Transcription

The following is a transcription of the Official Outlander Podcast episode 206, "Best Laid Schemes...." It is provided here for the purposes of study, criticism, and accessibility.

RONALD MOORE: Hello and welcome to the podcast for Episode 206, "Best Laid Schemes." I'm Ronald D. Moore, developer and executive producer of the Outlander television series. I'm joined today by my friend and colleague, Matt Roberts.

MATT ROBERTS: Hello, everybody.

MOORE: Matt wrote this episode. This is a fun one for us. This episode, I'm trying to remember way back in the beginning... We always knew that this was going to be the duel episode.

ROBERTS: Yeah. We did. Actually, this was combined, if you remember. Well, 5 and 6 were together at one point.

MOORE: Yeah.

ROBERTS: And it got so full. And over the course of our learning experience, we realized our scenes play out a little longer than the normal show. So we decided to split the episodes, but knowing full well we would end with the duel.

MOORE: Where was the split? Do you remember where we split them up?

ROBERTS: Where we decided to split, on the promise. So it's when Claire says, "Promise me you won't," he won't kill Black Jack for a year and we decided that's where... Because that was in the middle of the episode originally, so.

MOORE: Right. Yeah, I was talking last week in the previous podcast about... There was a point where we had King James in the earlier versions at the dinner party and some of the fallout and all that kind of stuff. I think that all... We rejiggered the structure a couple of times coming into this. Now, did you shoot that?

ROBERTS: I did. I shot the title card for that. As well as all the riding scenes with Jamie and Fergus which you'll see later in the episode, but yes.

MOORE: Now, this scene was originally deeper into the show as I recall, right? Didn't we used to open with the foot massage?

ROBERTS: We actually opened with the dream sequence that we never shot.

MOORE: Oh! The dream sequence.

ROBERTS: The massive dream sequence. What happens is only a few days go by from the end of [episode] 5 until now, and the way we wanted to bridge the gap was Jamie wrestling with the decision. Because he agrees and, "Don't touch me" is a harsh ending to [episode] 5 with our couple. And the dream sequence would have brought him to a place where when he does come to the foot-rubbing scene, we know he's weighed this because he wakes up here, but we had to trim it so he doesn't wake up.

MOORE: Right. Right.

ROBERTS: And we ended up through because of... There was a lot of battle in the dream sequence. We're using the same battlefield as we did in an episode that's coming up. Well, we got in... Battle sequences are hard and they take up a lot of time, so we had to make one of those decisions we usually do.

MOORE: Yup. It probably hurt us a little bit in the end result, because I think now, without the dream sequence and setting Jamie's emotional stake a little bit more clearly and understanding that he's reacting to his nightmare, his fears, and then understanding why he's able to reconcile with Claire a little bit later in the episode. Right now, it's a little quick. It's like he starts with Murtagh, like, "Okay, I'm not dueling Randall." The next thing you know, he's rubbing her feet.

ROBERTS: And I agree and I think when we first saw this cut, um, after it was filmed, we looked at each other in post, where we are now, and we said... Because we made a decision in the middle of the night, if you remember. We were in the middle of the night, sitting at a table, having a meeting and trying to work out the schedule and it was just a hasty decision. "Let's just cut that and film this," because we were there in the moment with that, and a lot of times, in production, that's what you do. You make decisions in the moment hoping you can fix them later and sometimes...

MOORE: It's easy to talk yourself into almost any decision because, right now, there's an emergency or a pressure or something that has to get done. And you rationalize and say, "Well, actually it'll be okay because of this, that and the other thing." And then, when you look at the cut, you go, "Oh, yeah, wait a minute."

ROBERTS: Yeah, exactly that. And it's usually... That's never, you know, at 10:00 in the morning over a latte. That's always midnight, middle of a field.

MOORE: It's never considered and you know... Where is this location? I tried to remember this three or four times. Where are we?

ROBERTS: This is Glasgow Cathedral in the basement of it or on the bottom floor. And Gary Steele and his team turned this into a hospital. Obviously, the front of this is in Prague.

MOORE: Yeah.

ROBERTS: But, um... They packed it full of beds and patients and it's just a stunning setting.

MOORE: This is the infamous Monsieur Forez, describes what it is to draw and quarter somebody which I, personally, just never got into because even as I read it, it just creeped the shit out of me and I was always like, "Oh, my God. I can't read that passage again." It was always on the board and then Monsieur Forez talks about drawing and quartering, and I was always looking for some way to cut it from the show over and over again but no one would let me.

