Episode 301 - The Battle Joined

The Official Outlander Podcast Episode 301 - Battle Joined

Scotch of the week: McCallum 21

Female: Hi everyone, we're doing this a little differently this year - you won't be able to hear the background of the episode in the podcast. So in order to sync up the show with what we're saying, you should pause now [time: 0:11] and hit play as soon as the main titles start. [0:13] <-- not sure how this is working, yet

[0:15] Ronald: Hello and welcome to the Podcast! I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the outlander television series, here to welcome you to the podcast for episode 301 the season 3 premier "the battle joined". This was obviously an episode we talked about for a long time in terms of concept, you know we wanted to do the battle of Culloden and we always sort of knew it was going to be the beginning of Season 3.

[time?] You know, what I would say changed the most between the outline and script to final cut is the way we realize the battle of cullodon. conceptually, what i wanted to do originally was play the entire battle. The battle of Culloden was actually over very quickly, it wasn't a long battle. It was about 15-20 minutes total and so we thought that we could play the whole battle in real time int eh episode. So what I scripted originally was a literal retelling of the battle.

[1:22] The way in was going to be Murtagh showing up on the battlefield, so we were going to follow Murtagh into the story. And Murtgah was going to be coming back from taking the Fraser men, you know sending them on their way back to Lallybroch and we were going to pick up Murtagh, Murghta walks onto the battlefield and the preparations for the battle are underway. And he would sort of find Jamie and Rupert on the battlefield with Charlie and the other Highland command. And from that point, you were going to kind of track with Murtagh and Jamie as they went into the battle until its ultimate end.

[2:00] In the original draft, I stayed relatively close to the movements of Culloden and sort of what the historical records said, when the Highlanders charged, what were the positions of the different forces, and sort of using the high command to sort of illustrate where people where and why and what they did. And ultimately there was a sequence where Jamie was in the famous highland charge going towards the redcoat lines. You know they met with heavy fire, then gunsmoke literally billows up on the field and people get lost in the fog but there was going to be a moment where Jamie and his band, including Rupert and Murtagh sort of penetrated through the redcoat lines, captured and English flag, like captured one of the standards. And there was a moment where it felt like maybe they had turned a tide. And then the smoke kind of blew away and there was just this small group that were deep behind enemy lines and surrounded on all sides. And there was a tableau moment that was an homage to the movie 'Glory ', you know theres a similar moment int hat film for those of you who know that, where they capture the confederate flag and it all turns against them.

[3:10] What happened was that sequence ran about 20 pages or so in the script and it was too big and too expensive. I think all our appetites were so large, and we were inspired by things like the Battle of the Bastards episode in Game of Thrones, in terms of "wow - lets do something big, lets throw some major resources at this battle, and do it right" and it just became such a burden on production that I ultimately decided that we just couldn't do it. And my reasoning was, yes we could spend the time and the resources to do it, and do it right and do the whole battle but the consequence would be that we would have to take money away from a lot of other episodes in the season and it was going to eat up so much production time that I would have to cannibalize many days from other episodes to get us back on track and ultimately I just decided that it wasn't worth throwing the whole show off track on the very first episode then by trying to catch up all the rest of the year.

[4:15] So I went back to the drawing board after much back and forth with production, and said alight let me re-conceive this and because I had written a full version of the battle, I had pieces to work form and things I thought would be cool and interesting to see. I just went back into the battle and said alright lets sort of do this as Jamie's surreal experience, the book really just picks up Jamie waking up on the Culloden battlefield lying there among the dead. He's kind of drifting in and out of consciousness, thinking about what happened. Not in such detail as we have in the show, but that was sort of the spirit of the sequence in the book.

[4:58] Oh and by the way, for those of you keeping track at home, the Scotch this week is McCallum 21 and the smoking lap is out.

