Outlander fans are still reeling from the revelations of the season seven finale, which confirmed Faith Fraser was alive despite previous suggestions the infant had perished.
The plot point marked a huge deviation from Diana Gabaldon’s novels, however, the story was aligned with an idea the author had for a graphic novel that never came into fruition.
As fans wait for season eight to arrive, with the Droughtlander only just beginning, some have gone back to reacquaint themselves with the Faith Fraser storyline from season two.
What fans may not know is, given the vague nature of Master Raymond’s (played by Dominique Pinon) powers in the books, the show’s writers were forced to deviate from the source material.
Season two, episode seven’s Faith saw Master Raymond sneak into the L’Hôpital des Anges to cure Claire Fraser (Caitríona Balfe) as she lay precariously close to death and feverish after her heartbreaking baby loss.
The sequence had to be altered from the novel Dragonfly In Amber so it would work for the screen.
Speaking about the alterations from the original text, executive producer Ronald D. Moore and writer Toni Graphia explained some of the big changes on The Official Outlander Podcast at the time.
Moore said: “This was a tricky scene to translate from the book. It’s a really great piece of writing. You read the book of Master Raymond coming in and healing Claire, it’s pretty compelling but it’s very internal. It’s all told completely from Claire’s point of view, from her delirious mind’s point of view. It’s a lot of metaphor, crystals and crystal spheres cracked and his healing hands.”
“It’s a mixture of medicine and magic,” writer Graphia added.
Moore said: “And it was hard to literalise that in this scene. But I think eventually we got to the place where it all does come through.”
Moreover, the writers wanted to keep in the significance of blue from the novels in the show, where Master Raymond told Claire how he could see auras; Claire and Master Raymond’s auras were blue for healing.
So, the episode featured imagery of a blue heron as a metaphor for Claire losing her baby – with a small scene right at the start of Claire in the 1960s with a young Brianna Fraser (Niamh Elwell) looking at a library book with the bird in it.
Graphia said: “I used the blue heron which was not in the book. It was actually trying to come up with something for the Master Raymond scene in the book. It’s beautiful in the book how blue is the colour, how his hands glow blue, the room is blue.
“We knew we couldn’t really show that on camera without a lot of special effects, so I’d come up with the heron as a way to show that this is what she imagines as she’s escaping the horror of what’s happened to her there as she’s losing the baby. She just fixates on a memory of this heron flying because blue is carrying her away, carrying her pain away.”
Moore elaborated: “We spent a lot of time in [post-production] trying to figure out how we were going to do the bird and how literal the bird would be in the room. Did Claire literally see the bird flying inside the hospital? Was it an animated kind of thing out of the [library] book?
“We went through many iterations before we came upon a much cleaner and simpler [image], it’s just a bird flying in the sky that kind of fades into the scene and then down to Claire.”
In a nod to the novel, when Master Raymond also mentioned Claire’s aura was blue like the Virgin Mary, there were statues of the Biblical figure including one which was smashed.
“I grabbed onto that and wanted to make the Virgin Mary as somewhat of a motif,” Graphia said. A Virgin Mary statue was also featured in the closing shot of Faith where Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire bid farewell to Faith in the cemetery.
Another key moment in the Faith episode which differed from the novels was when Claire learned about the death of her baby – something which wasn’t in the source text.
Graphia said it took her a while to come up the way Mother Hildegarde (Frances de la Tour) told Claire her child had passed away, settling on telling her Faith had “joined the angels”.