When “Outlander” returns for Season 2 on Saturday, Jamie and Claire will be in a totally different world than the one they left behind in Season 1.
The married couple and expectant parents not only find themselves in France for the first time, but as readers of the book “Dragonfly in Amber” knows, they have to contend once again with the time-traveling stone that sent Claire (Caitriona Balfe) back in time to Jamie (Sam Heughan) in the first place.
But first, they have to contend with being out of Scotland.
“We find them disembarking a boat in La Havre. They’re headed to France, Claire’s told Jamie on the boat that she’s pregnant,” Balfe told TheWrap of what’s to come in the first episode. “They’re about to start a new life. The only contact they have in France is Jamie’s cousin Jared, so really they don’t know what to expect. They don’t know where this new world is going to bring them. There’s a lot of hope. After the trauma and pain of the end of last season, they’re in a hopeful place.”
The pregnancy, perhaps even more than the new location and new worlds and faces she’s about to face, will be a game changer for Claire.
“It changes a lot about her. Claire will be always Claire but it’s a new sense of responsibility, it drives this mission that Claire has sort of come up with to change the course of history,” Balfe continued. “In one sense, she’s using it to help Jamie focus on a mission or a project to take his mind off what happened. But in other ways, it’s so important to her because they’re about to have a child and she wants to be able to take that child back to Scotland and allow it to grow up in a free Scotland, in a land that’s not occupied by the British. She knows this Highland culture is about the be destroyed so very much for the future of her child and the future of Jamie, she’s sort of pushes forward this mission of changing history.”
As Season 2 becomes more integrally entwined with the time travel aspect of its roots, particularly the idea of changing the future – where she will eventually be born, in the 1940s – Balfe said she was happy not to think too deeply about why Claire didn’t worry more for her own existence if she were to succeed.
“You can go on with that all day,” she said. “The great thing about sci-fi and fantasy and time travel is that, as the author, Diana [Gabaldon] gets to create her own rules. In Diana’s world, Claire doesn’t think about that, so [laughs]. I was very happy to relinquish all the troubling ‘Wait, but logic…’ and all of that. I’m sure Diana thought about all of that a long time ago so I just went with it. I’ve lived in Diana Gabaldon‘s rules of time travel for a long time and happily so.”
“Outlander” premieres Saturday, April 9 at 9 p.m. ET on Starz.