Claire & Jamie saddle up for Outlander Season 6 first look as production kicks off in Scotland

Outlander’s Season 5 left it all on the field when Starz’ time-jumping, history-bending series left off last spring. After a chaotic finale that ended with Claire and Jamie enjoying some precious, well-earned respite alone together in the wake of new traumas at their Fraser’s Ridge homestead, production on the show’s already green-lit 6th season was indefinitely delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, thanks to a fresh update from Starz and Sony Pictures Television, patient fans now have some well-earned respite of their own: The delays are officially over, the network has revealed, announcing today that production has at last begun on Outlander’s new season. To commemorate the occasion, Starz shared a first-look glimpse from the Season 6 location set in Scotland — and it finds Claire and Jamie alone together again, just as we left them at the end of Season 5.

Check it out below:

Credit: Sony Pictures Television / STARZ

There’s much more to getting ready to restart Outlander’s epic, location-based production than just Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Heughan) on a horse, of course. While Heughan himself took to Twitter to celebrate the cast reunion, Starz also teased the start of filming with an early behind-the-scenes peek at some of the costumes, set designs, and locations we’ll be seeing as the Revolutionary War looms over the time-crossed lovers’ efforts to stake their claim to building a new future in Colonial America.

Though the show is just now getting the chance to reunite its sizable cast and commence filming the new season, much of the groundwork has long been finished. Scripts for Season 6 — based on A Breath of Snow and Ashes, the 6th novel in author Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander book series — were prepped and ready last May, when the network was compelled to halt production as the pandemic took its early toll.

Showrunner/executive producer Matthew B. Roberts teased last summer that the new season will bring harsh new realities as the residents of Fraser’s Ridge navigate new personal traumas against the backdrop of a coming war. Claire and Jamie, each already having endured different cruelties in different times, won’t be spared a fresh set of challenges when Season 6 arrives. “You suffer. And it happens again,” said Roberts. “But there will be joys, there will be drama, suffering, tears.”

The Season 5 finale drew a collective gasp (and probably more than one or two cheers from fans) as Marsali (Lauren Lyle) found a karmically satisfying way to stick it to Lionel Brown once and for all; while Claire momentarily retreated to a more peaceful, modern-period 20th-Century fantasy as a way to cope with all she’d been through. With the winds of war blowing in just as Fraser’s Ridge is finally finding some much-needed solid footing, though, trauma probably won’t be in short supply as Season 6 comes into view.

“For the Frasers and their immediate family, ‘home’ is more than simply a site in which they live, it is the place where they are laying the foundations for the rest of their lives,” Starz teased as part of this week’s production reveal. “If Season 4 asked ‘What is home?’ and Season 5 asked, ‘What are you willing to do to protect your home?’ then Season 6 explores what happens when there is disharmony and division among the inhabitants of the home you’ve created: when you become an outsider, or an ‘outlander,’ so to speak, marginalized and rejected in your own home.”

So far, a premiere date hasn’t been revealed for Outlander’s 6th season. That just gives longtime fans and series newcomers alike more incentive than ever to catch up with the Frasers’ ever-deepening saga. All five full seasons of Outlander are streamable now on Starz.