Outlander Book Club: Voyager Chapter 54 breakdown
Foreshadowing in the Outlander chapter
The foreshadowing in this chapter connects to Temeraire. Claire and Jamie need to figure out a way to free him. It’s clear that a way will eventually come up.
In the show, this happens differently. In Voyager, the pirates boarding the ship have everything to do with Claire and Jamie finding an option. We eventually meet another slave, who knows of a place for Black men and women to head when they escape their masters.
I also think there’s an element of foreshadowing that there’s a lot Jamie either still doesn’t remember or doesn’t want to remember about Culloden. Some of that is going to come up at later stages. He thinks of it when something happening at the time connects directly with something that happened at Culloden. Jamie doesn’t talk about Culloden unless he feels like he needs to.
Adapting the Voyager chapter
The chapter was only partly used on Outlander Season 3, Episode 12. A lot of this was to do with time. There simply wasn’t enough time for the Frasers to island hop during the end of the season. That meant putting the slave market on Jamaica.
The show kept Claire’s reaction at the slave market the same. The writers also kept her reaction to owning a slave the same. While the show didn’t have time to go into why Temeraire couldn’t be taken back to Africa, Jamie did make it clear that freeing him just randomly in Jamaica wasn’t going to be safe.
Instead of the pirates boarding the ship to save time, the writers found another way for Temeraire to find out how he could be freed. It removed a character who could have a direct connection to Joe Abernathy, but that’s it. For the show, that connection isn’t necessary. After all, we didn’t have the Ishmael moment with Joe in the series that the book had at an earlier point.
The deep cut would come up later in the book leading to the epic turtle soup scene. The show managed to find a way to keep that in without the pirates.
All of this was done to condense the most important moments from the book into the series. For me, it worked. We didn’t need the pirates boarding the Artemis. Like some other times the drama has been included, this just felt like drama for the sake of drama. Sure, it happened, but that doesn’t mean it always has to be used in fiction. Space out the drama and save stuff for later.
It would have all been way too much for a TV show. So many show-first fans would have just screamed “get on with it!” It would have felt like this part was being dragged out for the sake of it instead of being contained to the main drama that is saving Young Ian. With that in mind, I’m glad the writers opted to keep the pirates out of it.
Of course, everything that mentioned Murtagh was skipped over because Murtagh didn’t die at Culloden. However, the writers did bring the “it doesna hurt a bit to die” into the story in Outlander Season 5, and I preferred seeing it all play out instead of just being told about it.
What did you spot while reading Voyager Chapter 54? Let us know in the comments below.
Like Claire and Jamie on Facebook for the latest from the Outlander Book Club and much more.