ROBERTS: You're right. And I think what... I mean, the original draft, the writer's draft of this was much longer.

MOORE: It was much more longer.

ROBERTS: It was much longer and then it was like, "Okay, let's trim this." And we trimmed it a few times and even in post, we trimmed it down and I think we get to the heart of the matter here. No pun intended, but...

MOORE: It is pretty effective. I mean, it's just horrifying.

ROBERTS: It is. And we've been playing it as we go too. We played that... Jamie was a traitor, he is a traitor and... I think, in... This is France, but the times were very similar, how they execute people in France, they execute people in Britain. So I think that's what we were trying to get across, that the choices they're making have consequences and dire consequences. You actually caught this at the read through. This is one of those 11th hours. The original scene is actually flipped in the next scene coming up. Master Raymond warns her and you're like, "Oh, oh, wait a minute."

MOORE: Oh, right.

ROBERTS: Yeah. It was a really good catch because sometimes you can stay with the spine of the story and you go, "Wait, we've made a change here." So...

MOORE: Yeah. You have to track it.

ROBERTS: You have to track it. So, those steps were in Prague and then this is on our stages in Scotland.

MOORE: Now, this scene changed a couple of times too. Didn't we go through a couple of versions where she comes and the shop has been trashed, and...

ROBERTS: Yes.

MOORE: That's from the book, right? Claire went there and the shop had already been trashed?

ROBERTS: We did that and that was supposed to be in Episode 5, when she comes back and it's trashed and they're cleaning up. She goes through the front of the shop and secretly goes into the... She knows where he's hiding. And he's holed up there, hiding out from the gens d'armes. And that's where we flipped it. That's where we made the flip. And I remember our production team, art department kept going... I get calls every day going, "Is it trashed or not trashed?"

MOORE: "Are we trashing it?"

ROBERTS: I think Gary's... The joy is that we didn't trash it.

MOORE: Oh, yeah.

ROBERTS: Because there's so many little... And Gina, as well, our set decorator, is... There's so many little things in this shot that it would have been a nightmare.

MOORE: And they knew full well that, once we trashed it, then we would have inevitably come back to them and said, "Oh, we wanna do an earlier scene in Raymond's. So put it back the way it was."

ROBERTS: Yeah.

MOORE: And they would go, "What?"

ROBERTS: And then, we just get that look.

MOORE: Yeah, then we get that look. Oh, the whiskey today, for your enjoyment, is Scapa. This is the 1 6-year-old and the smoking lamp is out.

ROBERTS: The confusion that some of you may have had is he heard that Jenny liked this. He never massaged Jenny's feet. There you go.

MOORE: Yeah, there you go. And basically, every husband needs to know how to rub his wife's feet.

ROBERTS: Yeah.

MOORE: It's a little life lesson to those few bachelors out there listening to the podcast. I'm trying to remember the book. This is a scene that's basically inspired from the book. It takes place... It wasn't the same night as the big argument.

ROBERTS: No, no, no.

MOORE: This was also on reflection.

ROBERTS: Yes, on reflection and that's what we were trying to get to. I think the one thing that we, in the television show, we... Is that Diana has much more time to get into the thoughts and the feelings of the characters, and sometimes we have to get to it because we just don't have enough time. I wish we did, sometimes, have more time. And I think the fans probably wished we had more time, but we do have to deliver these things...

MOORE: It's a different pace. It's just a different pace of enjoying the story. TV moves you along in a way that the page doesn't have to.

ROBERTS: Yeah.

ROBERTS: Reading this and writing this, it always struck me as how difficult it would be for me, as a person, to say, "Hey..." in the moment, "If something happens to me I want you to go and be with the guy..."

MOORE: Yeah, the other guy. And, "Let him raise our child."

ROBERTS: "And let him raise our child." Exactly.

MOORE: But this is why Jamie is the king of men.

ROBERTS: It is and I know some people won't probably agree with this, but it's even... She's dealing with two pretty magnanimous guys...

MOORE: Yeah.

ROBERTS: ...in Frank and Jamie. One raises, you know...

MOORE: Yeah, they're both valid.

ROBERTS: Yeah.

MOORE: It's like they're both valid partners for her. Her heart and her soul go to Jamie, but Frank is not an invalid choice.

ROBERTS: No, I think that's what makes the dilemma. That's what makes the triangle. I mean, everybody knows the perfect fit is Jamie.

MOORE: Yeah.

