What happened to young Ian at the end of Outlander episode eight?
Season three's eighth episode left us – and Jamie's nephew – all at sea...
If there's one thing the Outlander powers that be have shown us in season three it's that they sure do know how to write a cliffhanger ending.
**Spoiler Alert – do NOT read if you've not yet watched Outlander season 3 episode 8**
An action packed eighth episode – that saw Claire discover Jamie had actually married their old enemy Laoghaire and was acting as something of a surrogate father to her children, and Jenny give the surgeon a good grilling about her whereabouts over the past two decades – concluded with not one but TWO heart-in-mouth moments.
First came a charged encounter between Claire and Jamie on the cliffs. While watching young Ian swim out to an island – called Silkies' Island in the novels – to collect the hidden treasure Jamie had found there, Claire told her husband she wasn't sure they belonged together any more.
We'll give you a second to digest that – it was pretty tough to stomach the first time around.
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Anyway, as the pair argued about whether they could continue to live their lives together something rather large caught Claire's eye. On the far side of the island, a ship came into view. And as men in a small boat began to row to shore, young Ian – with the treasure in hand – unwittingly ran straight into their clutches.
There was little Claire and an injured Jamie could do but watch as Ian was bundled into the rowboat and taken to the ship, which immediately set sail.
But who took young Ian? And what will happen to him next? We'll need to ask a few more questions before we can get answers.
One of the most important questions is who had knowledge of the treasure on Silkies' Island?
We know Jamie first learned about it from the rambling Duncan Kerr, who was found wandering on the moor near Ardsmuir while Jamie was imprisoned there. Lord John Grey asked Jamie to translate Duncan's words, but what if he wasn't the first person to do so? What if someone else knew about the treasure long before Jamie did and had been keeping watch over it?
Then there's the matter of the white witch. Jamie immediately assumed that the white witch the man spoke of was his wife, Claire, but what if there was another white witch who could have been keeping watch over the treasure? Could Ian's fate now be in her hands?
And it's also possible that Ian just so happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was carted off by opportunists who were searching for treasure and walked off with twice the prize instead.
Will young Ian survive? Will we ever see him again?
It seems as though we'll have to wait until episode eight to discover the poor wee rogue's fate.
