Could Outlander Season 3 have told the story with time flashes?

One thing I didn’t feel like we got was a lot of focus on the characters’ growths in the 20 years. Could Outlander Season 3 have done things differently?

Outlander Season 3 had a difficult task. A lot of “Voyager” takes place with Claire and Jamie separated by time. While the TV show offered some of that, it couldn’t spend too long because viewers just wanted Claire and Jamie back together.

Sadly, there was a lot of storyline missed out from the 20-year separation. It didn’t feel fulfilling ot me, especially when it came to Claire’s journey through med school. We could have had more focus on Claire and Joe being the outcasts in med school, putting Claire back into the world of being a Sassenach in a place she belongs so well.

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Instead of working in the linear fashion that the show did, could the series have told the story slightly differently to the books? I don’t mean change the books, but change the way the timeline is told.

Rather than working from A to B from Culloden to the reunion, could the show have opted for a series of flashbacks. This would have allowed Claire and Jamie to be reunited rather quickly but allowed some strategic storytelling in the lead-up to that point.

Personally, I would have left the premiere alone. There was absolutely nothing wrong with that episode. It fit together perfectly with Jamie’s flashes to the actual battle as he laid on the battlefield bleeding out. Claire’s story with Frank in 1948 also worked just right seeing how they were distant but started to come together at the end.

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It’s after this point that a series of time flashes could have worked. We could have seen Claire learning about Jamie at Ardsmuir as we saw Jamie doing his time there in a series of flashes of Jamie telling Claire what happened. As Claire worked on saving the life of the man who attacked her, we could have seen her go through med school and take her oath that meant the world to her.

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Using time flashes could have kept Tobias Menzies in the series for longer. It could have also possibly helped to give us more time with Brianna and Roger, adding them in throughout all 13 episodes instead of only up to Episode 5 and then moving solely in the past—I feel we needed more of them later in Outlander Season 3 to get to know them better before Season 4.

Maybe the showrunners looked at doing Season 3 like this and it didn’t work in the end. However, I’m curious as to whether we needed a linear progression of the 20-year separation or we could have had a series of flashes to help piece together the two storylines.

Ranking the Outlander Season 3 episodes from worst to best. dark. Next

Would you have liked to see Jamie and Claire reunited at the start of Outlander Season 3? Do you think time flashes would have been better throughout the season? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Outlander Season 5 premieres on Feb. 16 on STARZ.

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Could Outlander Season 3 have told the story slightly differently with time flashes?

By Alexandria Ingham | Sep 17, 2019

One thing I didn’t feel like we got was a lot of focus on the characters’ growths in the 20 years. Could Outlander Season 3 have done things differently?