[5:08] So anyway I decided that if we were going to do this kind of hallucinatory experience of Jamie's, the best way to go at it was non-linear, non-chronological and make it more dreamlike. You were just in Jamie's head for the whole Culloden sequence, and you were just sort of drifting in and out of consciousness with him as he can barely, he's right on the knife-edge of death through this whole thing. He just kind of comes back into wakefulness periodically, and his memories are kind of flooding over him of the battle he just fought. I thought that's and interesting way to go about it - its sort of different, interesting and unique and maybe its a way of getting emotionally inside the battle in a different way. Because the truth is if we had done the battle sequence in the way I had originally scripted it, it would have been much more traditional, you would have been following the ebb and flow of the battle, 'Oh the Highlanders think you can do that, but the Redcoats counter with this, and then the charge, and Jamie's up and then they're down, who's going to win and who's going to lose" and you'd be caught up in sort of the narrative of the battle itself. This version actually is much more emotional and its inside the character and its about our character, our Jamie Fraser, his personal experience, and his personal memory of what he went through. And probably when he looks back on the battle this is probably the impressionistic memory that he has of it. So its one of those instances in TV where a budgetary, a production problem forces you to think a little more creatively about what your attempting to do and ultimately, it does sort of become better.

[6:45] You know there's a part of me that wishes we could have shot the full-blown battle of Culloden as a big set piece because of, you know, my love of history and military history and how cool would it be to see every move of an entire battle done in real time? But I think the truth is in terms of our story and in the terms of our show and our characters, I think this is more effecting and more moving presentation of the battle and I do think you get the fundamental idea of the battle, you know the Highlanders made this fateful charge which is really what it all kind of boiled down to, they were pummelled by British artillery, and at some point they decided to charge the line and that was kind of it. They had this one great last charge on the battlefield of cullodne and then they were pretty much wiped out. They took heavy, heavy, casualties and the British casualties were relatively light. In fact, one of the challenges of this sequence was that it didn't look like the Highlanders were killing too many redcoats, because historically there really weren't that many Redcoats that were killed.

[7:49] One of the other things we were going to do originally, and that we actually shot pieces of, was we were going to do a cut behind the british lines and find John Grey and Hector and his "friend", and we later realize was the man he was in love with, and you were going to sort of play that story as well, setting that up for later episodes. We would look back and realize that was part of the history of that character and I wasn't sure at the time whether we would actually put that sequence in the culloden episode or whether it would  function just as flashback in a later episode. Ultimately we did shoot that sequence and we decided not to use it.

[8:38] We are not filming on the actual Culloden battlefield obviously, which is a historic monument in Scotland and sacred ground. This is actually in a farmers field that is actually not far from our studios in Cumbernald, its just a big field, big open space. It's actually not as big as it looks on camera, a lot of trickery is involved in picking your angles and making the horizon looking much further away than it is. And only being able to shoot in one direction or two directions at most because if you turn the other way you would suddenly see houses and mountains, and it would spoil the illusion. But our director Brendan really did a tremendous job expanding the space visually within the camera.

[9:18] This whole bit with Jack and Jamie and their final battle, this was really embroidered on by the actors and the director. I think in the script I talked about the major moves that Jack wrote in, gets pulled off his horse, and he and Jamie fight unto the death between the two of them, but what Brendan did that was really brilliant is they took advantage of the fact that at the time of day they started shooting, they happened to get this glorious big pink sky going on, which you'll see coming up here very soon. It allowed this section of the battle of Jack versus Jamie to take on an almost surreal quality up until this moment, everything has been played very naturalistic, very grounded, it's just, there's not even music or score up until this moment because I felt that let the sounds and let the feeling of the battle just all be in Jamie's literal head and his literal memory. But this section you'll notice we suddenly have score, the lighting changes, it's more cinematic because this is really the clash of sort of our two great antagonists through the show, and it just felt like this was the proper moment to move us into a different sort of cinematic language because this battle has been a very long time coming in the show and it just felt like we wanted to give space to it.

[10:43] So then the actors, when they were rehearsing this, I think it was Tobias [Menzies] who came up with this beat you're about to see where he reaches out for Jamie. You know, there's this moment of almost quiet between the two of them - you know this shot I love, the two of them, two men left on the battlefield. There's enough smoke in the background to make it somewhat plausible that there are other people walking around that you cannot see them, but its definitely a heightened and out of time and place moment. This moment where Jack is reaching out for Jamie, I think this is something Tobias and Sam [Heughan] came up with on set on the location and then this is just a lovely moment, its emotional, its complicated and profound as they sort of fall back down together.

