We start the next book in the Outlander Book Club. The Space Between is a story set in Paris shortly after the events of Ian Murray’s death in the main books.
We start this book in Paris, 30 years after Claire and Jamie left the city. Of course, the past comes up. Grudges can run deep, and they certainly do in this short story. It puts a few people at risk due to the way grudges run.
Breaking down The Space Between Section 1
The section opens in Paris in 1778. Paul Rakoczy is running an experiment on rats. He gives the rats poison, which was given to him by someone named Melisande. Sadly, each rat has died, but then Paul wonders if the last rat is just in a dead-like state.
Paul isn’t just any man. We’ve met him before. He was Comte St. Germain, and we know that meeting him now means that he’ll become a much bigger issue in the story. You see, he still holds a grudge against La Dame Blanche.
As the Comte thinks about the dead-like state the rat could be in, he thinks about the dead-like state he was once in. He thinks back 30 years to when he was in King Louis’s star chamber and he had to drink from the cup that Claire had given him. That led to his dead-like state, but he does remember seeing an intense flare of blue bursting from Claire’s head.
After he was taken to the morgue, the Comte woke up. He stole the clothes off a drowned man, and then he escaped. All in all, it was around 10 hours after his supposed death.
He pulls his thoughts back to the present day. He has heard rumors that “The Frog” is back. We know that Master Raymond was often described as frog-like, so that’s likely who the Comte means.
Could this section be used in an adaptation?
I don’t think that we’ll ever see The Space Between developed into a TV series. There’s little need for it, to be honest. However, if it was, we would need to see this section play out. It gets us caught up on the storyline in Paris and re-introduces us to a character that we’ve long thought dead.
The problem is we wouldn’t be able to get much in the way of exposition. This would need to be shown to us in some way, as we can’t get into the Comte’s mind unless it was done similar to Roger’s voiceover in Outlander season 7B. This could be combined with a later section, then.
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