ROBERTS: When you're building that puzzle, he just fits perfectly with Claire, their souls match up. And had she never met Jamie, she could have had a nice life with Frank.

MOORE: Yeah.

ROBERTS: But she did meet him, and therein lies the issue.

MOORE: You can't close that door.

ROBERTS: Yeah. As we say, "You can't un-ring the bell."

MOORE: Yeah.

ROBERTS: The Jamie bell.

MOORE: The Jamie bell.

ROBERTS: Now, this whole conceit here is, uh... Ron and I love ships.

MOORE: Mmm-hmm.

ROBERTS: We love sea battles. Anything on ships we love. It would have been great to get Jamie and Murtagh traveling to Portugal on the ship, doing what was in the book. But production, the way it works is sometimes you just can't do those things. So we had to reconceive and set this heist and caper completely in France. I mean, this is the way we did it but...

MOORE: In the book, for those who haven't read the book, the book version was Murtagh and Jamie, actually, go on the ship that has the wine on it. It was supposed to be Murtagh faking the smallpox, right?

ROBERTS: Yes, yes.

MOORE: And then, Jamie was going to buy the wine from the ship captain, when the ship captain was panicked that everyone had smallpox, Jamie was gonna buy it at a cut rate and dump it somewhere else, basically. And then, through the course of events, Jamie was so seasick that he ended up faking the smallpox instead of Murtagh. It was a great little story and, yeah, the thing about doing it on a ship was really exciting. But when you really get down to nuts and bolts and how much it's gonna cost and now we need this ship set for just this one sequence in this episode, and ship sets are complicated, gimbals, motion, water... You need the CG. It was just like a whole thing that suddenly was just too much.

ROBERTS: Yeah.

MOORE: It was too much to take on for what was, ultimately, a very small part of the episode.

ROBERTS: And I think we constantly have to weigh that. And that's the beauty of writing a novel, is you can write, "They go on a ship and they do this and they do whatever," and you're just in it and it feels great. But when we have to go, "Ah, water," the camera's on the water, that adds... But I think and I hope that we've succeeded in keeping to the heart of the story.

MOORE: Yeah, the spirit of it.

ROBERTS: The spirit of it.

MOORE: We did go round and round. I mean, there were very... We tried various tales of, what we kept calling, the "wine caper." How the wine caper worked. What Charles thought he was doing. What St. Germain thought he was doing. What Jamie was trying to actually do, and then how it came unraveled. I mean, it's one of those plots you just kept working over and over again because as soon as you had it fixed then you'd realize, "Oh, wait, that doesn't line up with this other thing we said last week."

ROBERTS: And that's the story. Once they leave France and go to Portugal, and they're dealing with people they don't know... That makes it, in a way, a simpler story because they don't know those people. But in our story, the Comte is there, the Prince is there, and they're dealing with people they have dealings with. So, now they have to pull the wool over their eyes and that's what makes it more difficult and more intricate to weave the story together.

MOORE: Yeah, because it has to tie into everything else. Everything that's happened before this episode and after this episode.

ROBERTS: Yes, exactly. And then, this moment is... We've often... In the room it was... "Well, how much does Murtagh know?"

MOORE: Yeah. "What does he think they're doing?"

ROBERTS: "What does he think they're doing?" And, ultimately, we came to this episode and it was finally... I think we all came to the point where it was, "Let's just tell him. Let's just tell him and he's the most trusted guy in the clan." We've heightened the role of Murtagh in our story and so we had to, actually, bring him into the fold here and, obviously, we didn't wanna go through the whole story. She came through the stones and all the things that the audience already knows, even TV or book audience. So we devised a clever montage, I think.

MOORE: And it was nice to go out and do it in the courtyard, because we have this great courtyard set. This is all interior, again on our soundstages and we're just simulating sunlight... Daylight out there.

ROBERTS: And those cobbles are actually real. Those are real cement cobbles that they patterned into the floor. They'll rip them up, eventually. But yeah, everything... It's a workable courtyard which is what I love about... The majority of our sets are practical. We can really use them.

MOORE: Yeah, when you were on this set, the apartment set, you really felt like you were in a legitimate place.

ROBERTS: Oh, absolutely.

MOORE: It was walled in. I mean, there was no ceiling. That was the only part that broke the illusion but when you looked around, when you were walking through it, the hallways, the bedroom and the courtyard... Every direction you looked horizontally, it looked real. It looked like you were really there.