[11:28] That's the dragonfly in amber, which we talked about at length, [laughing] about how to find the amber on the battlefield where was it, when did he drop it? Then when we shot it, of course, it was really hard to see so I ended up adding a little extra glow to it in post-production so now it somewhat appears like a magical rock [chuckling] which I kind of regret but there was no way to see it otherwise if I sort of give it a bit of interior light so that's sort of pushing things a little bit there.

[11:59] I love this moment with Jamie and the rabbit. This came to me literally as I was writing the second version of the script, the surreal version of the script, and I was just looking for somewhat of a human moment. He's lying there amid the death, there's all this death and desolation and horror all around him, I just had a thought of looking over and seeing a bit of life, seeing something you know soft and innocent and positive, you know out of nowhere. And then there was the idea of just this bunny the twould just hop around and I think I wrote in the scrip that "Man and Bunny will look at each other for just a moment - then the moment is gone" and that kind of led me to this notion of seeing Claire, of having a vision of Claire walking across the fallen in the snow. I loved the idea of snow on the battlefield, and there's a little beat earlier where Jamie sort of licked his lips, just to sort of get a drop of water in his mouth and we added that with visual effects. But I love the idea of Claire coming out of the snowfall to touch him and then it becomes Rupert.

[13:07] I thought it was important here that we never see Claire and Jamie in the same frame. You'll notice that we cut away without ever have them sharing the same frame together. You'll see as episodes go on this season, that we never put Jamie and Claire in the same frame until they actually reunite. I wanted to sort of underline and emphasize the separation of the two characters until they got back together.

[13:33] I love, I just have to say as a side note, I love Sam's performance through this whole sequence. There's just something really moving and affecting about how he lays there, and it's just such a hard think to ask an actor to do because all he can do is move his head and he and to just be on the edge of dying and I thought he did just such a tremendous job.

[13:54] Ok the Claire story is, theres a couple of things to talk about here. The Claire/Frank story is pretty much invented at a whole cloth for the episode. It's implied by episode different incidents in different books and these pieces of backstory are sort of somewhat alluded to, not too much is literally taken from the book(s), but I thought it was all in spirit of what Diana had laid out for what the Claire/Frank relationship had become on their move back to Boston. So that's the first thing to note. This sequence here in the Randall house, and then coming up with Claire deciding to cook int he fireplace, this was all a very late addition to the script. My original script did not have any of this. The first Claire scene was actually going to be Claire and Frank at the faculty tea at Harvard and we were going to open there. I just wanted to cut from the battlefield into a completely different environment. This sort of calm, this very sedate place where people were intellectualizing about this and that and politics and see Claire was in that world, while Jamie had gone through this horror on the battlefield. So that was the original version of the script and that was all the way through the drafts, and what happened was we were actually in production and I was in Scotland and we started getting timings coming back - there's a script supervisor on a TV show does timings, and she times how long actual scenes are taking, takes, and starts making projections ahead about how long she thinks the episode is going to run. And we start getting these timings back from her, and also based on the table read - it might have actually been the table read I'm sorry. The table read, when the cast reads the entire script start to finish, the script supervisor times it, and gives you a projection about how long she thinks the episode is going to run. Well this episode came in very short, it was like in the 38/39 minutes, 40 minutes tops. And generally speaking, if you have an instinct about a show, and the projections can be wildly off, they can run much shorter, they can run much longer. And you sort of let your instinct in addition to that guide you. And she came back and said it was really short. And that kind of scared me, because I didn't think it was that short, but then anything with a 3 in front of it starts to scare you because you realize that's really short. So I was in Scotland and I was trying to decide if this was real or not, and how concerned should I be, and what should I do? And I left my office and I said "Ok I need to go think about this and maybe what would be scenes that I would write if I had to write more scenes for this show?" Ok so it wouldn't be on the Jamie side, because with the Culloden stuff we're just jam-packed. Maybe there's something in Claire. And I knew right away as a producer that ok, I didn't want to build a new set so it had to be on an existing set with existing characters - ok so that's the Frank and Claire apartment. So I walked down to the soundstage where the Frank and Claire apartment was standing, and I decided to just walk around the set and see and literally said "let me see what inspires me" which is just, it kind of sounds a little pretentious but that's sometimes just what you do. So I walked onto the set which was still being painted and worked on. I wandered around and I saw the fireplace and I sort of looked at the fireplace for a minute and thought about it and thought Claire used to cook over campfires. And I thought hmm what if she wanted to cook over a campfire in this house, because that connected her to the Jamie story. And then I looked around and I thought well when would that have happened, and I thought it would have happened early in the relationship. I started getting this idea of Claire wanting to cook but being frustrated by the kitchen and deciding to cook on a campfire in her own home. So I went back to the office, I opened my laptop, I sat down and in about an hour, I wrote up this opening sequence where Claire and Frank come to the apartment for the first time, when its still empty and they have their first conversation and then transition into this sequence where she meets the neighbour, decides to cook in the fireplace and it all just came out of this. And ironically its one of those things that I wasn't even sure it was going to be in the show, because I wasn't entirely sure that the timing was correct (which it turned out to be). But I do now looking back at the episode, its a couple of my favourite scenes and they were just written in like an hour right off the top of your head. Sometimes as a writer you find that there is that first idea best idea kind of happens to you, and you can just kind of get in a flow and sit down and write it and especially with characters that you know fairly well.

