Warning: This post contains spoilers from Outlander‘s Season 2 finale (and slight ones for Season 3).
As soon as we saw the finale, we knew what we had to do: Get executive producer Ron Moore on the phone to talk about the Frasers’ goodbye, Dougal’s demise, Roger and Bree — and absolutely anything he was willing to tell us about what he has planned for Season 3. (If you haven’t read Voyager, aka the third book in Diana Gabaldon’s series of novels, most of what Moore says won’t spoil you for Season 3. But if the words “print shop” have any meaning to you, you’re gonna want to read on.)
TVLINE | Talk to me about how you condensed the rest of the Dragonfly in Ambernovel into this last 90 minutes of the second season.
It all came from the decision to open the season in the 1940s, and going from Claire and Jamie on the ship sailing off to France. Jumping from that to 1968 was too big of a narrative leap for the TV audience. I thought, let’s start a little bit more chronologically. Let’s start in the ’40s. It’s a huge thing already to see that Claire returned to the 20th century, and left Jamie and is pregnant, and that Culloden was a disaster, so let’s start there. But when do you tell the 1968 story? So I said, “We’ll catch up to it at the end of the season, and we’ll intercut the last beats of Jamie and Claire at Culloden and him sending her back in time.” It was a big structural choice that we made at the very beginning of the season.
TVLINE | Did you see a lot of people for the roles of Roger and Bree, and what was it about Richard Rankin and Sophie Skelton that really nailed it for them?
We saw quite a few people. It was a big decision, because these characters become big players and definitely permanent parts of the family as the series goes forward, so it was more complex than just casting a guest-star role. They both just nailed it. We saw their audition tapes and, much in the same way as when we saw Sam [Heughan] and Caitriona [Balfe]’s audition tapes, you went, “Oh wait a minute, maybe this is who they are. I see the character for the first time.” Then we did a chemistry test where we had Roger and Bree on camera together. Once that worked, we felt like we had all of the pieces.
TVLINE | In the book, Claire is present for, but not directly involved in, Dougal’s death. In the finale, she helps Jamie push the blade into his uncle. Why the change?
We felt that when you saw it on screen, you would be struck differently than you were on the page. If you watch the scene play out on the screen [the way it does in the novel], Claire would very much be a spectator during the entire thing. We felt like she should participate, and watch her and Jamie be more of a team again. It just didn’t feel right for our Claire to stand and watch while this life-or-death struggle was playing out just a few feet in front of her.
TVLINE | Did you personally have any conversations with Sam and Cait about the goodbye at the stones?
We have talked about it since the beginning of the season. I don’t remember any specific conversations with Sam and Cait other than after the table read, we always have a quick catch up with the cast. We probably talked about it in some fashion, but I don’t recall anything specific. It’s a big moment, and I think what we had to do in TV was condense it a bit. We needed to maintain the urgency of the situation on the battlefield, so we had to keep it tight. We couldn’t stay up there for a very long time because the TV audience would start going, “Doesn’t Jamie have to get back to that battle?” There is a lot of good stuff in the book we had to shorthand to make it narratively work.
TVLINE | Jamie seems a little bit more at peace with the leaving than Claire is. In your mind, is this something he came to a while ago — he knew this was going to happen, and he just got there a little bit quicker, emotionally, than she did?
I agree with that. The character can see the writing on the wall about the war. Clearly, it is not going well. It had been foretold it was going to be a disaster, and he’s watching that disaster play out in front of him. Despite everything he tries, it just looks like this is not going to work. Jamie’s starting to think, “Well then, what happens? And what happens to Claire?” And once he began to realize she was probably pregnant, then he decided, “OK, if she’s pregnant and this is all a loss, here’s what I’m going to do.” He kept that to himself, I think deliberately, so that in the moment he could play that card. He could say, “You’re pregnant. You’ve got to go,” as a way of forcing her to do it, because he knew she would object. He knew that she’s not going to want to leave him, but he knew that he had to have some kind of trump card at the end to get her on the horse and push her through those stones.
TVLINE | Are you thinking the Battle of Culloden will be another production the size of what you did with Prestonpans, or are you going to do something smaller?
We’re talking about all of that now. I’ve written the script, and I don’t want to give too much away about how we’re going to realize it, but it’s certainly something special.
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