ROBERTS: We usually give our new directors a little walk-around the first day and every director we walked around this set, we normally would have to say, "Oh, you can close your mouth now," because they were so stunned that we were a television show for one. This is what you get in feature films and the staircase, the courtyard, just everything. They're just so overwhelmed by the detail and the scope.

MOORE: Yeah, the scale of these buildings is really something.

ROBERTS: Yeah. Now... We wanted to give Murtagh a reaction that was a Murtagh reaction... And I always felt like that's what he should do.

MOORE: Yeah, it seems right.

ROBERTS: You know, I'm gonna teach you a lesson here and Murtagh... That was Murtagh saying about the witch. The big question is, why would Jamie call his wife a witch? Jamie didn't call his wife his witch. That was just something that Murtagh inferred from the conversation. We also worked hard to bring our couple, our hero couple back together. They'd been separated early, going back and forth and then at the end of 5 they're really at odds, but one thing I think that Jamie and Claire do well, in our show and the books, is when they team up, they are a really powerful couple. They both have strengths. Jamie's strengths aren't Claire's strengths and Claire's aren't... I mean, they complement each other and they really work well together. This is actually a scene you suggested and when I first sat down to write it I, actually kind of struggled like, "How do I get this across?" And when I wrote the first draft of it, it started becoming my favorite scene in the episode.

MOORE: Oh, really?

ROBERTS: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you were like, "I want him to write the numbers. And I want him to come to believe what Jamie just told him." Because he probably has an inkling of something going on, and we deal in a world of fantasy.

MOORE: Yeah. Yeah, I thought there was something interesting about... This is how he literalizes it. He makes it real by writing the numbers and looking at them and trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a time that started 19-something because that's 200 years away. It's like us trying to imagine writing 22-so-and-so.

ROBERTS: Exactly.

MOORE: What's it like to live in 2215 or 2216?

ROBERTS: And, see, Murtagh comes from a time when she says, "I lived through a world war," a world war to Murtagh is something that the world's always been at war.

MOORE: Yeah.

ROBERTS: This is actually the most peaceful time in the world's history. So he knows what a world war is. This is my favorite part.

MOORE: Duncan is so great.

ROBERTS: Yeah, he's really good in this. Oh, he's good in everything.

MOORE: He really does have a soulful quality to him.

ROBERTS: He does.

MOORE: Which Duncan himself is nothing like.

ROBERTS: I actually could see Duncan playing in a soul band.

MOORE: Yeah, he'd play in a soul band. Now, did you shoot these?

ROBERTS: We did. We shot all this. We went up to an estate.

MOORE: Just to let you know, Matt shoots a lot of second unit for the show, which isn't credited in the credits, but Matt does a lot of things like this. These are pickup shots or insert shots or things that are shot after the main unit is wrapped or we need to just go back and pick up a quick scene or something. That's usually, Matt is doing all the heavy lifting on that stuff.

ROBERTS: Kind of like a journeyman baseball player. You're playing left field today or you're playing second base today. That's Le Havre, which... Our visual effects, Richard Briscoe, who's a genius who helps us out.

MOORE: Where is this?

ROBERTS: This is actually a real distillery that we found that's real close to Doune.

MOORE: Oh, Deanston.

ROBERTS: Yeah, Deanston. Yes.

MOORE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Deanston Distillery. Not far from where we live.

ROBERTS: Yes. And as I said, no, we did not get any free drams. We were not partaking in all those real casks of whisky. I would have to say that is our best-smelling set though. And this was a much bigger sequence filmed, but in post... Once again, I think you did a really nice job trimming this to the heart of the matter.

MOORE: Yeah, it was more going in and out, as I recall.

ROBERTS: There was.

MOORE: Fergus went in and came back out a couple of times. There was some interaction with...

ROBERTS: More dialogue.

MOORE: Yeah.

ROBERTS: And more action with one of the characters within the warehouse. But we know what he's doing and that's the key, is that he's planting all the things that we just saw Claire do to Jamie. Also the thing I like about our show is that, for that sequence, and this was also on the estate, there's a beautiful, long drive all the way. It's just a beautiful grass entryway to the estate and we used it to have them ride out, to make it feel like they were going back to Paris.

MOORE: Is that Hopetoun?

ROBERTS: I can't remember the name of the estate. It wasn't Hopetoun though. This was one of the things we tried to do in the script was bring them back to their playfulness, their connection and what Diana does in all the books is, the characters have a great sense of humor and I think Outlander and Ron has always given us free reign to add humor to our show, because the one thing that in some other shows, I'm not gonna name them, is they don't have humor. Sometimes you watch some of these and you come out and you go, "God, I didn't laugh once." And I like that. I like that we can laugh and cry and all of that.