[18:26] Ah Millie, by the way, is named after the neighbour in the Dick Van Dyke show, and so was her husband Jerry, they were the neighbours in the original Dick Van Dyke show.

[18:42] You know, this is all talking about Claire's relationship and her trying to give this a go. It felt like Claire when she arrived - when we last saw her in the 40's when they got off the plane in La Guardia, Claire had decided to give it a try so I thought she was honour bound to keep trying, she was going to try and make this relationship work.

[19:07] This whole section here of Jamie and the farmhouse with the other wounded men and officers from Culloden is very much taken from the book. It think what I did, if I recall, Rupert had died in the previous season in the book, so our Rupert lived longer. There were a lot of the staging here, rather the decisions and dialogue that Rupert has in this sequence were actually given to another character in the book but I thought as far back as last season that this would be Rupert's job, that he would be the one to kind of be in charge of the farmhouse, and be the one to make the major decisions, and would be the one to negotiate with the British as they came in. Because Jamie's role here is still to be hovering on the verge of death. It's an interesting place for your main character to be where he's really out of the action, he's not making any of the key decisions, and he's basically just one of the wounded and can barely even speak for himself, much less anyone else. I liked that aspect of this part of the story because it's an untraditional way to go, and it just, its one of the joys of doing the show, is that you can sometimes go against what is the conventional drama. And you know, I was talking aobut this earlier and I think Sam is just tremendous through this episode - there's so much, such a haunted look in his eyes, and such depth I think he's giving you by doing just very very little. I've watched him dozens of times on this show and just each time I'm more impressed with what he did here.

[20:39] This actually at one point was going to be the beginning of the Claire story. There was the version where we cut straight into the faculty tea, the next draft that I wrote of the script, the one that was at the table read was going to cut from Jamie's face to Claire's face and Claire was looking in the mirror, getting ready to put on makeup. So this is sort of where the original story was going to start. This is obviously not Harvard University, this is a location in Glasgow I believe, sitting in for Boston and Harvard. I thought it was sort of fun to talk politics, just something different and we do a lot of Scottish politics and I thought, oh, you're at a faculty tea at Harvard, and your in the fall of 1948, and they would be talking about the Presidential election.

[21:36] It's also interesiting now retrospectively, obviously, you know, that when I was writing this I was talking about one of the great upsets, one of the great political presidential upsets of the 20th century, when Truman defeated Dewey. And I had no idea when we were writing this scene and shooting it, that Donald Trump was then be the victor in the next greatest upset and presidential election in history. So this wasn't really intended to comment on the Clinton/Trump race but now in the context in which its going to be broadcast, it will feel like it.

[22:12] We did sort of play a little, we went back and forth on what Frank's attitude would be here. There was a version where Frank was less sympathetic to Claire, more on the side of the other guys, not shutting her down but being less comfortable with her speaking up in this public forum, but as the scene evolved and I think as I recall some conversations with Tobias and Cait [Caitriona Balfe] it felt more like Frank would actually be supportive of her, and that would actually be a better way to get that relationship going if he was on her side a little more overtly because then you started to root for them as a couple more. And i think that was ultimately the right way to go.

