This article contains spoilers about Outlander: Blood of My Blood episode 6, titled “Birthright.”
Misery loves company — so it’s only fitting that while Julia (Hermione Corfield) endures a harrowing birth, Henry (Jeremy Irvine) will face his own trials.
In episode six of Outlander: Blood of My Blood, Henry is still desperately searching for Julia — and he’s devastated to discover that Julia died in childbirth. Of course, this isn’t true. As it turns out, Arch Bug (Terence Rae) hired the midwife to lie for money because Lord Grant (Brian McCardie) was weary of Henry’s fixation on finding his missing wife.
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But Henry doesn’t know that — and the desperation and grief that the news triggers sends him into a PTSD episode. He goes into the woods, vomits in the trees, and then he imagines he is at the end of the war, hearing Julia’s voice in his head, telling him not to give up.
“It just destroys him,” Irvine tells Entertainment Weekly. “It truly breaks him, and it breaks his mind and he goes and does some things, not necessarily knowingly, but he does some things that he wouldn’t, in a sane mind, do.”
Those things amount to essentially cheating on Julia. In his distraught state, Henry goes to meet with the prostitute who Ned Gowan (Conor MacNeill) previously hoped might be Julia. Only Henry believes that she actually is Julia, and they have sex, with him believing all the while that he is in bed with his wife.
Hopefully, Henry will come back to himself the next morning, but when he does, he will have to face the reality of what he’s done. How might he react? “Not well,” quips Irvine. “It’s going to be very complicated. Henry and Julia are going to put the words ‘unconditional love’ to the test. There’s going to be challenges for both of them.”
Of course, Julia has her own sins to atone for, given that she slept with Lord Lovat (Tony Curran) out of her desperate need to protect herself and her unborn child. “They’ve both had to do things that they don’t want to do purely to survive,” adds Irvine. “It’s a real test of anyone’s relationship.”
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For her part, Corfield thinks that what Henry does is more unforgivable than her own actions, particularly because shell-shock is not well understood in her time. “It’s a really difficult pill to swallow,” she says of Henry’s actions. “Jeremy said, ‘Yeah, but you slept with Lovat.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, but it was a survival thing.’ Julia understands Henry’s struggles with PTSD, so she’s understanding of that, but she definitely does feel a level of betrayal.”
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For series creator Matthew B. Roberts, this is just another opportunity to ask the questions that the world of Outlander presents best. “Henry’s not in his right mind,” he says. “In his heart, that’s Julia. And Julia had to do something on her end as well to survive. Those are the questions that Outlander always asked — and we’re going to keep asking those questions in Blood of My Blood. How far would you go? What would you do to be with the person you love? And what do these traumas do to you as a person?”
Outlander: Blood of My Blood airs new episodes at 8 p.m. on Fridays on Starz and releases episodes to stream the same day on the Starz app.
