After the jump for 1×12 Spoilers!
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This episode answered a lot of questions the audience had regarding Jamie leaving Lallybroch and staying away. It’s a nice complement to Claire’s (Caitriona Balfe) own honesty last week.
It’s interesting because we started out thinking there’d be a lot more about Jamie and his father in the episode. In the first draft there was a whole thing in the beginning with a flashback to Jamie and Ian as boys with his father. But it became something different even though his father is in it. It evolved and evolved.
What was it like to introduce Jenny Fraser to the story?
As always, we start with the book and Jenny gets a great introduction there —in fact that’s very much how we played it. We thought of this as the family episode where you get a look at a different side of Jamie: Where he came from and, throughout the course of the story, how he’s going to fit back in there. I love the character of Jenny. She’s really fun to write. She’s such a strong character.
You see that when Jenny reveals what happened between her and Black Jack. It’s intense but also subversive in a lot of ways.
A lot of the stuff that’s so creepy with Tobias, where he was touching her mouth and all that stuff, wasn’t scripted. They just did that on the day. It’s very intense, but you need to know what happened to her and it gives you another picture of Black Jack. But we were a little concerned about that scene because we wanted to make sure at the end that you believed he had not done anything, that he did not rape her but left her alone. A lot of that happened on the set in the moment, and it is a really intense scene. I’m curious by what you mean by subversive though. In what way do you think it’s subversive?
A lot of times you see women in these situations where it’s immediately victimizing. But here Jenny laughs and — to a certain extent — it empowers her.
I agree completely. Because that is the kind of person that Jenny is and I love that she said, “I don’t know why I did it, I just did.”
The power of both of the women in Jamie’s life says a lot about him.
With Claire, you attribute that to her being from the 1940s; although we always have to remind ourselves that she’s not from 2015—she’s from 1945, so they weren’t exactly the most feminist of people, either. But we wanted to portray almost all of our women characters with a lot of muscle. They’re not trying to make a statement. This is who they are. And it makes sense. Imagine Jenny having to live that life and keep that place together. How could you not be strong?
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