[22:55] I did do a fair amount of research into when womencame into Harvard, which was a fascinating sort of historical information as it was. There was Ratcliffe which was an all-female school at the time, which sort of functioned as the other Harvard in Boston area. Then they were slowly starting to let women into Boston Med/Harvard Medical and Harvard law. It's interesting to find and go back into this period and see things weren't as progressive as you thought they were. These things are all in living memory, this whole era.

[23:45] Again, this is the cloisters at Glasgow university, standing in for Harvard. I'm sure everyone who has been to Harvard will jump in and say there is no such structure at Harvard. Be that as it may, in our version there is.

[24:04] Special shout-out of course goes to the costumes, I thought Terry [Dresbach] did a tremendous job evoking this period and sort of the reality of what men and women are wearing here. The costumes always roots you into the characters and into the period its a great short-hand for where you are in space and time. And I think they look really great on the cast.

[24.32] That shot is a bit of a composite sort of VFX, sort of erasing certain things and adding the farmhouse into that shot. Didn't have a really great angle on the farmhouse to work with because it was sort of a structure that didn't lend itself to a lot of great photography so we sort of hit it with different shrubs, and bushes ands so on.

[24:53] And every version it was always going to be unclear what happened to Murtagh, on the battlefield, for the purposes of this podcast it will also be unclear what happened to Murtagh on the battle field

[25:10] This is interesting, this is all again very drawn from the books, Diana gets all the credit for this little story here. I really like the character of Lord Melton, and his aide, and their attitudes as they come in. The resolute, and firm sense of his duty and yet his innate humanity being there at the same time in an era when a man's honour was held above literally everything else. And even though he's here to execute these men as traitors, without trial, in defiance of most conventions of war - because if it was a true war between two opposing nations at this time, you don't just go execute the prisoners, but in this particular circumstance, they weren't just prisoners of war, they were rebels and traitors so the Duke of Cumberland had given these orders to execute all of them, which is a quesitonable order, to be sure, even in that time. I liked the fact that Melton had certain lines that he held for himself - he was a man with a code. He asks them if their traitors, he's going to shoot them but he's not going to hang them, coming up a bit later he says he's not going to shoot a man lying down. And even though he won't let the boys off, there's a humanity to him that was really interesting and fresh and I appreciated the fact that the characters were not painted as monsterous villains, moustache-twirlers coming in to do evil things to our Highlanders.

[26:47] We're back in the boston apartment, interesting note the Boston apartment is actually a redress of the apartment that Jamie and Claire had in France it's the exact same footprint, the exact same walls and pathways and windows are basically the same. Gary Steetle our production designer essentially just revamped the set to work as the Boston apartment so it was really interesting task to change it over into that. It's why I have a line in the first scene where Claire and Frank are walking through it for the first time and Claire's like "Woah its pretty big on a professor's salary" and we all kind of went "yeah, it is kind of big for a professor's salary" but ok, let's just hang a lantern on that, which means to sort of acknowledge something on TV show openly and then move on.

[27:42] This beat with the bird is sort of meant to echo the moment with Jamie and his moment with the bunny. There's also a part of Claire that has a running theme with birds, you know the witch trial episode in Season 1 and there's just something also about the literal flying away, and being free, and the character in the cage as it were. So I just thought it was an interesting subtle echo between the two.

[28:13] I love all the period furnishings in here, the stove, the refrigerator, the ovens. It was great stuff when you were on the set it was fun to walk around this set and walk around the kitchen and go "Oh, I've heard of that.." or "Oh my gradmother or my great grandmother had this, or this I saw in the garage one day."

[28:35] [Ron chuckles] This whole thing with the tea bag I thought was funny - I guess our UK friends are not above tea bags anymore. There was a period where they definitely looked down upon the tea bag.

[28:52] I just had some fun with this about, ok there are two ex-pats, what are their different points of view on the Country, giving them different points of view. You now, Claire trying to embrace it more, Frank ironically even though he's the one that brought them there, still being tied to the mother country, but Claire not even thinking of England as her home.

[29:16] This speech here that Frank's about to give about giving up Drake and Marlborough is actually an homage to a speach from my favourite musical of all time, 1776, and there's a speech in it where the character of John Dickenson is arguing with John Adams and he's reminding him, reminding Adams of everything that England had meant to them, and would you really forsake Hastings and Marlborough and Drake for what, and you sir and you sir? It's always been one of my favourite speaches in the musical and I decided, ok, i'm going to do a version of that here as an homage in just a different context, but still talking about American and its value to the mother country. And I just thought it was a fascinating sort of speech that he gave. I was tickled to put it in the show.

