Ronald D. Moore; Caitriona Balfe as Claire and Sam Heughan as Jamie in ‘Outlander’ (Getty/Starz/Sony Pictures Television)
Starz’s “Outlander” went to some unsettling and dark places in its Season 1 finale on Saturday night.
(Spoiler alert: This story contains major plot details from the show.)
Before things ended with the main characters on a ship to France, with the hope of being able to change the future, there were harrowing scenes of torture and male rape, perpetrated by Black Jack Randall (Tobias Menzies) on the show’s male protagonist, Highlander Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan). Based on the material in Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” book, the show tackled a subject not often seen on TV.
PHOTOS: ‘Outlander’ — Our Favorite Pics From Season 1
Executive Producer and showrunner Ronald D. Moore first read Gabaldon’s book after his wife, Terry Dresbach (“Outlander’s” costume designer), and producing partner Maril Davis, brought it to his attention during a dinner in Vancouver, as “Battlestar Galactica” (his former show) was wrapping up. When he reached the last part of the book, Moore was “surprised” by the twists it took, and knew it would present a unique challenge to try and get right in a television production.
“I was reading the book and I was surprised that that’s where the lead male protagonist was taken, you know, that that was the story and that wasn’t a story I had ever read before, and I immediately sort of realized, that, ‘Well, I haven’t seen this on TV or film, and this just isn’t the place that you typically take somebody,'” Moore told Access Hollywood, when we interviewed him about the finale. “And I thought, ‘Well, that alone is sort of an interesting challenge to do something — to go into some pretty taboo or forbidden areas,’ and that was sort of a challenge. … I knew it was shocking and I knew it would be controversial, but that was sort of an incentive, if anything, to try to pull it off — to see if you could actually manage this and see if you could play it in such a way that it felt inherent to the drama and that didn’t feel gratuitous or exploitative.”
WATCH: ‘Outlander’: Sam Heughan & Caitriona Balfe Share Season 1 Memories
The Wentworth Prison scenes with Jack and Jamie featured incredibly dark, complex and difficult material (and actors Heughan and Menzies did exceptional work). Asked if either of the actors had deep concerns about the scenes prior to filming, Moore said they didn’t, but there were discussions all season long about the characters.
“I don’t think either one of them had great concerns. I mean, again when they took the job, they sort of knew where this was all going, so there was an ongoing conversation with them all season… in preparation to the finale, just sort of checking in with the characters and where they sort of were on the larger story arc,” Moore said. “Both of them – Sam and Tobias – were really fearless in their performance. They just threw themselves into it. There was extra rehearsal time we gave them. The directors really sort of carved out some time so they could really dig into these characters and scenes, and the conversations with each of them always kind of centered around, well, what does their character want from the scene? Where are they going? What are they trying to do? What’s important to them? All the changes [that] happen along the way were usually in service of that idea.”
Moore said not making Menzies’ character, Jack, the big, bad, easy-to-define villain, was critical.
“One of the things that I thought was important with Jack was that he is a man. … He’s not a monster, he’s not something created out of a machine. He is a human being who is driven by dark things, and allows that darkness to engulf him and overwhelm him and take him to places,” Moore continued. “And I like the fact that Tobias never lost contact with the fact that this is a man, that he wasn’t just a cardboard cutout of a villain, that there was a person here and that makes him more horrific, because people do these kinds of things, not just fantasy creations. Human beings take these kinds of actions and I think that Tobias always sort of held on to that idea.”
WATCH: Caitriona Balfe On A Year Of ‘Outlander’
When Access spoke to Moore about the “Outlander” season finale, it was after HBO’s “Game of Thrones” was facing criticism for a rape scene involving Sansa Stark (a scene that didn’t happen to that character in George R.R. Martin’s book). Due to the conversations taking place about “Thrones,” Access asked Moore if he was worried about the reaction to the “Outlander” Jamie/Jack scenes.
“I haven’t watched it, so I stay away from reading what it is,” Moore said, referring to the “Thrones” episode.
“I mean, we know it’s going to be argued about,” he continued, referring to the “Outlander” Wentworth material. “It’ll be controversial and people will take a variety of opinions about it. Am I worried about it? No. This is what we’ve done. I’m happy with it. I’m the showrunner. Ultimately it’s my responsibility to make those calls and to stand by the material and if people want to shoot arrows at it, my job is to stand there and take it, but I feel confident about what we did. I know the choices that we made and I feel OK about it.”
While the final episode of the season was heavy with chilling moments between Jack and Jamie, there was also light, love and even a little humor (courtesy of some livestock).
With the help of a herd of cows, Jamie’s Highlander family (thanks to a door being left unlocked by the woman instigating his rescue – Claire, played by Caitriona Balfe), broke him out of Wentworth.
Rescue, though, didn’t mean recovery. As his wife toiled away, trying to nurse him back to health at a monastery, Jamie grew more and more distance. As he continued to be haunted by what happened. Jamie wanted to die (and he even tried to take Willie’s dirk). Claire, though, wouldn’t let him go down that path, and she found a way to break through, telling Jamie that if his life didn’t matter, neither did hers.
Finally, the season ended with Claire, Jamie and Murtagh (Duncan Lacroix) on a boat to France, setting up the possibility that Claire and Jamie can change history and stop the Jacobite Rising. It also left Jamie a moment of happiness when Claire told Jamie she’s pregnant, something he had been told wasn’t possible. Hope is what Moore felt when he watched the show’s final sequences of his gutsy drama, and it is what he’d like the audience to be left with too, as the wait for Season 2 begins.
“That is one of the things that I think is key to my job, is that I’m always trying to watch it as an audience member and when I watch the episode and I get to that shot – that first shot on the beach, I feel relief. I feel, ‘[Sigh], we’re out of the darkness. We’re out of the horror of that. We’re out of the brutality and the nightmare quality of it and the claustrophobia of it,’ and suddenly you’re outside and there’s the beach and it’s clean and it’s fresh, and there’s open water and there’s a ship there,” he said. “And by the time you get to the end when it’s, ‘I’m pregnant,’ and they put their arms around each other and the camera pulls back and you’ve got that big, beautiful, sweeping shot of the ship, yeah, I do feel better. I do feel hopeful, I do feel like, ‘Wow, we went through something and now we’ve come out the other side and tomorrow is a new day,’ so hopefully that’s how the audience feels as well.”
PHOTOS: ‘Outlander’s’ Sam Heughan
“Outlander” Season 2 is currently in production.
— Jolie Lash
Copyright © 2024 by NBC Universal, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This material may not be republished, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.