MOORE: It also helps, in a way, letting yourself laugh for a moment or having a moment of humor increases the tension of the following beat. That's something I've always loved in Spielberg. Spielberg's the master of that sort of thing. He can direct a really suspenseful, intense sequence, and knows exactly where to put a joke in.

ROBERTS: Yeah.

MOORE: Like the tyrannosaurus attack in Jurassic Park should be required viewing for anyone who wants to be a director. That is a really intense, great thrill scene. It's like a rollercoaster, and he knows precisely where to put in a couple of jokes and you no sooner laugh then something immediately scary happens, and it increases the scare. It's like if it's all tense all the time, you get used to that feeling, but when you break that moment and you feel a little bit of mirth, and then the scare will grab you. And I think the same works in drama, in emotion. It's like if you're feeling just sad all the time, you almost burn out on that core.

ROBERTS: I agree. I mean, if you don't... If you can't feel happy, you really can't feel sad. You have to feel both.

MOORE: Yeah.

ROBERTS: I think Stanley and Andrew here, the tightness of this shot, the intimacy of this shot is... Metin Hüseyin, who directed, did a lovely job here. But Andrew and Stanley are spectacular in this scene, and in the following scene that comes up...

MOORE: I like that all through the show this season... At least, I do find myself alternately being repelled by, and rooting for, Prince Charles.

ROBERTS: Yes.

MOORE: Like I'm always going back and forth like, "Oh, I want him to win. Oh, my God. He's an idiot."

ROBERTS: Yes.

MOORE: It's just sort of this push-pull quality.

ROBERTS: I think that's... Let's attribute some of that to Andrew, who is brilliant, by the way.

MOORE: Yeah, he's amazing.

ROBERTS: He makes you love him and then he... The next performance, you go, "Why would you hang out with that guy?"

MOORE: I know. You can kind of see both. You can see why men followed him to their deaths, and why it all failed at the same time.

ROBERTS: Yes. That's the genius of Andrew Gower, is that he... That little smile... When Jamie looks back and Andrew's got that smile... It's gonna be all good.

MOORE: Yeah.

ROBERTS: It's like, "That's the guy that you go... Yeah, we wanna follow him because he has this hope." And he thinks God is driving him to this final destiny. And Stanley has this... This is my... I'll always love this scene.

MOORE: You always love this scene, yeah. "Playing the Jessie.""

ROBERTS: "Playing the Jessie."

MOORE: Where did you get that phrase?

ROBERTS: Well, Jessie is a phrase that... On set they mentioned. That's what they called him so I added in. Carol Ann, who is our dialect coach, said Jessie would be a great term here in another script, so I stole it and used it in this script.

MOORE: It's so perfect because you know exactly what it means, but I'd never heard of it before.

ROBERTS: Yeah. This is another one of those moments that we wanted to play. Not the lightness, but the humor. So, that line, "It's okay for you to lie to me," is an actual callback to the line that Jamie and Claire speak in Episode, I believe, 7 where he says, "We can have secrets, but we can't have lies." So she's saying... She's saying, "Hey, as couples, real couples do, they play with each other." And...

MOORE: They have their in-jokes.

ROBERTS: They have their in-jokes and their private moments. So their private jokes, yes.

MOORE: I love Suzette.

ROBERTS: Oh, Suzette, she's brilliant.

MOORE: That was a great... I mean, the whole little Murtagh-Suzette run was one of my favorite things.

ROBERTS: And I think one thing that we both were looking for is we wanted to finish off... Not finish off because we were... I'd love to see what happens between these two but we just don't have the time. But that little moment, that little, "I'll have to get you out of these clothes," I think everybody knows that... And remember the earlier episode, Episode 4, where Murtagh's kind of fishing when he says, "You know, Suzette, does she love anybody?" Fergus says, "She loves everybody."

MOORE: Everybody.

ROBERTS: But that was before Murtagh.

MOORE: Yeah.

ROBERTS: Yeah. Now, this scene was added. I'd written the entire script and this scene got added late in the game, so to speak. And... To me, it's the most important in the script because of what's coming.

MOORE: Yeah, I agree. I think, initially, I was opposed to this scene because I thought it broke the mood of the aftermath of the confrontation and the argument about Jack Randall. But I think what swayed me into now seeing it as like a really important beat in the story, is that you do have to reconnect before you break them apart, and if we had not reconnected them in the story and they were just apart through the whole thing, then the ending of the show would be a little less shattering.