[30:27] Yeah, this is the speech. Hastings and Magna Carta, Drake and Marlborough.

[30:37] And I really like the actors here play this so well, is watching even though they aren't talking about their relationship though any of this, they are talking about their relationship you know. theres a lot of subtext, a lot of looks, a lot of body language. You know Cait and Tobias have played off each other for 3 years and they've developed a rhythm and a short hand with each other and you can watch them try things and experiment it out in the set and in dailies. Its just a joy to watch their scenes to watch and see what they do with it. How quickly it can go volatile between the two of them is one of the really fun things - that you can write a scene like this that starts light and fluffy and fun, and has a turning point and gets serious and then literally spirals out into people throwing things at each other and shouting. And thats not an easy transition - you're asking a lot of your cast when you are taking them from A to B there, and these two can just take it and run with it

[31:38] You know the raw emotion that Cait capable of giving you here, and the anger of Tobias you can see them just feeding off each other and handing it back and forth and building the scene. You know its fun to work with pros like this.

[32:15] [Ron Chuckles]

[32:20] Oh man, and its great, I totally believe it. I believe that moment of rage, that moment of throwing the ash tray, that impulsive moment. I believe that it takes the air out of the scene as well as each of them realizes that they've gone too far.

[33:04] [static] ...that Frank says is absolutely true. Its all her choice. Its her choice to stay and it absolutely is. And Claire's not a victim of her own story, Claire is the author of her own story and this was her own choice.

[33:34] Its her own regret, and her own complicated feelings. Its great and its one of my favourite scenes of the season is that whole long scene.

[33:49] I definitely wanted to stay inside the farmhouse - I didn't want to go outside with the executions and the firing squads. I wanted to establish it and see it, it was just a creative choice to stay inside for the most part, except for this - I wanted to be more distant from it. It had more power in some ways by seeing it far away, over there they're doing these things to people rather than being in it.

[34:17] Like I said earlier, I mentioned this scene earlier with the two boys, this is taken directly from the book was this little negotiation. I mean arguably we could cut it because we don't know who these boys are, and we're never going to see them again, what would we care. But somehow I thought it spoke to the humanity of all those involved, the boys and their situation, Rupert arguing on their behalf, Lord Melton's reluctance, and yet firmness in his duty. Everyone is sort of trapped in their roles, but never losing sight of the people.

[34:51] I think it's been, Diana's talked about it before, but this incident actually happened, there really were a group of actual survivors that were in this farmhouse after the battle of culloden and they really were held there by the British for several days, and then the British really did execute them one by one, and on the list of names there were officers from the Fraser regiment and one officer missing from the names of the dead. They knew he was in in there, and then he wasn't on the listing of names. It was something Diana found by happenstance as I recall, she could probably tell the story ten times better than I can, but my recollection was she discovered that during her research and it was a beautiful bit of happnenstance that there really was a Fraser missing from the rolls of the dead who went into this farmhouse but didn't come out so she sort of wrote the story around it.

[35:56] Again go look it up on the web because I'm sure theres a better version of the story than I gave you, but thats the gist of it.

[36:05] Again, just consider Sam here, You are asking the actor to just lie flat on his back, he's really limited in what he can do. He's not making the key decisions he's reacting to everything, and his role is just to sort of be dead and keep himself alive through this all and be human and its wonderful. I can't take my eyes of him throughout these sequences and I think its just a tremendous job.

[36:51] Even that little look from Melton is nice, sort of the acknowledgement, the firmness of it yet the respect. I thought it was really important, you know, we talked about that Rupert should have a last moment with Jamie where the subject of Dougal comes up, and I thought it was important that Rupert if he doesn't forgive him at least he doesn't hate him, and there would be some sort of reproachment between the two men and I though it was a really lovely end to that relationship and that story.

