From THR:

Executive producers Ron Moore and Maril Davis, plus stars Caitriona Balfe and Tobias Menzies, dive deep into Saturday’s game-changing episode, “The Hail Mary.”

[Warning: This story contains spoilers from Saturday’s episode of Outlander, “The Hail Mary.”]

Read more after the jump!

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History is playing out exactly how Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Hueghan) feared on Outlander.

Despite all their actions in Paris in the first half of the season, they failed to stop the Battle of Culloden from happening in advance. And thanks to Prince Charlie’s (Andrew Gower) troops getting lost in the dark, Jamie’s plans to lead a nighttime surprise attack on the British army the night before the Battle of Culloden were squashed. So now Jamie and Claire know the Highlander army has a very low chance at actually winning the war, but they’re forced to fight it anyway.

And another surprising historic event came to pass: young Mary Hawkins (Rosie Day) married Black Jack Randall (Tobias Menzies). Claire knew her young friend would end up married to her worst enemy because of her husband, Frank’s (also Menzies), family tree, but she had no idea how to make that happen since Mary was in love with Black Jack’s brother Alex (Laurence Dobiesz). But when Claire ran into Mary in Inverness, she learned Mary was pregnant with Alex’s child, and Alex was dying from his medical issues he’d been plagued with back in Paris. Alex’s dying request was for Black Jack to marry Mary and take care of her and their child, insuring both of their futures.

Shortly before Alex died, Claire witnessed Mary and Black Jack’s rushed nuptials, and after Alex passed on, Black Jack completely lost it. He jumped on Alex’s body and shook his dead brother, until he calmly got up and walked out of the room while Mary and Claire watched in horror.

“We had a lot of discussion about what we wanted to do with Jack and Jack’s relationship to his brother,” showrunner Ron Moore tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I thought there was something interesting about showing that, for all of his monstrosity and all of Jack’s horror, he really did care about and love his brother. Even though he had trouble expressing it, even when he’s grabbing his body at the end, which was a very violent and angry reaction, it still comes from this place of humanity in Jack.”

According to Moore, that redemptive, loving quality in Black Jack was important to show in those scenes between the brothers.

“That’s the thing that appealed to me the most,” Moore says. “This idea that if Claire was going to help this marriage happen, if she was going to hand over Mary Hawkins to Jack and honor the wishes of Alex and participate in this whole scenario, you had to see some glimmer of humanity in Jack, just to make it play. So that was our primary focus.”

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