ROBERTS: Exactly. And this was the moment they were a family.

MOORE: Yeah.

ROBERTS: When he talked to his baby, when she... When they were playful, he says "he", she says "she", because in his time, a "he" is very important.

MOORE: Yeah.

ROBERTS: And in her time, I mean she's... Is Claire a feminist? I don't know. I'm not gonna say, but it was important.

MOORE: That's why it's important, in general, when you're writing a show and when you're looking at a story like this, it's important to not get too dark. It's important to have an opinion and a point of view of what each episode is about, what story you're trying to tell and hold to that. But you do have to be open to realizing that, "Oh, wait a minute. It's actually shifted under my feet or I hadn't looked at this way." And you have to be open to hear other voices periodically and still know that and not worry about it. You don't wanna... A trick some people will get into is believing that if you allow yourself to change your mind and allow yourself to pivot on a decision you make early, that somehow that means that you're not holding true to a vision of the show, but it really just means that you're allowing the show to live and breathe, and you have to grow and change with the show along the way.

ROBERTS: The one thing that... You know, I've come up kind of under your umbrella, and the one thing that I've always loved about you is, it's not your idea that wins, it's the best idea that wins.

MOORE: I try really hard to do that.

ROBERTS: And you do, and there are certain things that you do dig in on because you think that is the best idea and, you know what, ultimately a lot of times we come around, we go, "God, that really was a damn good idea." And that's the beauty of it is normally the best idea does win, and you do listen, though. That's the great thing. You always listen to every idea. You have to filter out a lot of them, and that's a tough job. When you have to filter out all those ideas, it's a talent. In the end of the day, it becomes a talent.

MOORE: It's certainly a skill set. It's trying to figure out what it is you're trying to say, what's the vision of the story, and trying to tell that the best way you can, but realizing that you might be wrong about that. Being open to at least considering the possibility that you're wrong and not being afraid to embrace that, not being afraid to say, "You know what, that is a better idea," and "Okay, let's go that way." You just do it.

ROBERTS: And I think that's the thing that I always find, the joy of working with you is that, egos aside, everybody has an ego, but when you can just go, "Yeah, that's a really good idea." It doesn't reflect... How does that reflect on me? You're picking the best idea.

MOORE: That's because my ego is massive enough. There's very little that can dent it. I like this scene.

ROBERTS: I do too.

MOORE: I like this little beat of Claire trying to be somewhat socially conscious, and it's an interesting element of the show is that we don't really talk about... There's maybe this is one of two references to the French Revolution in the whole thing, and it is coming. All these people are doomed on a certain level. The French culture that she's part of is as doomed as the Highland culture of Culloden, in many ways. And blood is gonna run in the streets and all that, and this was just like one of the only times that she could actually hang a lantern on it.

ROBERTS: And really what she's saying is, "I'm warning you of what's going to come."

MOORE: Yeah. "Don't you think we should think about this?"

ROBERTS: "Don't you think you should think about this?" Yes.

MOORE: I love that, for a moment, they're "Yes."

ROBERTS: Yes! It's a beat.

MOORE: Claire actually got through to them.

ROBERTS: Yeah. Oh, I'm making progress. That's actually... Claire is the actress there, playing Louise, and Scarlett Mack plays Toinette, named after Toni Graphia, one of our writers. That's what it is. "I tried to help you. You're not going to be helped. I can't..." Changing history is very difficult.

MOORE: Yeah. This is the kind of scene I have a lot of trouble writing. There's always that moment, structurally, in many episodes where we say and there's a party or they're at dinner and they're chatting about this and that. And then I get to the actual scene where I have to have them make small talk or they actually sort of chat and I'm, sort of, like, "Fuck, what are they saying? Oh, crap. They have to say..." Then I'll get down to counting lines. I think I need three lines of crap before they get to what it means, and those three lines will torture me.

ROBERTS: What I do is I write the scene and then I leave those out and then write those in the appendix. Those are the appendix.

MOORE: The appendix, yeah.

ROBERTS: Yeah, pretty much rule of thumb is, do what Mother Hildegarde says. Just stick with that and you'll be good and I think Mother Hildegarde knows that this is not... That this is a serious thing, and she's trying to make, like any good doctor, you're gonna try to make your patient feel a little more at ease so their anxiety doesn't exacerbate the situation. So she lies.

MOORE: I remember discussing it generally, our feeling was that Claire is a combat nurse, didn't have a lot of experience.

