From Access Hollywood:

In Saturday night’s “Outlander,” Claire and Jamie Fraser faced new struggles as they inched closer to war with the British.

(Spoiler alert! This story contains major plot details from “Outlander” Season 2, Episode 9 – “Je Suis Prest.”)

Read more after the jump!

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After recruiting men from Lallybroch and Lord Lovat’s estate to fight on the side of the Jacobites in the conflict ahead, the Frasers met up with Murtagh to begin training in “Je Suis Prest,” an episode penned by “Outlander” co-executive producer and writer Matthew B. Roberts.

As Jamie and Murtagh put the men through training, they were joined by some familiar faces from Season 1 – Dougal MacKenzie, Rupert MacKenzie and Angus Mhor – who brought their own ideas about how to face the enemy in combat.

While Jamie worked to turn farmers into fighters and dealt with conflicting opinions and power plays from his Uncle Dougal, Claire found herself haunted by her World War II experiences as she watched the men train.

“It came up in the room,” Roberts told Access Hollywood, when asked who came up with the idea to add in flashbacks for Claire into the episode. “We were trying to find a story for Claire that wasn’t just kind of preparing for battle. … It felt like not a great way to use Caitriona Balfe’s talent. So being an avid book reader… one of the elements that I have always wanted to see is… I wanted to see the moment when she heard ‘Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,’ and I wanted to know what affected her in battle. I was an EMT here in Los Angeles before I started writing, my brother is a firefighter/paramedic for many years and the trauma of just seeing things has always affected me in a different way than it’s affected him. So I wanted to kind of show that on screen, and when I pitched out the story, the other writers liked it, Ron [Moore, ‘Outlander’s’ executive producer] liked it, so he kind of let me run with it and I thought it worked out really nicely.”

Claire’s conflicts in the episode weren’t just internal. Roberts wrote a very charged scene between Claire and Dougal (Graham McTavish), where Dougal tried to blackmail her into talking to Jamie about giving him more power, by bringing up his marriage bargain with her from Season 1 (back then, the deal was she could have his men to try and help free Jamie from Wentworth if she agreed to marry him if Jamie didn’t make it out alive).

“I never once thought that she would ever marry Dougal, I thought that she would escape through the stones and go back to her own time if in fact Jamie was dead. For her, it would have been a win-win. She gets the men, and she gets the men, either way. So, we wanted to do a call back to that,” Roberts said. “It felt really odd that Dougal and Claire would be in the same place and never mention that. So, one of the ways I thought it was organic was to [have] him start to blackmail her into getting his own way. It also helped to show Dougal’s scheming side, that he’s always trying to get ahead, that he didn’t like his position of being Jamie’s subordinate anyway, so he was trying to work this to where if he could blackmail Claire into saying, ‘Hey, maybe it would be good if Dougal was kind of equal with you in this.’ Not that Claire obviously was ever going to do that, but it was nice to see him try.

“And the other thing I wanted to get out — and I really wanted to be emphatic about it — is Jamie and Claire do share everything,” he continued. “We don’t always get to see it on screen because we only have 50-odd minutes to do Diana’s massive books, per episode, so we can’t fit everything in. So the line I really thought was important in this little section, this little speech of hers was, ‘My husband and I share everything.’ And she just cuts him off right there. He has nothing to say after that. He really doesn’t and then she takes over after that moment and kind of goes off on him. I thought it was an important scene, a nice scene for her in her arc of her story.”

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