Outlander Book Club: Drums of Autumn Chapter 12 breakdown

Foreshadowing in the Outlander chapter

There isn’t too much in terms of foreshadowing here. Claire’s reluctance to call on the slaves and to ask them if they would mind doing something instead of ordering is a small hint of things to come. Claire can’t remain at River Run forever. She can’t own slaves.

However, the foreshadowing is in Ulysses’s storyline. Claire thinks that Ulysses has an eye for her, but that’s not really it. He mistakes Claire for Jocasta while Claire wears Jo’s dress. Jocasta does have a fond memory of the dress after all, and it’s all likely connected.

Ulysses knows that he could get into a lot of trouble. That part of the assessment of the situation isn’t wrong, but it’s who his attention is drawn to that is wrong. There’s more to come with this storyline.

Adapting the Drums of Autumn chapter

The dinner party goes off without a hitch in Outlander Season 4, Episode 2. However, Jocasta does get the chance to announce Jamie as her heir during it. This sparks the conversation about owning a slave, instead of continuing with the next part of the story in the chapter.

What doesn’t happy is JQM’s interruption. Instead, the hernia operation is saved for Episode 8. We see Claire work on one of the men at the theater while Jamie sends a message to Murtagh about a trap. I love the theater moment as it shows that Claire and Jamie are back on the same page. She helps without questioning why.

I also prefer the way JQM became a bigger character on the series. Part of that is to do with loving the character Kyle Rees brought to life, but I also prefer to get to know characters instead of them just popping up for some sort of drama and then disappearing. In both a TV show and a book, I prefer side characters to have a little more meaning to the overall plot or to the main characters.

But why would the show change it? Maybe the writers realized they could do more with JQM. There were chances that they already knew the next storyline to come and the runaway slave Pollyanna was going to change so there needed to be a change to JQM’s storyline. The writers also would have known the bear scene would need to change, and it made more sense to have JQM there as a larger character for it.

What did you spot while reading Drums of Autumn Chapter 12? Let us know in the comments below.

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