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.