‘Outlander’ EP Ronald D. Moore Talks Emotional Season 2 Finale, What’s To Come In Seasons 3 And 4

The Season 2 finale of Outlander was an emotional ride for fans.

Not only did Jamie (Sam Heughan) kill Dougal MacKenzie (Graham McTavish), but he also said goodbye to Claire (Caitriona Balfe) right before the Battle of Culloden. Thankfully, it appears as though Jamie survived the battle and a reunion is on the way in Season 3.

During an interview with Deadline, executive producer Ron Moore discussed the emotional finale and how it differed from Season 1.

As fans will recall, the first season of Outlander ended with Jamie’s brutal rape at the hands of Black Jack Randall (Tobias Menzies).

“It was certainly intentional what we went for, but I don’t think we set out to set it apart from Season 1,” Moore explained. “It just had its own kind of organic feeling to it. It had a different rhythm and a different kind of overarching idea to what we were doing in the finale this year.”

In speaking to the Hollywood Reporter, Moore added that the final scene with Claire looking at the glowing stones was meant to spark excitement for the coming season.

“We really wanted to set up the promise of season three with that shot. And of course, to make it cinematic,” he stated. “It turned out beautifully, having the show come full circle to Craigh na Dun once more and the fate of the characters and the future of the story depends once more on traveling through those stones. It was a great opportunity to do something really visually powerful and I love how it came out.”

Now that the second season is over, Moore and his team are already preparing for Season 3.

The upcoming season of Outlander is based on Diana Gabaldon’s book, Voyager.

Although Moore diverged from the book a little this season, he assured fans that Voyager is a lot less complicated to adapt.

“Yeah, some things get moved around, but the third book is not nearly the same challenge as the second book is,” Moore said. “Voyager is a little bit more of a straight-ahead narrative and the adaptation process has already proven easier in the writer’s room because the structure is a little bit more straightforward.”

The second season just wrapped and Moore already has the scripts complete for the first three episodes of Season 3.

“The writer’s room is well underway, and we have scripts for the first two, three episodes,” he shared. “We’ve broken up to like Episode 8, 9, or 10, and we’re in that range right now in the writer’s room, which we don’t have formal outlines and all, but we’ve been actively breaking stories.”

Production hasn’t started yet, but Moore promised that filming would commence as early as August.

“So we have a pretty good sense of where the balance of the season is going. We’re in preproduction at the moment. We won’t start shooting again until late August, early September,” he stated.

Voyager features a completely different setting than Dragonfly in Amber, which was largely based in Paris, France. For the most part, Voyager is set on the high seas and contains a lot of sailing scenes.

The new setting is one challenging aspect of Season 3 and might force Moore to look for filming locations outside of Scotland.

“Also, you know, after the sea voyage they end up in Jamaica – which doesn’t look a lot like Scotland either,” Moore noted. “So we are actively scouting other locations and having conversations about where to do both of those things, but our production base will still be primarily in Scotland.”

The next season of Outlander is expected to arrive early in 2017 on Starz.

[Image via Starz]