Outlander Star Reveals How the Show Pulled Off Its Thorniest Challenge Yet

This post contains frank discussion of Season 4, Episode 6 of Outlander, titled “Blood of my Blood.” Proceed with care.

Theres an inherent difficulty at the center of Outlander—one the show must grapple with more and more as its source material becomes increasingly riddled with land mines. How does a TV series with an ostensibly progressive, feminist, and sex-positive core handle regressive, period-appropriate attitudes toward gender, race, and sexual orientation? Series star David Berry—who plays book-favorite Lord John Grey—explains the shows approach, which is clearly on display in its latest episode, “Blood of my Blood.”

The hour finds John, a gay man navigating the dangerous cultural waters of colonial America, paying a surprise visit to the Frasers—with Jamies young son, Willie, in tow. While John is there to get a glimpse of his crush, Jamie, and jump-start his own troubled heart, the most important connection he makes in the episode ends up being with Claire—an elegant example of the storys efforts to blend the modern with the antiquated. The key throughout Outlander, after all, is Claire—the anchor of the show, as Berry explained. Audiences “view everything through the lens of her eyes, and shes a deeply compassionate person,” he said. “I dont think homosexuality, race, and so on get in the way of how she connects with people. . . . Though she is also a woman of her time, so she is coming from the 1960s, where homosexuality was not—were not as free with it.”

Whats intriguing about this episode is how, like much of Season 3, it forces audiences to confront a Claire who is not always the font of compassion we might wish her to be. The conversations between Claire and John are, initially, tough to watch: “You cannot at all be a comfortable woman to live with,” he says, cuttingly, at one point. The tone swings from sniping to brutal honesty to a shared pain and understanding. But Claires initial standoffishness, Berry said, has nothing to do with Johns sexuality—outside of how it positions him as a rival, of sorts, for Jamies affections:

This feeling of perhaps jealousy that she may have—the episode goes into the time that they spent away [from each other]. Lord John shared it with Jamie. The very fact that Lord John is raising Willie as his child—I think those things are more pertinent to Claires stance on the thing.

Ultimately, as this episode shows, Claires compassion can transcend any 1960s-era discomfort she may or may not feel for playing host to a gay man in love with her husband.

Their interaction underlines a difficult thread that runs throughout Diana Gabaldons popular books, which often skate the line between progressive and regressive thinking. Gabaldon, for her part, has understood from the beginning that she must carefully walk a line while exploring the various cultural attitudes on display in her own work, and in Claire, specifically. As the author told BuzzFeed in 2017:

Time-travel stories offer a writer a lot of scope to make social commentary—but very few such books are making commentary on the (always modern) time traveler; its very one-sided. Mine kind of arent. The main point here is that Claire is not (emphatically not) “a modern woman.” She was born in 1918 and became an adult on the eve of World War II. The point here is that Claires attitudes and perceptions are those of a woman with her background, experiences, and perceptions. They arent much like the attitudes of an American thirtysomething of today.

But even as some of Claires attitudes feel dated to the modern viewer, so, too, do some of Gabaldons books; the series, after all, was first published nearly 30 years ago. In order to dodge audience outcry, then, the shows producers have had to give the source material a bit of an update here and there. Whether its excising one (though not all) of the novels sexual assault story lines, or deepening the shows treatment of the Native population of America, Starzs version of Outlander has struggled mightily to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to the time-traveling romance.

Having given him several spin-off novels of his own, Gabaldon herself is obviously fascinated with Lord John—and with depicting him as a fully well-rounded character. (In fact, she has said before that she identifies with gay men in a broader sense.) The show, however, does even Gabaldon one better when it comes to Claire and John.

In the books, a stretched timeline allows for Claire and John to share several adventures alone in the cabin as she nurses him back to health. But ultimately, Claires connection with John in the novels is not forged over anything they share outside of Jamie—and though she finds sympathy for him, she does not find empathy for him. The show, however, cleverly underlines how Johns inability to love his wife mirrors Claires distance from Frank. “Do you know what its like to love someone and never be able to give them happiness?” John asks. “Not through any fault of yours or theirs, but simply because you were not born the right person for them?” With a shock of recognition, Claire suddenly sees herself clearly in John.

This allows show Claire to travel even deeper in her connection with John than she did in the books and prompts her to wish that John find someone who, unlike Jamie, can love him back. “Theres a knowingness between both characters about what that means,” Berry explained. “To have a loving, more than likely homosexual, relationship. I think that final blessing that Claire gives him is one of the most positive and affirming aspects of the episode, and of the progressive views of the show that really are a factor of Claires compassion and humanity.”

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