Outlander: Blood Of My Blood Boss Reveals What Got Author Diana Gabaldon 'On Board 100%' Despite A Specific Story Change
The epic saga of Outlander on Starz is set to wrap the love story of Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Heughan) in the eighth and final season. Their devotion has spanned centuries, wars, and tragedies, and questions still remain for the long-awaited last batch of episodes. Fans can get a fix of that Outlander world of time travel romance soon in the 2025 TV schedule, with the premiere of the prequel spinoff called Outlander: Blood of My Blood. Showrunner Matthew B. Roberts opened up about expanding the story of Claire's parents, and why author Diana Gabaldon was "on board" with the changes from her books.
Matthew B. Roberts was an executive producer on Outlander going back to the very beginning, but the future is now bright for Blood of My Blood after the drama's early Season 2 renewal. Speaking with SFX Magazine on CinemaBlend, Roberts explained the origin of Blood of My Blood as the story of Claire and Jamie's respective parents, with a time travel twist that even Claire herself didn't know about. As far as Claire knew, her parents had died in a car crash when she was very young. The trailer makes it quite clear that she was actually very wrong. Roberts said:
Then I just posed the question, 'What if they didn't die in the car crash?' That's where the prequel really took off in everybody's mind. A magical thing about Outlander is time travel, as that's the thing that is weaved throughout all the episodes and all the books. Even when Claire comes back in the books and she stays [in the past], there's still much more time travel with the other family members.
Technically, Blood of My Blood isn't rewriting Claire's history from Starz's Outlander or Diana Gabaldon's books. Fans may have believed that Claire's parents died in a car crash based on her narration, but the reveal works as long as the leading lady just never knew the whole story about Julia Moriston (Hermione Corfield) and Henry Beauchamp (Jeremy Irvine) to narrate it.
Normal narrative rules don't have to apply when time travel is involved, and Outlander lore states that time traveling is hereditary. Claire had to get it from somewhere! Of course, leaning into an unreliable narrator to spin a whole new origin story is one thing, but what about the author? Diana Gabaldon has spent nine books (and counting) establishing one canon across more than thirty years of her life. Matthew B. Roberts shared how she reacted to his idea for the prequel:
I knew all the places I wanted to go, so it was easy to pitch Diana where I wanted to go with the characters. When I first pitched her Henry and Julia, she was on board 100% right off the bat.
Just like how Diana Gabaldon penned several episodes of the original series, she wrote the penultimate episode of Blood of My Blood's first season and co-wrote the finale with Matthew B. Roberts. The showrunner consulted with the author about the story, but she wasn't looking over his shoulder from start to finish. Roberts explained the extent to which she was involved, which included writing the penultimate episode of Season 1. He said:
She was well aware of where we were going the whole time. It wasn't like I was checking in with her to go, 'Can I go this way, or can I go that way?' She knew where I wanted to go from the beginning, and she was fine because in her mind, the books and the show are two different things. I know a lot of the audience sometimes doesn't think that, but she does, and we do too.
Diana Gabaldon has gotten candid about Outlander making changes from page to screen in the past, so I for one am interested in watching her episodes that are not actually adapting from a book that she wrote. Blood of My Blood also stars Harriet Slater as Ellen MacKenzie and Jamie Roy as Brian Fraser, bringing Jamie's parents to life on the small screen.
While fans will have to wait for the premiere to see just how this story will unfold across two timelines, I think it's at least safe to say without any spoilers that the Outlander prequel nailed it when it came to casting actors who look like they could be related to Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe.
Outlander: Blood of My Blood premieres on Friday, August 8 at 8 p.m. ET on Starz. In a fun twist, that premiere is almost exactly eleven years to the date from when Outlander premiered in 2014 and introduced the world to Caitriona Balfe and Sam Heughan's versions of Diana Gabaldon's already beloved book characters.
