Outlander season 5: Ed Speleers discusses Stephen Bonnet’s fate

Tonight’s Outlander season 5 installment proved to be all sorts of epic. It was emotional, gut-wrenching, and it also focused a lot on Stephen Bonnet. We learned a little bit about his past, but also witnessed him torment Brianna further. The installment culminated with the character’s death, as he was shot by Bree shortly before drowning.

Speaking in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, here is some of what Ed Speleers had to say about saying goodbye to the show and this character — a move that may have been rather surprising to him based on the timing of it all:

I found out in a roundabout way. I was upset because a character like that is never going to last that long, but I was thoroughly enjoying playing him. I didn’t want it to stop, but it had too. I’m very lucky that the script for that final episode for my character was a chance to maybe answer a few questions about who he is; he confesses perhaps quite a lot he’s never confessed before. He almost goes through a big bit of therapy I suppose, as well as getting his comeuppance.

The character of Bonnet was killed off much earlier than he was in the books, where he survives until A Breath of Snow and Ashes. There were some things that were advanced fast in this final episode — it’s still not clear why the decision was made to skip over some of this stuff and not include a part of the Bonnet story in season 6. Yet, we personally think that Outlander wanted to create more of a large-scale impact and not just push Stephen into the background for extended periods of time. After all, the experience of watching a show can be very different from reading a book.

What did you think about the way that Outlander wrote out Stephen Bonnet?

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Photo: Starz