Outlander Book Club: The Fiery Cross Chapter 19 breakdown

Foreshadowing in the Outlander chapter

The foreshadowing is all about the battles to come. It’s clear that Jamie won’t have a choice. He and his militia will need to face off against the Regulators.

Even if you didn’t know anything about the Battle of Alamance before this, you’d get the sense that something big was coming in this chapter. It’s all setting up this war between friends; people caught on the opposite sides, even if they don’t want to be.

Adapting The Fiery Cross chapter

The chapter wasn’t used in Outlander Season 5. That doesn’t mean we didn’t get the weight of the things to come. I did prefer the way the show did it for visualization. It was easier to feel that weight of things to come with Murtagh being the leader of the Regulators. We’d already come to know Murtagh, and we knew that it was going to be next to impossible for Murtagh and Jamie to fight against each other.

I know a lot of people didn’t agree with Murtagh being the leader of the Regulators. It wasn’t in his character from the earlier seasons. However, 20 years had passed since Culloden. He’d been through life as an indentured servant, and he would have been completely disenfranchised. I could see this development, but I was disappointed that we didn’t even get a flashback and were just briefly told what happened to him.

Of course, Murtagh was killed in the book at Culloden. He wasn’t part of this.

In real life, Herman Husband was the leader of the Regulators, and Diana Gabaldon includes many real people in her novels when necessary. This was one of those cases.

It made sense for the show to mention him but not really delve into his character. The mention was there for those who know their history and the fans of the book. However, Murtagh was the main focus in the Regulators situation on the show, and for a TV series, that’s the way it needed to be. The focus is on the characters we already know, especially when there isn’t a lot of time to explain things and introduce new characters.

What did you spot while reading The Fiery Cross Chapter 19? Let us know in the comments below.

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