Hold onto your bannocks, Outlander faithful: We’re heading in uncharted territory.

The cliffhanger at the end of Friday’s Season 7 finale likely surprised even the most devoted of Diana Gabaldon’s readers — mainly because it doesn’t happen in the novels on which the Starz series is based. In case you missed the episode, a quick overview: Claire dreamed that Master Raymond, the French apothecary who saved her life after her stillbirth in Season 2, visited her while she was healing from her recent surgery. Of note: He apologized, though Claire wasn’t sure for what, and told her he’d see her again. Before he left, he said, “Have faith.”

At the end of the episode, after a series of eerie coincidences (or were they?) led Claire to a stunning conclusion: What if Faith, a premature stillborn baby, somehow had survived and lived to adulthood? (For detail on those coincidences, make sure to read my recap here. Then hear what series star Sam Heughan has to say on the matter here.)

While Claire does entertain the idea of Faith’s survival during a passage in Book 9, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, the idea comes up during a conversation full of wishful thinking. And the wistful speculation ends when Jamie lovingly points out that their daughter’s survival is extremely unlikely.

Still, Master Raymond’s somewhat spooky nature, as well as his appearance in Gabaldon’s novella The Space Between, lends an otherworldly possibility to the whole affair. In that book, he is revealed as a time-traveler himself, and he speaks of his “sons and daughters.” Actual offspring? Metaphorical family? Who knows?

While we’re asking questions: How did we get here? And where are we going, as the show heads into its eighth and final season? For the answers to that (and more), I talked to co-showrunner/executive producer Matthew B. Roberts, who also is showrunner of the upcoming Outlander prequel Blood of My Blood, for the scoop on how everything will play out in Season 8.

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There’s a blurb in Book 9 that gave us the idea of, ‘Hey, what if?’ And we ran with it. You’ll get the answers in Season 8. Obviously it’s a cliffhanger, but hopefully we tie it up in a bow with the answers and the explanations and what happens and the ramifications of all that on Jamie and Claire.

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You’ll see, visually, how it ties up.

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If we went down this path and she said, “Don’t, I wish you wouldn’t,” we wouldn’t have. That’s happened in the past, where we’ve proposed something to her and she’s like, “I wish you wouldn’t,” and then we don’t.

| You’re not going to tell me what those things are.
[Laughs] No. In my memoir about Outlander, you’ll read that then. But it might be 20 years from now.

TVLINE | Master Raymond is back — can you tell me if we’ll see him again in Season 8?
I cannot. And I don’t even know if I saw him in Season 7. Who’s to know what happened?

TVLINE | Diana’s books get deliciously Byzantine as the series continues. There is a lot going on in Go Tell the Bees. You have 10 episodes. Can you give me an idea of how deeply you’re going into the things that take place in that book?
Yeah — the brief was: Nothing that doesn’t affect Jamie and Claire gets in. It’s gotta affect Jamie and Claire. All the main characters do — they’re a part of it — but that’s the drive. There’s so many aspects. I mean, they’re all big books. There’s things where you kind of go over here, and you go over here — that’s what makes the books so readable and fun. But when you have 10 episodes, you have to stay literally on track.

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