Outlander shocks with taboo scenes

Warning: This post contains details of latest episode S2E7 “Faith.”

By any measure last night’s episode of Outlander was the most compelling of the season so far.

Watching Catriona Balfe’s handling of scenes involving the death of Claire’s baby was moving stuff, all before she submitted herself to the French king, in order to secure Jamie’s release.

But it was surely the sexual assault of a child, Fergus, that was the most explosive scene of the episode.

Outlander has never shied away from harrowing, horrific scenes, but there are few programmes that dare to depict such trauma on television.

Variety discussed elements of the episode with writer Toni Graphia.

Variety: Rape is obviously a very overused plot device on television, and it’s a subject that can be triggering for a lot of people, but dealing with the assault of a child is a particularly sensitive issue. Does that add pressure to the writing process?

Graphia: I don’t think we feel the pressure because it’s not like we’re trying to do it in any certain way. What it is, is really the freedom to do it the way that it really should be done; our hats are really off to Starz for that because they allow us. A lot of people look at that book and go, “They’re never going to let them put this on TV.” And it wouldn’t be on network TV and I’ve worked in network TV for a long time before cable, and I loved it when I did it and it was great, but in cable you do have this freedom.

And so it’s not like we have to really think about it, it’s more like someone just took the leash off and said, “Go for it.” And so then we’re just doing what you would normally do, like this is what we’d normally do, we’re not manufacturing and it’s coming from just the reality of that. We couldn’t show this [on network], we couldn’t show maybe a dead baby or the rapes, but we trust the audience. People can handle this. I thought people would totally freak out over the rape scenes, and friends of mine, they would just call and say like, “Well, I white-knuckled it through that one.” And I think that struck me as a good way to put it because I think people can handle it.

And I think even in this episode, the Fergus…there was one reviewer last week who was like, “I commend Outlander that they had the grace not to show what happened to Fergus, that they just showed the red coat and they cut away, and that’s all we need to see.” And I was like, “Oh, no. Oh, man. They’re going to freak out next week,” because we do show it. But I felt it was important to show it and believe me, we didn’t want to show a child getting attacked. We were all very sensitive about that, but we need to see why Jamie would have betrayed Claire and broke his promise. If we didn’t see what happened, we can imagine it in the book, that’s what the book’s for, but on TV you’ve got to see it, and we didn’t show anything gratuitous but it was like when you see that, your blood boils. When you watch it and your anger goes up and you think, “This is what Jamie felt.” This was the something that was important enough to break his vow to Claire and tear apart this marriage and lose their baby over, because he was not going to allow this injustice to happen to this kid that he loved. And that’s why we love Jamie and that’s why he’s the King of men. So we can’t have people being like, “You can’t show this on TV,” because this happens today, in today’s world and people should be aware of it. We did the emotion of it, not the logistics of it, and that’s why we filmed it kind of impressionistically.