[37:24] And just bringing up Angus one last time, its a nice bittersweet farewell. I loved Grant [O'Rorke] in the role as well and really you know its a shame of him leaving the show like so many of our cast members, you get attached to the characters and the actors portraying them. Very fond of Grant, loved his portrayal of Rupert and wanted him to really have a great exit from the show so I wanted him to have this great little speech and my favourite line in this whole piece coming up here in just a moment when he walks up and he gives his name with pride, stands tall then stands tall and says to the sergeant "I mean to keep a quick pace, so try to keep up" and then he walks out to his death with that - it's just something, something just classically heroic and defiant until the end. And that Rupert would hold his head high as he went out and I just really like his exit from he show, and Grant will absolutely be missed, and while he'll always be a part of the family, I'll definitely miss writing scenes for him.

[38:40] Yep we played around with this a bit in editorial, we wanted to have enough time on Jamie, and enough time for Rupert to be taken out there for everyone to raise their weapons, you wanted to extend the moment as much as you could before the final volley.

[39:09] I believe that Sam found those lines, if I'm not mistaken thats the Gaelic for "farewell Rupert", and I liked going from Jamie straight to Frank on opposite sides of the frame - something we kind of found in editorial. This is a nice little sequence here - I'm not sure what I was going for. I kind of like it for reasons I can't quite name of just Frank not being able to sleep and the modern electronic technological noises in the house sort of keeping him awake which sort of roots him in the 20th century as opposed to Jamie and Claire's experience that this is all, every little piece you see here is something rooted in modernity. Then he gets up and decides to write a letter to the reverend. This is from the books - which you find out later that Franke and the Reverend and kept a correspondence and theres a lot of subplot that I won't get into here, that's kind of scattered through the books about Frank research into Jamie unbeknownst to Claire. He and the reverend traded letters back and forth. So there's sort of this - this is the beginning of that. I believe we talked about this back in season two when Roger and Brianna discover some of the correspondence in the attic but this is where it all beings.

[40:53] This moment, I don't know why I've always been taken back to the I Love Lucy episode where Lucy is pregnant and lucy is going to have her baby and she kind of walks in and no ones listening and she's trying to tell them that she's having the baby and as a child, the 1950's versions of having a baby on tv has always stuck with me and I've always thought about that through the years whenever I'm writing a show about pregnancy or giving birth. I always think back about that moment in I Love Lucy.

[41:43] Again, this section is drawn very closely from the book, and as I recall I probably used some of the dialogue here with Melton and Jamie and the lieutenant. This is one of those great surprises and I remember when I was reading it for the first time I got to this section and I wondered how is she going to get out of this, they're all going to be executed - Jamie can't even walk and clearly they're being executed one by one, and I just didn't see the way out - and this was a callback to the character of Lord John Grey that had been set up the book before. I was really impressed - its a very nice bit of storytelling. Its organic to the story. Its not fabricated out of thin air and it makes sense and yet you're surprised by it. I don't think theres any possible way you could see this coming. It was great to be able to use this in the show.

[42:41] And again, it touches on 18th century notions of honour, obligation, and giving your word and how far the men and women of the era would go to preserve the idea of their personal honour. I like that the show keeps touching on that, that this was a different era, that they had a different value system and that we are sometimes surprised by how dear they held these sorts of moral ideas.

[43:27] Briefly thought about doing a flashback here to that indecent, but it really felt like it would break the mood and would take you out of this scene. Sometimes its just too much of a TV convention to flash back and remind you what the characters are talking about. It's not that we're above doing that sort of thing, but in this particular circumstance and the mood of this particular scene, it would just be destructive, its not additive.

[44:13] I believe the phrase this is a deuce of a situation so it's not an homage to Stewie on Family Guy, though you would be forgiven for thinking so.

[44:27] Again, I'm not above that sort of thing either, it just doesn't happen to be.

[44:44] Taking a birds-eye view of the season, this chapter of Jamie's experience in Culloden, and post-Culloden just felt naturally like "ok well thats an episode" and as we the writing staff were moving forward into the book and we're outlining the chapters and how they would lay out episodically, it became really relatively clear relatively soon, that Jamie's story was going to provide the beat as it were, it was going to sort of Jamie's story was going to fit into neat chapters and each chapter would be an episode and an hour unto itself, so the Culloden story has a natural ending and a natural arc to it, and the next chapter of the Jamie story that you'll see next week as a natural arc and a natural ending to it as well. And so does the subsequent one and so on. So the challenge sort of became where to begin int eh Claire story, what would the Claire story be, because as I said earlier the Claire story overall, the Claire/Frank story overall is kind of something that we invented out of whole cloth, inspired by and referencing material int eh book but the actual sort of storyline and the way we played them is something we did for the television series, so it became more about what are the Claire arcs within each individual episode while the Jamie story was sort of giving us the metre and the rhythm of the pace of the episode and what was going to drive us to the end of the episode. All versions of the script actually ended on the Jamie story, ended on Jamie getting to Lallybroch and the last lien being "you're home Jamie, you're home". On the page felt very emotional and, we begin with Jamie and end with Jamie. When you put the episode together actually the bigger emotional ending was with that baby and who has the red hair? So we switched it editorially.

