old. She says she will have Jamie, the house, and their child. Claire threatens her with a knife. Falling back to sleep, she awakens later and goes out to the garden—only to find Malva murdered, her throat slit. Claire performs an emergency C-section to try and save the baby, but it is too late. How will Claire explain Malva’s mutilated body in her garden? This doesn’t look good for Claire.
Are there any Outlander Season 6 episode 7 spoilers?
Book readers know how the tragic story of Malva unfolds, but the show does something interesting by combining this plotline with Claire’s use of ether to self-medicate, which is not in the books. Because she was in a dreamlike state under the ether, Claire becomes an unreliable narrator as we see the events from her point of view: Did the last scene with her and Malva really happen? And is it possible Claire could have killed Malva and not remembered it? This is one addition to the show that gives a deeper level to the mystery of who killed Malva, which will be explored in the next two episodes. In the next episode, Claire will also likely need to face her addiction to the ether, and tell Jamie what’s been going on. Claire is used to putting up a strong front, but the post-traumatic stress of her attack at the end of Season 5 was just too much, and she turned to the ether as a coping mechanism. “When someone starts having a secret like Claire with her ether, and in the beginning, it’s a secret from herself really as well,” Balfe told Entertainment Weekly. “I don’t think she wants to admit what she’s doing. But that creates distance [with Jamie] because you’re not sharing and being open and vulnerable.” Now that Claire’s connected to a murder for which she had motive and opportunity, she will face accusations from the Christies and the rest of the settlers—but what will this ultimately mean for the Frasers? “This season will definitely end on a cliffhanger,” executive producer Maril Davis told Entertainment Weekly, admitting Season 6 has been a tough one. “We never see Claire and Jamie in a happy place for very long…It’s just turmoil and trauma. This season, because it’s shortened…for some reason, it seems more traumatic. This season we don’t get a chance to breathe. It’s trauma upon trauma or issues upon issues. And I’m just so excited about where it ends.” In next week’s penultimate episode, the ramifications of Malva’s deceit and murder will have dire consequences for Claire before the season finale’s cliffhanger. But hopefully, the next Droughtlander will be a short one, as production on Season 7 has already begun! Tune in to episode 7 on Sunday, April 24. Next, Will There Be an Outlander Season 8? Here’s What Executive Producer Maril Davis Told Us
