The second season of the sensual and romantic time-travel drama TV series “Outlander” premiered on Starz on April 9 and lived up to the hype that it would be a blast because indeed it was.
But fans the world over were actually caught by surprise when instead of picking up from the Season 1 finale where Jamie Fraser, played by Sam Heughan, and Claire Fraser, played by Caitriona Balfe, where already onboard a boat heading to France to escape the likely persecution they will get from the English, the first episode of Season 2 opened in the unlikeliest of setting – Scotland in 1948.
The first episode of the second season of “Outlander” had the title “Through a Glass, Darkly,” began by showing a distraught Claire reuniting with her first husband Frank Randall, played by Tobias Menzies.
But instead of telling him how she missed him after being away for so long, her immediate concern was to know what the outcome of the infamous Battle of Culloden was and find out whether she and Jamie had succeeded in changing the course of history, details Variety.
Quite interestingly, more than half of the first episode of Season 1 featured Frank and Claire’s attempts to reconcile what had happened to Claire in the past even as they look towards an uncertain future together since the heart is no longer there for Claire. The remaining portion focused on Jamie and Claire already in Paris.
Complicated and tragic
In a recent interview, actress Caitriona Balfe revealed that when she first got the script for the first episode of Season 2 where she is to do the scene with Tobias, she cried reading it.
She said that showrunner Ronald D. Moore wrote the episode and it was beautiful. She remembered saying to herself that she can’t wait for filming to start because it is so tragic and complicated.
He said neither from Frank nor Claire is wrong but neither one of them is right so people will surely feel for them depending on circumstances.
In the scene where Claire told Frank the truth about where she had been, who she had been with, and that she was carrying Jamie’s child, it was very tragic, to say the least, because Claire is someone in grief and she can’t really see past that.
For his part, Menzies said that the writers managed to write some really interesting stuff especially about Claire arriving from the stones, pregnant, and Frank and Claire having to come to terms with that and what it means for their marriage. He said that it is such a rich territory to explore and start the season with a bang in terms of possible plotlines.
Menzies added that it also felt like it was a good payoff from having built Frank up in the first part of Season 1 and root it in the emotional cost of the story, in a way.
Hard to swallow
With the return of Claire after some years, Frank is confused but elated just the same to see his wife back. But things started becoming a little harder to swallow once Claire comes clean about time traveling to the 18th century, finding and marrying her soulmate, and trying to alter the course of history. To top it all, she is actually pregnant with her lovechild with Jamie, details Yahoo! TV.
The 1948 setting of Season 2 episode 1 was a deviation from the second book of Diana Gabaldon where the series was culled.
In the book titled “Dragonfly in Amber,” the story begins in the 1960s and Claire has already been back in her era for years and the baby is all grown up and named Brianna. Reports have it though that author Gabaldon has also given her nod on the book deviation and plot twists for the TV series.