Outlander Book Club: Voyager Chapter 26 breakdown

Foreshadowing in the Outlander chapter

There’s a little foreshadowing within this chapter. The first that stands out is Jamie potentially losing his leg. This is something that comes up in The Fiery Cross, and Jamie fights against the idea of losing his leg. Ian knows how Jamie will not cope with the loss of his leg, and Claire has to do everything she can to save Jamie.

Fortunately, in The Fiery Cross, they have Brianna’s engineering skills. They don’t need to use tricks like boiling water in the wound.

Another element of foreshadowing is the Fiend. Bruno says the Fiend has been around for two years. That’s the same amount of time that Yi Tien Cho has been in Edinburgh. While we find out that the two are not directly connected in the end (there’s someone else we need to meet), I do feel this connection foreshadows that we may not be able to trust Yi Tien Cho.

Adapting the Voyager chapter

Let’s start with what did make it into the TV series. Young Ian and Ian Murray did turn up. This happened in the opposite way on the TV show, which immediately gave Claire a look at the lies Jamie was willing to tell. While the book can go into Claire’s thoughts more, the TV series needs to show more through dialogue happening on the screen.

We needed Claire and Jamie to argue more about this on the show, as it shows that Jamie isn’t the man she necessarily remembers. Not fully. Claire brings this up in her thoughts in the book.

Then there’s the bit with the exciseman. It works out very differently on Outlander Season 3, Episode 7. After brunch with the ladies in Episode 6, Claire is attacked by the exciseman in Jamie’s room. He trips and falls, which leads to a brain injury. In Episode 7, Claire spends time trying to save him.

I do appreciate this part of the show. Claire is a surgeon. She would try to save someone because of the oath she took. After all, she didn’t intentionally try to kill him; that was an accident! In the books, it wasn’t an exciseman in the end and it wasn’t the end of Jamie’s smuggling business.

In the show, things had to be contained to the one episode. TV shows work with drama in each episode, and there wasn’t time to continue Jamie’s business in Edinburgh after this episode. The quick sell of the illegal alcohol and stuffing the body of the man in the Creme de Menthe along with the fire in the print shop helped to just quickly wrap up this story and get everyone back to Lallybroch.

What about the moments that didn’t make it? Well, we didn’t get the conversation about Jamie’s scar or how he healed. To be honest, it wasn’t needed for the show. We can imagine that type of conversation happened off-screen.

The whole ending was different, of course, but there was also the removal of the Fiend. This is something I didn’t mind being removed from the story for the TV show. Was there really enough time to do this storyline justice? Definitely not.

To be honest, it wasn’t the most enjoyable part of the story in the books for me. It felt a little like the rape in Paris in Dragonfly in Amber which had to wait until toward the end to wrap up. It was just yet another thing going on that didn’t really add much to the overall story. There were elements that were needed for plot points, but for the supporting characters instead of the main characters.

Keeping the Fiend storyline out of the TV series made a lot of sense to me. It allowed the focus to remain on the more important storylines.

What did you think while reading Voyager Chapter 26? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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