The penultimate season of Outlander has already delivered a lot of surprising twists and turns. From Jamie (Sam Heughan) nearly ending up lost at sea — for the span of an episode, anyway — to Claire (Caitríona Balfe) getting shot after the Battle of Monmouth, the show hasn’t refrained from putting our favorite characters in perilous situations. While the finale ends on a huge cliffhanger, one that could completely change the events of what happened to the Frasers in France and beyond, another major bomb was dropped earlier in the season in the form of a covert time traveler from Diana Gabaldon’s book series — and it might have gone right under most viewers’ noses.
Captain Richardson Is an Immediately Suspicious Character in ‘Outlander’
Ezekiel Richardson (Ben Lambert) first shows up in Outlander in Season 7, as a British officer fighting on American shores. He takes an interest in William Ransom (Charles Vandervaart), the biological son of Jamie Fraser who was raised by Lord John Grey (David Berry), and gives him various errands to run for the Loyalist army. In the latter half of the season, he threatens to arrest Claire for spying against the British, which results in her hasty marriage to Lord John, and then reveals that he’s been working as a double agent for the Continental Army all along when he asks Claire to spy on her new husband.
Later in the season, Richardson arranges for William to be kidnapped and tortured by Hessian soldiers with the intention of ensuring John’s political cooperation. Claire, Jamie, and Lord John receive a warning not to trust Richardson – which does give them the heads-up they need to save William’s life with Ian’s (John Bell) help. But it feels like the understatement of one (or several) centuries. Captain Richardson is meddlesome, and his loyalties are all over the place — but where have we seen him pop up elsewhere in Outlander?
We’ve Already Seen Richardson in the 20th Century on ‘Outlander’
Captain Richardson may not have revealed himself as a time traveler yet, but the clues are out there — because he’s already been spotted, albeit briefly, in another century. In Season 7, Episode 14, Jamie and Claire’s grown-up daughter Brianna (Sophie Skelton) discovers that two men have infiltrated the Fraser home at Lallybroch where she, her husband Roger (Richard Rankin), and their two children have been living.
Said men are associates of Brianna’s villainous coworker, Rob Cameron (Chris Fulton), who kidnapped Brianna and Roger’s son Jem (Blake Johnston Miller) at the end of Season 7 Part 1. Although Brianna does her best to scare them off, courtesy of the shotgun she keeps in the trunk of her car, she and the kids ultimately end up fleeing Lallybroch for their own safety. Before they drive off, however, Brianna rips one of her attacker’s masks off, and once she’s long gone, Rob addresses him by the name “Callahan.” Sure enough, the now maskless man is Captain Richardson, sans 18th-century powdered wig.
Captain Richardson Has Noble Intentions in the ‘Outlander’ Novels
In Diana Galbadon’s book series, Richardson first appears in the seventh novel, An Echo in the Bone, where he plays a similar role. He’s always up to something, but for a while, his true motivations are unclear. However, Go Tell The Bees I Am Gone, the ninth book that will be adapted in Outlander’s eighth and final season, reveals that he is a time traveler like Claire, Bree, Roger, and various members of their extended families.
The book additionally hints that he and an archaeologist named Michael Callahan, who Brianna and Roger knew in 1980, are one and the same. (Brianna speculates that he underwent plastic surgery to disguise his face, but multiple characters observe that he has plain and unmemorable features.) Given that Outlander directly namedrops Callahan in reference to a man who looks a lot like Lambert existing in Brianna and Roger’s current timeline, it seems as if the seeds are already being sewn for this storyline to play out in the series.
The books also shine more line on why Richardson, or Callahan, chose to take such an active role in this particular time period. He figured out that if the colonies lost the Revolutionary War, slavery would be abolished in America several decades earlier. (By comparison, the British Empire ended slavery in 1833.) So he’s been trying to tank the war efforts all by himself.
It’s also not apparent whether Callahan has considered other repercussions of the American Revolution, like the French Revolution. And if America’s plantations still economically benefited the British Empire, would Parliament still have abolished slavery when they did? Once you start looking at history through a subjunctive lens, the “what if”s start to pile up. It’s not that Richardson is morally wrong in his approach — not yet, at least — but right now, his efforts are having a direct impact on Jamie, Claire, and their family’s lives, and very little of it has been good so far.
Outlander isavailable to stream on Starz in the U.S.