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We know when many of the Outlander characters die, but the Blood of My Blood prequel will show how they lived says the showrunner for both series
Never let something like established canon get in the way of telling a great story.
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Prequels are always challenging to do well. After all, we already know what happens to these characters, right? Who lives, who dies, and who gets their happy ending? So, how can the writers really surprise us? In the case of Outlander: Blood of My Blood, it is about filling in the blanks in the original stories and focusing on their lives rather than the circumstances of their deaths.
One big example of this balancing act is the character of Ellen Fraser, who is already dead by the time the original Outlander series begins. According to Michael B. Robers, showrunner and executive producer for both Outlander and Blood of My Blood, the trick is to expand the world and the story without undoing established narrative. “They’re mentioned in the book as they got in a car accident and died and that’s as much as we hear about Ellen,” he explained in a recent interview. “And we know Ellen and Brian and Dougal and Colum and Murtagh, we’ve seen all their deaths on camera. So we know when they die. But I don’t think that hampers us at all because the way we tell stories both on Outlander and Blood of My Blood is the how story, not the if story.”
This isn’t just a problem with prequels, of course. Anyone who has read the original Outlander Books knows what is happening through most of the series – at least until it reached its own Game of Thrones moment in season seven. “So when Jamie and Claire are up on the ramparts at Fort William and they jump off and they’re escaping the Redcoats, we know they live, there’s another four other books, five other books at that point. So we know they live, it’s how do they get out of that? How do they survive that? That’s day one of Outlander. So the same thing applies on Blood of My Blood is we know when all these characters die, [but] how do they live? How do they get to these places? How do they become the characters they become in Outlander?”
Outlander: Blood of My Blood starts exploring the How of the story when it returns to Starz on August 8, 2025.
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