Outlander Season 6 Premiere Sets The Stakes For A Tumultuous New Season

“Echoes” starts 20 years before the end of the previous season — it’s 1753 and we’re in Scotland, and Jamie (Sam Heughan) is serving his time at Ardsmiur prison. We get a glimpse of Jamie’s prison life (a rather long glimpse, actually — the sequence at Ardsmiur lasts 22 minutes, a quarter of the episode), and it sets up the character of Mr. Thomas Christie (Mark Lewis Jones), a protestant Scot whose religious fervor grates against Jamie and also gets the preacher special treatment from the redcoat warden.

The Ardsmiur sequence also touches on love, because this is “Outlander,” of course. We get a touching scene with a young blind prisoner pining for his love. “What we have known, some never will,” Jamie tells the lad, who — given his setup in the show — is very clearly going to die soon. “It’s eternal and it’s ours.”

As expected, the character dies in the next scene when a brawl between the Jacobite and protestant prisoners breaks out and the blind lad, unable to see, is killed by a rock to the head. For the guards, the boy dying isn’t as big of a problem as the fact that an older prisoner of not the soundest mind lays a tartan on his corpse, a big no-no at Ardsmiur after the Scottish rebellion. Jamie is Jamie, however, and takes the blame for the tartan and the subsequent whipping.

Christie knows Jamie is taking blame that isn’t his  and is also scandalized to see the other scars on his prison mate’s back when Jamie takes his shirt off to receive punishment. Only bad men would have scars like that in his view of the world, and he is also appalled that Jamie took the punishment instead of the feeble, addle-minded old man. Justice in the eyes of Christie is black and white and brutal — it must be served accordingly no matter what the circumstances, something that will undoubtedly come back into play later this season. 

Jamie also sees his beloved Claire (Caitriona Balfe) while being whipped, another reminder that this show is about love, y’all, and Jamie and Claire have the strongest kind out there.

We end our time in Ardsmiur with Jamie being Jamie — he ultimately creates peace among the prisoners by saying they are all freemasons (an idea he got when he noticed that Christie and the redcoat warden shared a secret handshake confirming they were as well). Even in prison, Jamie is a leader, something that Christie also undoubtedly envies.