Claire wakes in the mud. Jamie is beside her, bruised but real. The sky is normal. Birds sing.
“It doesn’t want the episode to end. Because at the end of episode 9—the real episode 9—you lose the battle. Faith dies. Jamie sends you through the stones. The codec is re-encoding reality to prevent that pain. But each loop degrades the image. Soon, there’ll be nothing left but macroblocks.”
She buries it in the earth.