WARNING: This article contains spoilers from Outlander season 7

Outlander enthusiasts are still grappling with the shocking revelations of the seventh season’s finale, which unveiled that Faith Fraser was indeed alive, contradicting earlier hints of her demise. This narrative twist diverges significantly from Diana Gabaldon’s original novels, but it does align with a concept the author had for an unrealised graphic novel.

As viewers eagerly anticipate the arrival of the eighth season and try to wait out another Droughtlander, some have revisited the Faith Fraser storyline from the second season. What might surprise fans is that due to the ambiguous nature of Master Raymond’s (portrayed by Dominique Pinon) abilities in the books, the show’s writers had to deviate from the original text.

In the seventh episode of the second season, titled Faith, Master Raymond clandestinely enters L’Hôpital des Anges to heal Claire Fraser (Caitríona Balfe), who is on the brink of death and delirious following her devastating loss of her baby. This scene required modification from its depiction in the novel Dragonfly In Amber to make it suitable for television.

Executive producer Ronald D. Moore and writer Toni Graphia discussed these significant changes from the source material on The Official Outlander Podcast at the time, reports the Scottish Daily Express.

Moore elucidated, “This was a tricky scene to translate from the book. It’s a really great piece of writing. You read the book of Master Raymond coming in and healing Claire, it’s pretty compelling but it’s very internal. It’s all told completely from Claire’s point of view, from her delirious mind’s point of view. It’s a lot of metaphor, crystals and crystal spheres cracked and his healing hands.

“It’s a mixture of medicine and magic,” contributor Graphia chimed in.

Moore elaborated further: “And it was hard to literalise that in this scene. But I think eventually we got to the place where it all does come through.”

Additionally, the creative team were keen on maintaining the thematic presence of the color blue from the original novels, mirroring how in the books Master Raymond informs Claire about his ability to see auras, with both their auras radiating a healer’s blue hue.

In aligning with this, the episode incorporated symbolism through the image of a blue heron, representing Claire’s loss of her unborn child—a poignant piece of visual storytelling that opens with Claire in the 1960s showing young Brianna Fraser (Niamh Elwell) a library book featuring the bird.

Graphia said, revealing a creative decision: “I used the blue heron which was not in the book. It was actually trying to come up with something for the Master Raymond scene in the book. It’s beautiful in the book how blue is the colour, how his hands glow blue, the room is blue.

“We knew we couldn’t really show that on camera without a lot of special effects, so I’d come up with the heron as a way to show that this is what she imagines as she’s escaping the horror of what’s happened to her there as she’s losing the baby. She just fixates on a memory of this heron flying because blue is carrying her away, carrying her pain away.”

Moore further elaborated: “We spent a lot of time in [post-production] trying to figure out how we were going to do the bird and how literal the bird would be in the room. Did Claire literally see the bird flying inside the hospital? Was it an animated kind of thing out of the [library] book? “.

“We went through many iterations before we came upon a much cleaner and simpler [image], it’s just a bird flying in the sky that kind of fades into the scene and then down to Claire.”

Graphia mentioned that the nod to the novel, when Master Raymond also mentioned Claire’s aura was blue like the Virgin Mary, was incorporated through statues of the Biblical figure, including one which was smashed. “I grabbed onto that and wanted to make the Virgin Mary as somewhat of a motif,” Graphia said.

The Virgin Mary statue was also featured in the closing shot of Faith, where Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire bid farewell to Faith in the cemetery.

Another pivotal moment in the Faith episode that diverged from the novels was when Claire learned about the death of her baby – a scene not present in the source text. Graphia explained that she spent considerable time deciding how Mother Hildegarde, played by Frances de la Tour, would break the devastating news of the child’s passing to Claire, ultimately choosing the poignant phrase that Faith had “joined the angels”.

Outlander is streaming on MGM+ via Prime Video now