ROBERTS: She had zero.

MOORE: Yeah.

ROBERTS: How many births did she have?

MOORE: When she helped Jenny, did she say that was the first birth?

ROBERTS: Yeah. We played.

MOORE: We just kind of played.

ROBERTS: She really didn't know what she was doing in that regard and this is, kind of, one of those funny things that I know Caitriona has been saying on interviews that I was an EMT, which I was, and I did deliver some babies and we had conversations during the scene of, you know, what would happen, and Mother Hildegarde does lie in the sense of saying, "Hey, this happens all the time," because Claire hasn't had a baby either, and that's the other thing about it is...

MOORE: She has no reference.

ROBERTS: ...she has no reference. The aftermath of the heist.

MOORE: The aftermath of the heist. My favorite beat of this is when he starts talking about, "If you had to live in Poland," and how horrified he is at that.

ROBERTS: Now, just to let everybody know, we love Poland. It has nothing to do with the actual... The beauty of Poland or the people of Poland, it's that Prince Charles' mother is from Poland and if he loses the Pope's support, if King James loses the Pope's support and they have to retreat somewhere, it will be to Poland and to his mother's family. And, I think, it was more of the concept of having to not be the king of England, because he thinks he's going to be the king of England and Scotland someday, and if this all goes pear-shaped then he would have to go and live in Poland, and that's why he says that. It has nothing to do against Poland or the Polish people...

MOORE: It's the only time we see a brothel empty.

ROBERTS: Yeah, this is what we imagined as dawn, very early morning. They'd just come back from the heist. Prince Charles...

MOORE: Was there a version of this that played in the wine warehouse? Or am I not remembering this?

ROBERTS: No. We talked about... We talked about setting it there, but this seemed like the more reasonable place he would be... And then the weeping.

MOORE: Now, just watching him react to the horror of it all.

ROBERTS: "The horror." And this little beat, I wanted to connect Fergus and Jamie a little bit...

MOORE: Mmm-hmm.

ROBERTS: ...and there's also... Claire's never really taken to Fergus, not 100%.

MOORE: Right.

ROBERTS: So, there's a line later that comes.

MOORE: 'Cause he's this odd little interloper that just appeared in their house one night.

ROBERTS: Exactly. And Fergus, especially in the books and what we wanted to play is that, he wants to... He's a little Jamie. He wants to be Jamie more than anything.

MOORE: Yeah, there's a definite hero worship going on over here.

ROBERTS: Exactly. And that was a little play off Episode 4 where he's eating at the end, with all that chaos. So I wanted to play a little beat off that, that he's always hungry and even in that world.

MOORE: I still regret, I said this in the last podcast, I still regret the fact that I cut the scene with Fergus brushing Claire's hair and talking about it. I mean, it slowed down the episode and that's why we cut it, ultimately, but it was a nice insight to more of his backstory and who he was.

ROBERTS: That was the play on, one, we like to try and give... To set Claire a little out of time every now and then and that saying is very much... This is... originally in the book, it's the wine warehouse foreman, so we changed it to...

MOORE: 'Cause we never even met him.

ROBERTS: We didn't meet him. We didn't know him and we leave Charles Stuart at the brothel, so it made more sense that it was him. And this little saying about "I'll guard your right..." is something that Diana had laced throughout the books and I like throwing those little nuggets out every now and then.

MOORE: Wasn't that something that Ian says?

ROBERTS: Yes, Ian says it.

MOORE: Ian says that.

ROBERTS: So, those little nuggets are really important, I think, to the people who read the books. The people who don't, I think, will probably, eventually go and read the books. I hope our show inspires you to do that.

MOORE: Link now to Amazon.com.

ROBERTS: Yes. Now, this is... We filmed this a couple of times.

MOORE: We filmed this little sequence a couple of times. First time through, I think, the red coat was lying on the bed.

ROBERTS: It was. We went back and did this again, yeah.

MOORE: 'Cause the first time I couldn't tell what it was. It just looked like a blanket. It looked like a red blanket.

ROBERTS: So, this was one of those second unit shots where we went back and did it all over again.

MOORE: Actually, yeah. In that wide shot, you just saw there a second ago, you can see there's actually a red fabric in the foreground that is the uniform coat, but you couldn't tell it was the red coat.

ROBERTS: Yeah. And what Fergus is actually doing is going to steal some perfume for Claire, because he's a solid guy who has no money. This was Prague, this was back in Prague. I think, back on our set which I think seamlessly works... This is Robby McIntosh, who's brilliant as Magnus. I would have loved to have taken him to Scotland somehow. He's just really good, solid actor who just really performed.

