New beginnings
To France! Cross-time romance Outlander heads beyond Scotland’s shores…
Part period piece, part time travel drama and part romantic character study, Outlander might be impossible to pigeonhole, but it’s a genre hit. With Ronald D Moore returning as showrunner, season two adapts novelist Diana Gabaldon’s second Outlander novel, Dragonfly In Amber. “The second book is more complex and more difficult to adapt so we’ve had to make more changes as a result,” Moore says of how he’s straying from the page. “We always try to get back to where the book was even if we can’t do a scene or we change a scene. But it’s a bigger, richer thing to try and wrangle into one-hour episodes.”
Set primarily in France, season two sees Claire and Jamie trying to change history by preventing the Battle of Culloden. “The mood is different,” Moore says of the overall tone this year. “They are walking around with the French aristocracy, who are completely different people than the Scots. This is the most sophisticated and populated city in the world, in this era, and way before the French Revolution. It’s French society at its zenith before it all starts to come apart and that has nothing to do with Castle Leoch or the clans. It’s very much a fish out of water story in a lot of ways and just a different show.”
Moore also teases that a time jump in the books will shape the series narrative too. “How we do it and when and where is some of the fun,” he teases. “I like [the book readers] to have a series of discoveries and not sit there and go ‘I know exactly what is going to happen next.’ It’s good to surprise them, and sometimes scare them when they think something is missing, but...” he smiles, “it’s not.”
Outlander season two airs in 2016 on Starz (US) and Amazon Prime Instant Video (UK).