Fans of Starz’s Outlander have been eagerly awaiting news of when Season 6 will drop.
With filming officially getting underway in February of this year, it seemed unlikely that the next installment of the hit historical drama season would land in 2021. Now, that has sadly been confirmed.
However, we won’t have to wait too long as it’s now known that Season 6 of Outlander will premiere in 2022 after the network confirmed via its official Twitter account for the program that filming had wrapped.
No date was included or even a month to narrow it down other than it being “early 2022,” but at least it gives fans some sort of air date to anticipate.
The network also confirmed via the tweet that the first episode would be a whopper.
They wrote: “In honor of #WorldOutlanderDay, I’m excited to announce that #Outlander Season 6 has officially wrapped and is coming your way in early 2022 with a 90-minute premiere episode!”
Season 6 will be shortened — but there is good news
Entertainment Weekly also confirmed that Season 6 would have a run of eight episodes, which makes it a somewhat shorter season than normal. Previous installments of Outlander have seen at least 12 episodes per season.
The series showrunner gave an explanation for this shorter season, and, as to be expected, it had to do with the current coronavirus pandemic.
“Filming in 2021 has presented an unprecedented set of challenges which led us to the decision to truncate the season in order to bring the fans the most vibrant and dynamic season as soon as possible,” Matthew B. Roberts said in a statement.
However, he did sweeten the bad news with some rather excellent news about Season 7 of Outlander, which was confirmed earlier in the year.
“Dinna fash, we will then film an extended Season 7 with 16 episodes next year as life returns to normalcy.”
New Season 6 images have been revealed
Starz also included some new Season 6 images featuring everyone’s favorite Outlander family in order to tide fans over until 2022.
Three of the images are happy family snaps of Claire (Caitriona Balfe), her husband Jamie (Sam Heughan), their daughter Brianna (Sophie Skelton), and her husband Roger (Richard Rankin).
The first shows Claire and Jamie touching heads and sharing a tender moment together.
Next up is a picture of Brianna and Roger sitting on a porch step and gazing lovingly at each other.
Another shot shows Brianna and her parents seated inside a building. Brianna smiles at her parents, who only appear to have eyes for each other.
However, the last shot takes a decided turn from the joyful family snaps. This one shows Roger soaking wet and carrying a swaddled baby out of a river.
Season 6 of Outlander will premiere on the Starz network in 2022.