Yahoo Lifestyle 'Outlander' Author Diana Gabaldon Weighs in on the Shocking Season 7 Finale (Exclusive)
If you’re a book reader like me and not just a TV watcher of Outlander, the Season 7 finale was quite the shocker. It hinted that baby Faith, Claire (Caitríona Balfe) and Jamie Fraser’s (Sam Heughan) child, didn’t die in France and that Master Raymond (Dominique Pinon), who was prominent in Season 2, had something to do with the mystery.
“No part of the ending is from the books, save that Frances's mother's name was Faith,” bestselling author Diana Gabaldon, who created the Outlander novels the series is based on, tells Parade.
In the books, soon after Fanny (Florrie May Wilkinson) comes to live with the Frasers, she shows Claire her tiny cache of possessions, including a locket, with an indistinct miniature of a woman with dark brown hair, and the name "Faith" engraved on the cover. So, while the series changed the when and where Fanny showed Claire the locket, the event did take place in the books.
Also, according to Gabaldon, “They totally made up the [use of the song] ‘I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside’ in Season 2 and re-used it here.”
She indicates that it will come into play in the prequel Outlander: Blood of My Blood, as well, but that since that series won’t premiere until this summer, it’s too early to discuss it.
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“I agree that the ending of 716 is flat-out weird, partly owing to their (evidently) having exhausted their budget,” Gabaldon continues. “They could have made a more convincing visitation by Master Raymond with blurry special effects, rather than having him just walk through the door and stand there. Better to have kept it soft-focus and leave it up to question as to whether he'd actually been there, or perhaps Claire imagined or dreamed the whole thing. But easy for me to talk; I don't have to figure out the logistics.”
Then she adds, parenthetically, (“I'm frequently pleased that I can do things easily in a book, that are incredibly difficult [not to say expensive] to do in a visual medium. A book is a remarkably useful [and economical] way to tell a story.”) That's not to say that Master Raymond showed up in this manner in either An Echo in the Bone or Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, upon which Season 7 was based.
That said, Gabaldon did have some input into the idea and maybe something similar will show up one day in one of the Outlander spinoff novels she writes, like the Lord John Grey series, especially if she does a book featuring Master Raymond, who is an interesting character. Or if she changes her mind and maybe does a second graphic novel. The first one, The Exile: An Outlander Graphic Novel, features Jamie Fraser.
“They actually did get the (general) idea from me, though,” she admits. “When chatting with [showrunner] Matt [Roberts] about All Things plot wise, I mentioned that if I had written a second graphic novel (I didn't, for assorted reasons), I would have shown what actually happened after Faith's presumed death at the Hopital des Anges, and how/why Master Raymond resuscitated and nurtured the baby secretly, but wasn't able to come back with her before Claire and Jamie left France. So, they liked that idea and ran with it.”
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Because Outlander is ending with an eighth season that will be only 10 episodes long, and Gabaldon has a lot more story, Season 7—as mentioned—was a combination of An Echo in the Bone and Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, which together are more than a million words of adventure and story.
“The show had 16 hours; just listening to the (very good) audiobook versions takes more than 90 hours, which tells you something about how much has to be left out,” Gabaldon points out. “It's amazing that they're able to make a comprehensible (and usually very good) show, using no more than 20 percent of the book version of the story. (On the other hand, a visual medium is also economical, insofar as they can capture thousands of words of description in a few seconds of film.)
“Naturally, I have my favorites among the episodes: Ep. 708 and the two battles of Saratoga, for instance, and the parallel stories of Jamie and William [Charles Vandervaart], and some of the later episodes in the second half of Season 7—I love how they handled the accidental triangle among/between Claire and her two husbands, with the collateral damage to Lord John. In re which, while I love and admire all of the actors, who did a remarkable job with this season, my kudos to David Berry, for Lord John's adventures in the last few episodes of 7B."
There’s no word yet when Outlander Season 8 will begin airing, but it has finished filming, so possibly later this year. The Outlander: Blood of My Blood prequel has been announced for this summer.
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