MOORE: He's got a great moment coming up in the next episode. Lots of discussion on this little sequence of how Claire figures out what's happened. In the book, there was the note and then the hair, right?

ROBERTS: The note and the hair, the ponytail and since we haven't been playing the hair, there was no way, so we used the brace.

MOORE: Just to be clear, in the book, the idea was Jamie cut his hair, because it was a reference to a conversation he had with Annalise back at Versailles, where they talked about when he dueled for Annalise, he had to cut his hair so that it wouldn't fall in his eyes when he dueled. So, here, there was a beat in the book where Claire looked over, he had cut off his hair and left it with the note and she realized, "Oh, my God, he cut his hair again to go do the duel," but we didn't really play that.

ROBERTS: First of all, because his hair wasn't like that and we never played that in Episode 2, so we couldn't play it here. So we used his brace as, kind of, the telling... And I think a big shout-out to all our supporting cast. Caitriona, Sam and Tobias and Duncan are amazing all the time, but our supporting cast really elevate Outlander. They're so good. They're so believable.

MOORE: Look how long we hold on Suzette in this scene to really let her... You can be with her.

ROBERTS: Exactly. And I love how Annie and her team let Claire's hair go crazy. It was disheveled, like she just woke up.

MOORE: There's a shot coming up here, when the carriage leaves the front door and goes flying down the street, the back end goes sliding across and it almost slams into the curve because... There, look at that. Oh, my God.

ROBERTS: I was sitting just off camera to the left, and I jumped up off my apple box and I said, "We're not doing that again!" And I looked around to everybody and I said, "Did we get that?" Everyone's like, "We got it." and I'm like, "Done." Caitriona was actually in the carriage.

MOORE: Was she in the carriage?

ROBERTS: She was in the carriage. She jumped out, and Caitriona being Caitriona, was like, "Hey!" Almost like, "That was fun. I don't wanna do it again, but it was fun." And this is Hopetoun Estate.

MOORE: We're back in Scotland.

ROBERTS: So, now we're back in Scotland and... Well, that's poor man process, but works out well. This is actually Pollok Park, in the center of Glasgow, so we build these scenes from multiple shots from all over.

MOORE: Yeah, this is a multi-national sequence.

ROBERTS: It really is. So this is... We jump back at the end of this. We jump back to Hopetoun Estate, and then once she jumps out, we go back to Pollok Park, which is Glasgow's Central Park. It's their biggest park, and we filmed the duel there. We had a very difficult time trying to keep photographers away, because the one thing that we like to do is we don't wanna spoil the... With 1,000 pictures out there, you'll know what's coming and we wanna keep that special. We wanna have a special moment. Sam and Tobias rehearsed this, the choreography of the duel, over a few days, but they did perform, and each time when we were filming Caitriona's coverage.

MOORE: Did they?

ROBERTS: Yeah, they did.

MOORE: Is there any stunt work involved in this? Is this all them?

ROBERTS: We did use stuntmen at some points but in the final cut, I'd say about 95% of it is Tobias and Sam.

MOORE: It feels like that.

ROBERTS: Yeah, it really is.

MOORE: I love that.

ROBERTS: Yeah. And, of course, Claire doesn't wanna yell out.

MOORE: Yeah, she doesn't wanna distract him.

ROBERTS: Distract. But the pain of it, the pain of the miscarriage, and building the timing and the rhythm of this in post...

MOORE: Yeah, this was a lot of work. The editing team really worked through this again and again.

ROBERTS: See, Jamie, that's the first moment he knows that Claire's there. We had the horses rush out. And even in that moment, Claire's smart enough to know, "If I don't say, 'take me to Mother Hildegarde,' I'm a dead woman." There's always that, "Where do you end?" Do you end on Jamie calling for her?

MOORE: Jamie calling for her. Back to Claire.

ROBERTS: And I think that is the right moment.

MOORE: Yeah, go back to her.

ROBERTS: Yeah.

MOORE: It's a great episode, it's a really good ending. Like, the ending is really so good.

ROBERTS: Well, there's 206.

MOORE: There's another one down.

ROBERTS: Yeah.

MOORE: Just keeping going forward, like sharks.

ROBERTS: I would say, just to warn you, 207.

MOORE: Bring out your handkerchief.

ROBERTS: Yeah.

MOORE: All right, well, thank you for joining us and we'll talk again very soon on 207. Good night and good luck.