“I would get stuck in the banter, and then I would just throw in violence, and it wouldn’t feel connected,” he said. Dialogue and conversation between Black Jack and Jamie wasn’t hard - “you can write pages of them just bantering back and forth” - but he couldn’t figure out a rhythm between the violence, fear, agony, and quieter moments of reflection. But as Moore tried to write his episode, he struggled with the emotional focal points. Moore had planned episodes 15 and 16 as a two-parter, and originally divvied up the episodes between himself and Ira Behr to script. 1 was adapting the scenes from Diana Gabaldon’s book. It felt like we had a unique challenge, a unique story, and it didn’t feel like there was much out there to help us along the way, so it was like, ‘How are we going to figure this out?’”Ĭhallenge No. “I kind of knew, as soon as I read the book, I had never seen this story on film or TV. “This is not a place you take your lead male character,” Moore said. Male rape is so rarely featured on television, to have not one but two extended incidents that haunt the lead character and require an intervention-style recovery is pretty groundbreaking.
This is a horrific situation, so it should be horrific.” There’s a book that we’re following, and this is part of the story that is absolutely necessary to that book.
“‘Angus is going to come in, flying on a rope or something, and it’s all going to be okay.’”Īnd why shouldn’t we think that? Didn’t that happen for Claire, when Black Jack was about to rape her during the season-break cliff-hanger? Hasn’t every rape attempt on the show been averted so far, at the last moment? Yet all along, Moore has been trying to warn the non-book-reading portion of the audience that the season would be darker and more brutal, to prepare them for this moment. “We’re not playing around here,” Moore said. “A chunk of them were going, ‘Oh, that’s not going to happen,’” showrunner Ron D. The opening scene is designed to shock the portion of the audience who, after episode 15’s ominous ending, might have hoped someone would come in and save Jamie before he suffered any further. “It’s so sad to watch!” agreed actress Caitriona Balfe. It’s like, ‘Oh my God - what’s happened to this person?” “Hopefully it’s a shock, rather than something pleasant to watch. “I didn’t want to do this kind of nudity until it had a great effect,” actor Sam Heughan, who plays Jamie, told us. After a long night with his nemesis, he appears devastated, ruined, lost. When we first see Jamie and Jack in the season finale of Outlander, the two men are naked, in bed together as morning breaks - though from the look on Jamie’s face, he probably didn’t get any sleep at all. Spoilers ahead for the season one finale of Outlander. L-R: Black Jack, Claire, and Jamie in Saturday night’s finale.