Anyone else feel like you've been having trouble breathing for the past hour?
Tonight's Outlander premiere was all about breathing, in a way. Jamie's (Sam Heughan) labored breaths opened the season as he struggled to survive after Culloden, lying on the ground and recalling his death match with none other than Black Jack Randall (Tobias Menzies). Eventually, we all came to realize that Jamie had been lying there for hours, with a dead Black Jack on top of him.
Jamie seemed dead too, but he was eventually found and saved by Rupert (Grant O'Rourke), who had amassed a small group of survivors in a little house. But they didn't get so survive long, because the English found them and had them all executed, one by one, for their treachery (RIP Rupert).
Jamie was so gravely injured that all he could do was lay there, impatiently waiting his turn. He was so ready to die that it was actually super annoying when Lord Melton, the English officer in charge, recognized Jamie as the guy who didn't kill his younger brother that one time. So he sent him home to Lallybroch in a wagon.
Claire (Caitriona Balfe, who should still get an Emmy for every moment she's on screen), meanwhile, was back in the 1940s, stifled by a world in which everything really, really sucks for women—especially pregnant women who just spent three years in another century with another man.
She couldn't cook like a wife's supposed to, or shut up around the men like a wife's supposed to, or love Frank the way a wife's supposed to (THOSE. FIGHT. SCENES.). And when she went into labor, she was barely given the opportunity to watch her daughter take her first breaths, because she was knocked out, not even given control of her own childbirth.
It was all kind of devastating in such different ways, but in some of the same ways, too. Jamie and Claire are both stuck in lives they didn't want to live, without each other and with no say in the matter. It felt like we were there on the battlefield at Culloden, and there in that kitchen with Frank and Claire, and there as Claire was desperate to be awake to actually participate in Brianna's birth.
It's great to have this show back, but damn did we forget the emotional toll it can take.
For some scoop on the battle sequences—both on the field and in the delivery room—keep on scrolling, and check out our San Diego Comic-Con interview with the cast above.
Outlander airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on Starz.