Harrowing Outlander finale leaves fans breathless

Outlander fans are reeling after the season finale in which Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) was brutally raped by Black Jack Randall (Tobias Menzies).

If the penultimate episode two weeks ago was twisted, then last night’s finale was truly harrowing stuff.

As the Hollywood Reporter notes, “It feels safe to say that never before has so graphic an act of sexual violence taken place between two men on television.”

It comes just a week after Game of Thrones attracted headlines for depicting female rape. But Outlander went further in taboos, duration, nudity and for suggesting the victim turned complicit.

Last night fans took to social media in reaction.

https://twitter.com/HookedOnEmma143/status/604970164161945600

I can't watch this… It's horrible 😖 I hate Jack Randall!!! 😞 #OutlanderFinale

— anjams_ (@anjams_) May 31, 2015

https://twitter.com/Elleira92/status/605032380772909057

https://twitter.com/Cosmetologist65/status/605029398098649088

Jamie was begging to be killed at this point #OutlanderFinale

— Mikasa Ackerman (@JusCallMeSash) May 31, 2015

#OutlanderFinale – WOW. You guys are amazing!! Fantastic job!!! @SamHeughan @caitrionambalfe @TobiasMenzies @Outlander_Starz 🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆👏👏👏👏

— Samantha CR (@samanthacr) May 31, 2015

The Wall Street Journal recap described it as “a nearly perfect season finale.”

Variety posed questions to producer Ronald D. Moore:

Male rape is something that’s rarely depicted in mainstream media, and it’s even rarer to see your lead male hero in such a vulnerable position. Obviously that’s a credit to Diana’s novel first and foremost, but how much of a draw was that subject matter and the chance to explore something so foreign to audiences, just from a creative standpoint?

“When I read the book the first time, I was surprised — because that’s not a place you take your lead male hero, and I had never read that before or seen it before. I knew, “OK, if we do this book and we do that and that’s really the end of Season 1, it’s really going to be something,” because that’s just not where you go. So the storyteller in me was really drawn to that like, “Wow, let’s go out on the high wire here. Let’s do something that no one has done and know that it’s tricky territory and there’ll be a lot of criticism one way or the other. But those who dare, so let’s go do it.”

“And we just tried to then approach it with, “OK, we’re going to do this; let’s make it as truthful as possible. Let’s talk about who these characters are. We’re doing this for a reason. What does Jack want? What does Jamie want? What are their vulnerabilities? What are their weaknesses? What are their strengths? How does this game of cat and mouse between them play out? Where is the violence in it? Where is the rape? Where is the breaking?” We really went through it and talked it over and made sure that we were telling a story, we weren’t just trying to show you something that you’d never seen before. This was an organic part of this tale that was in the book, that is an outgrowth of earlier episodes. It’s part of the reason why we spent as much time as we did back in Episode 6 with Jack Randall and Claire. We kept letting him tell us the story of the flogging. Let him tell us about his obsession with Jamie, so that you’re in that character’s mind and you’re starting to lay the track for where this is ultimately going.”

Hollywood Reporter also asks Moore about differences from the novels by Diana Gabaldon:

You must have a lot of feelings about this finale. How did the differences between how this scene went down in the books versus the show come about?

“It was really something. I’m very proud of it; it was a remarkable end to that story. As the book is a first-person narrative all the way to the end, we split the point-of-view starting in episode nine, so that gave us the ability to then, in episode 15, to cut to the story of [Jamie’s] encounter with Black Jack Randall. In the book, everything that happened to him we got related through Claire much later in flashback. So what we were able to do by switching it was play it in real time as Claire’s trying to rescue him. Then, in [the finale], we maintain the fact that it was looking back, his memory, but we’re still in his head, he’s not really telling Claire the story — you go back from his perspective. We also changed the fact that, in the book after they rescue Jamie from Wentworth Prison, they board the ship and sail away to France where there’s a lengthy recovery period. I wanted to maintain the tension that they still had not escaped and left Scotland. So that once you told the tale of Jack and Jamie, you have that moment at the end where you cut outside to the beach, and there’s the ship and you can really take that breath of fresh air, and feel like ‘Ahhhh, I’m outside again, it’s OK.’ You can show a more romantic feeling as they sail away. It lets the show end on this more uplifting note.”