[46:43] One last word about that brief wagon ride with Jamie, its a brief wagon ride with Jamie and a lot of it was shot second unit much later. I had some various vignettes of Jamie going through the night, riding through the day that I put in the script. There was one line I put in there and it was hot, and he's lying in the back of the wagon and it says something like "suffering under the merciless Scottish sun" and the crew endlessly mocked me - there were many mocking references to the "merciless Scottish sun" when, of course, the merciless Scottish sun is often obscured by cloud and rain most of the time. Its not really that mercilless.

[47:25] This is just reminding the audience and ourselves w7hat childbirth was really like in this era, in the '40s and mothers were routinely put out under general anesthesia to deliver the baby whether they wanted to or not. The doctors attitude was very paternalistic and tended to ask the fathers questions and it was just an opportunity to remind ourselves that yes the 20th Century is yes the more progressive century in so many ways but it wasn't quite what we think it was even in the 1940's

[48:08] and this is a lovely opportunity to bring these characters together. They've had this enormous row and they're at odds, and things are not working well but in a moment of crisis wouldn't they both reach out and each try to get through the difficult circumstance that they're in?

[48:34] One of our researchers pointed out to me that flop sweat is actually anachronous to 1948 and that is a term that was invented a decade or two later. I decided to ignore that research because there is no synonym that was as evocative as "flop sweat" so I just kept it in the show.

[48:58] And it was important to me that in this sequence that everything feel as hard and clinical and antiseptic as possible - not only because thats what they did in this era, but also to contrast with the warmer more organic more rustic feeling of the 18th century  and you know really remind you of the cold clinical aspect of technology and what it also does to people - saving their lives, one of the tradeoffs was this sort of coldness to this entire medical experience. Originally on this transition I wanted Claire to wake up multiple times like her sitting up and saying "where's my baby where's my baby?" - Oh sorry that's in the next cut. This was originally going to be Jamie going to see raindrops going down the side of the wagon, and he was going to be fascinated with the raindops and divide the stream of raindrops into a fork - two paths symbolic if him and Claire. It didn't work out - was more a literary idea than it was something you could realize on camera. But this was going to be the original end of the episode - this right here.

[50:18] Great to see Jenny and Ian again.

[50:22] So that's why this shot is designed like this - its a big pullback that goes back to the family Fraser crest. It didn't feel like it carried the same weight, it didn't have the same dramatic emotional punch  as what we opted for. This is where I was talking about where Claire I wanted her to wake up multiple times and various cuts of Claire waiting up from season 1, season 2 and have Claire repeatedly saying "Where's my baby" from the Paris episode but I just couldn't make it work - we just didn't have the footage of her waking up in al those various ways.

[51:03] Combination of baby doll and live baby through all of this - hard to pick them out. Theres actually the real baby. Also a lot of conversation about the red hair, and can we see it on camera. We ended up colour correcting the hair a little more red than it was on set because we did want it to read without looking like we had gone on set and dyed this poor child's hair, so we just lightly changed it in post-production.

[51:35] Its such a sweet lovely scenes and such a reconnection and what I really loved about it is you just feel once again here you're rooting for them, you're actually sort of hoping that its going to work out, and that they can make this crazy relationship work with the birth of a new child and a new beginning and its all just ruined in a moment - with just a question.

[52:10] And they both really believe it at that moment.

[52:27] Thats so great. Great ending. its a lovely episode I think its very emotional show. Its a very special show. Its a great way to kick off Season 3 and I'm happy to have shared it with you. I think that wraps it up here on the podcast and we'll be talking again on the next episode - 302. Until then, I'm Ronald D. Moore and good night and good luck.