Outlander saw Master Raymond save Claire Fraser’s life
Outlander fans are still reeling from the shocking revelations of the season seven finale, which confirmed Faith Fraser was alive despite previous suggestions the infant had perished. This plot twist marked a significant departure from Diana Gabaldon’s novels, but it was in line with an idea the author had for a graphic novel that never materialised.
As fans eagerly await the arrival of season eight, some have revisited the Faith Fraser storyline from season two. What fans may not realise is that due to the ambiguous nature of Master Raymond’s (played by Dominique Pinon) powers in the books, the show’s writers had to diverge 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 dangerously close to death and feverish after her devastating baby loss. The sequence had to be modified from the novel Dragonfly In Amber so it would work for the screen.
Speaking about the changes from the original text, executive producer Ronald D. Moore and writer Toni Graphia explained some of the major alterations on The Official Outlander Podcast at the time, reports the Scottish Daily Express.
Moore remarked on the challenges of adapting a particular scene from the book to screen, saying: “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.”
Writer Graphia then chimed in, describing the blend of elements in the narrative: “It’s a mixture of medicine and magic,” Moore continued, acknowledging the difficulty in visualising the scene: “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.”
The writers were also keen to incorporate the thematic significance of the colour blue from the novels into the show. In the books, Master Raymond tells Claire about his ability to see auras, with both their auras being blue, symbolising healing.
Consequently, the episode included symbolic blue imagery, such as a blue heron representing Claire’s loss of her baby. A brief moment at the beginning of the episode shows Claire in the 1960s with young Brianna Fraser (played by Niamh Elwell) looking at a library book featuring the bird.
Graphia elaborated on the creative choice: “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 further explained how they approached the visualisation in post-production: “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.”
The theme was enriched by another symbolic element from the novel where Master Raymond comments on Claire’s aura being blue like the Virgin Mary, leading to visuals including statues of the religious icon – one of which was depicted shattered. “I grabbed onto that and wanted to make the Virgin Mary as somewhat of a motif,” Graphia revealed.
A statue of the Virgin Mary also prominently appears at the end of the Faith episode when Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire have an emotional moment at Faith’s gravesite. Additionally, the episode diverged from the novel in a significant way by showing Claire’s reaction to discovering her baby’s death, a pivotal scene not originally present in the written work.
Graphia revealed that it was a challenge to devise the manner in which Mother Hildegarde, portrayed by Frances de la Tour, would inform Claire of her child’s death, ultimately choosing the phrase that Faith had “joined the angels”.