StarzOof.
Season two of Outlander may finally be here, but we kinda feel like we've been hit with a ton of bricks. Book fans knew Claire (Caitriona Balfe) would eventually return to her first husband, Frank (Tobias Menzies), in the 1940s, but we can't say we were expecting it to happen so soon.
We were crying out right alongside Claire in the opening moments, as she realized where she was and what she had just left behind. We tried to be right there alongside Frank as he found himself reunited with the wife he thought he had lost, but it was truly difficult after having gotten to know the true, other love of Claire's life, Jamie (Sam Heughan).
While Frank is not our favorite (which is only partly his fault), we were actually shocked to see how quickly he accepted Claire's explanation and current condition. Sure, she just time traveled 200 years in the past, got married to another man, fell in love with that man (in that order), and became pregnant with his child, but after a quick and terrifying bout of breaking everything, Frank was willing to overlook it all. He wants Claire back, and he's even willing to raise her child as his own, since he himself is sterile.
Fortunately for us, we were soon back to the story we fell in love with last year. Claire and Jamie's boat had just arrived in France, and it didn't take long for Claire to make her first French enemy in the Comte St. Germain after diagnosing his ship (and its passengers) with smallpox, meaning he had to burn an entire shipment of wine.
Basically, it was business as usual for Claire and Jamie in the midst of the very unusual business of trying to change the course of history, all while we sit here knowing that it ends in a particularly wrenching and complicated kind of heartbreak.
"Those scenes were just so tragic," Caitriona Balfe tells E! News' Kristin Dos Santos in the top video above. "There is no right in them. You just feel so much for Frank but you feel so much for Claire and you just know that there's nowhere good that these two can go in the future. Then you flash to this really hopeful arrival in France with Jamie and Claire, and it was just like wait, how did they go from this point to that? So you just know that the rest of the season's going to be a rollercoaster."
As for Frank, he's on a rollercoaster all his own.
"I don't get a sense that he's moved on emotionally, particularly," Tobias Menzies says in the second video above. "I don't get a sense that he's gotten involved with anyone else. He seems like a man who's had to bury that bit of himself."
While it may be hard for fans of Claire and Jamie to really see the good in Frank, Menzies promises that it's there.
"He's loyal. I think he's, albeit quiet, he's a person of substance," Menzies says. "When we see the stuff in episode one, his response is rather remarkable in a very compromised, very imperfect, but nonetheless wonderful expression of love."
Click play on the two videos above to hear more from Balfe, Menzies, and Heughan, and stay tuned for more Outlander coverage to come!
Outlander airs Saturdays at 9 p.m. on Starz.