Outlander Season 7 Episode 10 “Brotherly Love” finally reveals when and how exactly one Dougal MacKenzie (Graham McTavish) met Geillis Duncan (Lotte Verbeek). Sure, we’ve known since Outlander Season 1 that the Scottish War Chieftan and time-traveling medicine woman had an illicit affair, culminating in the birth of one William Buccleigh MacKenzie, aka Buck (Diarmaid Murtagh). However we didn’t know how their romance on the Starz show began…until now.
**Spoilers for Outlander Season 7 Episode 10 “Brotherly Love,” now streaming on Starz**
Outlander Season 7 Episode 10 “Brotherly Love” reveals that Dougal and Geillis’s momentous meet cute was even crazier than we first thought. That’s because it was witnessed by their time-traveling, fully-grown adult son, Buck, and Buck’s own time-traveling, fully-grown descendant, Roger MacKenzie (Richard Rankin). Oh, and Roger’s already run afoul of a future version of Geillis in the 18th century (which explains his reaction to seeing her in last week’s episode).
Through Roger’s voiceover, we’re reminded repeatedly just how bananas this all is. Geillis is taking care of a man she doesn’t realize is her own son, which is weird enough. However, then she begins flirting with that guy’s secret father, too?
If you, like Roger, felt awkward watching this go down, Outlander executive producers Maril Davis and Matthew B. Roberts want you to know, it was fully intentional.
“I think if you were a fly on the wall in that particular scene, you would feel really awkward. If you were watching your parents creepily meet for the first time and watching your dad put the moves on your mom or vice versa,” Matthew B. Roberts said. “You would go, ‘Oh man, I don’t want to be here.’”
“It was the kind of feeling of walking in on your parents having sex,” Maril Davis said, cracking up.
Outlander star Lotte Verbeek told Decider that the sheer outrageousness of the scene was what made it so “fun,” but she also pointed out how “special” it was to finally see these characters interact in a scene together! (Yes, even though Dougal and Geillis had an affair, we never have seen them together before on Outlander!)
“It’s the one scene that we always speculated about. We’ve never seen these characters meet. We’ve never actually even seen them maybe share a scene altogether,” Verbeek said. “So to then see them be introduced was really quite special. It was quite a treat to play.”
Graham McTavish added that he loved the fact that Outlander set up a scene where certain characters got to meet their ancestors, something he called “a marvelous thing to be able to do.”
“You have to play the complete ignorance of the situation as the characters,” McTavish said. “There’s that beautiful moment when you look into the eyes of the person who’s playing your son and you just look at him completely innocently. You know, like, ‘Who are you?’ Interesting, right? ‘Nice to meet you.’”
That said, Roger did not necessarily have a great time meeting his great-great-great-what-have-you-grandmother. As he explains to Buck, not only has Roger witnessed Geillis perform a blood sacrifice ritual to activate the Stones, but she also at one point had it in her head that Brianna (Sophie Skelton) had to die. Geillis’s mad plan to murder Young Ian (John Bell) to get to the 1960s to kill Bree resulted in Claire (Caitriona Balfe) murdering her all the way back in the Outlander Season 3 finale.
Now, however, she’s alive and well and actually flirting with Roger before Duncan promptly arrives on the scene. It’s a juicy moment that both Lotte Verbeek and Richard Rankin found humor in.
“It was very fun because he was holding the ill wish in that scene, which is so fun,” Verbeek said, noting that there’s yet another Season 1 callback in the sequence.”That’s kind of almost the way I’m playing with him, right? The way he’s dangling that toy.”
“It’s funny anyway because it’s his ancestor,” Richard Rankin told Decider. “So we know that the audience knows this is grandmother a million times removed. But it’s also just Geillis’s way.”
Verbeek agreed. “I thought it was just a really fun, typical sort of Geillis moment to to play. What I’ve always really liked that about the character that she just is kind of wicked, you know? And so I got to revisit that.”
“It’s quite funny when she tries it on me, Roger, given also her son is in the room,” Rankin said. “The audience will all be informed on each of those characters already, obviously from previous seasons. So to see them come together, I think it’s just immediately kind of amusing, escapist fun.”
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