From THR:
[Warning: This story contains spoilers from Saturday’s episode of Outlander, “Je Suis Prest.”]
Read more after the jump!
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In just one small, seemingly throwaway scene, Outlander introduced the possibility of an entirely new spinoff series.
Saturday’s episode introduced a major character from the book, Lord John “William” Grey (Oscar Kennedy), when a young British scout saw the fires burning from Jamie’s (Sam Heughan) Highlander army, and he recognized the infamous “Red Jamie.” Grey tried to kill Jamie when he was alone but of course Jamie overpowered him. While captured, Claire (Caitriona Balfe) pretended to be a English captive held against her will, using Grey’s compassion to “save her honor” by getting him to divulge the location of the British troops. Jamie played along, and their ruse worked.
Book readers know that Lord John Grey becomes a bigger character in later books, as well as the main character of his own spinoff book series, the Lord John novels. The Hollywood Reporter spoke with Outlander producer and writer of “Je Suis Prest,” Matt Roberts, about introducing Lord John, Claire’s PTSD-inspired wartime flashbacks and more.
Congratulations on the recent multi-season renewal. Were you expecting that to happen or did you have any doubts about your renewal chances?
We get excited when we get just a back-nine pickup, so two seasons was unheard of. We’re very excited. Just from inside information, yes, we knew we were going to do season three for sure. We haven’t stopped working, and we just went straight over from season two to season three. We carried the writers room over and a few people in Scotland continued to prep for next season. Outlander is a beast of a show to produce, so if we took a normal break, a regular hiatus like a normal show, we would already be behind. Now the fans can have it sooner than what they think. The Droughtlander won’t be as long as they expect.
In this week’s episode, it was interesting to see how you integrated Claire’s memories of World War II with the training of the Jacobite army, and how it brought up feelings of PTSD for her. What did you want to convey with those scenes?
In the book, this section for Claire is very internal. She’s thinking a lot. And she had the backstory of being a WWII nurse which we saw in the very first episode of Outlander. As we were breaking this episode, we thought that it wouldn’t be going off book so to speak if we were just to tell part of that story, when in fact we know this all happened. These lines of dialogue are in the books, just from different parts. I wanted to incorporate all these little exchanges and moments from all the different books into a script somehow, and so I did it with these flashbacks.
Will Claire continue to suffer from PTSD, or has Jamie helped her overcome that?
You won’t see that this season. It may pop back up in future episodes of future seasons, but not this year. What I like to do is when our couple comes together, they solve problems with their connection. Bad things happen when they’re apart and good things happen when they’re together. But Jamie and Claire’s issue is that physically, they can’t stay together all the time. A lot of times they’re dragged apart, which we’ve already seen a lot this season.
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