Why ‘Outlander’ Book Fans Will Love the ‘Blood of My Blood’ Spinoff
Outlander: Blood of My Blood filming is officially underway in Scotland and with it comes the love stories of Claire’s (Caitriona Balfe) parents and Jamie’s (Sam Heughan) parents.
Chronicling the romances set in World War I England and the 18th-century Scottish Highlands, the show will explore two very different time periods, which eventually come crashing together with the help of Claire’s time-traveling abilities when she takes a fateful trip to Inverness. While the original television series is based on Diana Gabaldon‘s books, some fans may wonder how this spinoff will live up the franchise.
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Well, Gabaldon put minds at ease when we spoke to the author in April 2023 for Outlander‘s Deluxe Collector’s Edition Issue as she revealed her own involvement in the prequel spinoff. “I will be writing a script for the prequel and also one for Season 8,” Gabaldon said in reference to Blood of My Blood and Outlander‘s final season. But her involvement doesn’t stop there.
“I am, in fact, writing the first bit of the prequel volume at the moment,” Gabaldon shared last year, hinting that her own writing will continue to serve as the inspiration behind the new show, even if fans haven’t seen the volume in question yet. Working on Outlander‘s tenth book, another Lord John Grey entry at the same time, Gabaldon noted, “I rarely work on one thing at a time, unless we get really close to a deadline, in which case I drop everything else and finish.”
“I talked with the production people and they sent me their general outline, their synopsis for what they think the prequel season might look like. Now, that was very preliminary, and things can change,” she added. Clearly, some things did change as Blood of My Blood was originally only going to follow Jamie’s parents. Could Gabaldon’s writing have influenced the inclusion of Claire’s parents? Only time will tell, but it’s certainly something to ponder.
“But I have seen [it and] told them what I thought about this, that, and the other,” Gabaldon recalled. “There are some parts that will go directly with the book that I’m writing, and then there are other parts that they want to write that I don’t want to write, but I have no problem with them doing it,” she clarified.
“It’s just a constant back and forth, and as I say, they’re subject to a lot of constraints that I’m not,” she pointed out. But her words should put fans’ minds at ease knowing that at the end of the day, Gabaldon is still a key contributor to the fabric of Outlander‘s television legacy as it looks ahead to the prequel following Ellen MacKenzie (Harriet Slater), Brian Fraser (Jamie Roy), Julia Moriston (Hermione Corfield), and Henry Beauchamp (Jeremy Irvine).
Outlander: Blood of My Blood, TBA, Starz