Solve the daily Crossword
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Gearbox's Randy Pitchford celebrates Borderlands 4 going gold by explaining what that means: "The moment we're done is about as monumental as anything we experience in our lives"
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Borderlands 4 has officially gone gold, Gearbox has announced, and just in case you don't know exactly what that means, let studio head Randy Pitchford put his reading glasses on, lean back in his creaky wooden rocking chair, and tell you the origin story behind the phrase. Alternatively, if you're short on time, I can just tell you real quick: it means the game's done, theoretically anyway. These days, developers continue working on games up to and through release, fixing bugs and working on future content releases. But, essentially, it means Gearbox has a master copy of the game that's, again theoretically, ready for launch. Back in the days of the disc, though, things were different. "For videogame development, where a lot of emotion and creativity from a group of hardcore devs working together on a team, the moment we're done is about as monumental as anything we experience in our lives," Pitchford said, prefacing a tweet thread with some insights into the process of securing that coveted gold certification clearing the way for launch. "So, when is the exact *moment* that a video game is 'done'?" As Pitchford explained, back when games were still only released on physical discs and sold in stores, but recent enough that information largely traveled via the internet instead of magazines and retail endcaps, devs would send those physical discs often by mail to press, tech companies, and most importantly, first-party hardware companies like PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo for certification. "When we were ready, we'd submit a build of the game as a candidate to be the 'final' version," Pitchford said. "The 1st party would receive the game and make master discs that they would run through their tests and, hopefully, approve it for licensing and manufacturing. "When the first parties approved the build, they would create a new master copy of that software to be sent to the physical media manufacturer to be replicated onto the discs that would be packaged and sold to customers," Pitchford said. "Those master discs were literally gold colored." So there you have it. In case you hadn't already heard the origin story a thousand times, the phrase "gone gold" is from back in the day when there were actual gold-colored discs. Thanks, Randy. "Today, the process doesn't involve burning builds onto gold colored discs the way it once did," he added. "But, we still use the term 'gone gold' to describe the *moment* the game is finished. Today 'Gone Gold' means that the video game has been approved for launch on all platforms." Borderlands 4 boss confirms "there will be a download, even for physical copies" on Switch 2, which will "mostly" run at 30 FPS "with some dips"
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
The new Borderlands 4 trailer feels like an extreme parody of the 2025 games industry: a (literal) bloodbath caused by board members killing cool ideas to save money
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Look, I don't want to sound overly dramatic, but, well, here we go. If Gearbox wasn't going for a tongue-in-cheek parody of today's games industry with its new Borderlands 4 animated short, then it was certainly serendipitous, because now that the parallel has struck me I'm having a hard time ignoring it. The star of the trailer is new Vault Hunter Rafa, a cyber-soldier held together by a "Liveframe" exo-suit like ground meat in a sausage casing. Rafa grew up in a different gravity, so his body can't handle other environments without the suit, which happens to come with laser swords, turrets, and a bunch of other Tediore military-grade gadgets. We see some of those weapons in action here, kindly escorting loads of people into the afterlife at a shareholder demonstration gone very awry, but narrative is the focus. And once again, despite absurd caricatures and some expected ham-fisted writing, I find myself surprisingly intrigued by the tone of Borderlands 4. A demonstration of the Liveframe suits comes to a swift and bloody end after members of the Tediore board deem the project too expensive. The presenter bows to "the living, breathing backbone of this company," also known as "savings," in one of the video's loudest roasts of capitalism. "The board has decided to reduce our overhead in R&D," he adds, executing soldiers and animating their corpses using those fancy suits. There's an AI simile in here somewhere, but it's too tortured even for me. Now, I'm not going to seriously compare games industry-wide layoffs caused by mismanagement in real life to straight-up murder ordered by greedy shareholders in a video game in a series that's about as subtle as a brick to the forehead, but clearly I am going to spend about 270 words mulling over their curious thematic overlap. And that's more mulling than Borderlands has generally gotten out of me in the past, so screw it, maybe I'm just in a cynical mood this summer, but I'm still naively holding out hope that Borderlands 4's story will clear the "dumb as a bag of hammers" bar. Borderlands 4 has the "biggest world" Gearbox has ever made, and it's as seamless as it can be thanks to the power of "technical bulls***" that allows for "less borders, more lands."
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
New Borderlands 4 trailer is a funny critique of capitalism, and Randy Pitchford says if we "share and retweet" we could get more: "Those numbers directly impact the decisions made in the suit meetings and conference rooms"
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Borderlands 4 has had its fair share of marketing mishaps, from Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford saying "real fans" would find a way to pay $80 for it to a collector's edition that isn't a collector's edition and doesn't even contain the game. But a new trailer is already at over 100,000 views on YouTube, and Pitchford says we need to get sharing it if we want to see more like it. The trailer is actually a narrative short film that introduces the backstory of Rafa, a new Vault Hunter. Raised in an asteroid belt, he can't handle planetary gravity without the aid of an exosuit developed by the Tediore corporation. It plays out a Robocop-esque scene where the exosuit is paraded in front of shareholders, and deadly violence ensues. It's a blunt-but-funny parody of the kind of capitalism we're all too familiar with these days – maybe even a parody of the video games industry itself. Making the parody even more real is Pitchford himself, who tweets: "If you like this kind of thing instead of normal commercials, please share and retweet. Those numbers directly impact the decisions made in the suit meetings and conference rooms." The kinds of conference rooms and suit meetings being explicitly mocked in the trailer...? We can debate until the cows come home if it's possible to effectively critique a system such as capitalism from within it, but here we are. All I know is I enjoyed the video, it even made me laugh out loud once, which Borderlands has never made me do before, so that's something. In the meantime, check out all the upcoming games of 2025. Solve the daily Crossword
