‘Outlander: Blood of My Blood’ Showrunner Confirms an "Intense Roller Coaster" Ahead in Season 2

Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Outlander: Blood of My Blood Season 2, Episode 4.

Summary

• Season 2 of 'Outlander: Blood of My Blood' delivers big answers, new questions, and intense high-stakes reveals.
• Brian and Ellen's bond deepens as her pregnancy raises urgent, dangerous stakes.
• Julia and Henry grapple with PTSD, betrayal, and Seema's threat as war looms.

In the second season of the Starz series Outlander: Blood of My Blood, relationships will be tested as family bonds are strengthened. Brian Fraser (Jamie Roy) has had to form a shaky alliance with Dougal MacKenzie (Sam Retford) in order to survive the warring clans during the 1715 Jacobite Rising and return home to his now pregnant love Ellen (Harriet Slater). At the same time, Henry Beauchamp (Jeremy Irvine) made it back to Julia (Hermione Corfield), but the reveal of his infidelity, the threat of Lord Lovat (Tony Curran), and her drive to reunite with Claire have pushed her to the edge. As challenges continue to push all the couples, showrunner Matthew B. Roberts promises an intense roller coaster where anything could get ripped away before Season 2 concludes.

Collider recently got the opportunity to chat with Roberts and executive producer Maril Davis about the evolution of the relationships and where things are headed. During the interview, they discussed how hard it will be for Julia and Henry to work through everything, dealing with Seema (Lauren McQueen), the fun chemistry between Dougal (Sam Retford) and Maura (Bobby Rainsbury), and the stakes of Ellen’s pregnancy.

‘Outlander: Blood of My Blood’ Season 2 Will Provide Answers and Have Big Reveals

"I certainly want to ask a whole bunch of new questions."

COLLIDER: You ended last season with a cliffhanger, and then you gave us some answers at the start of Season 2 while also raising new questions. What are the major questions that you wanted to answer with this second season?

MATTHEW B. ROBERTS: Our job is to answer questions and then engender new ones. With a cliffhanger, for me personally, I don’t like to string them out all the way through the season. Certainly, the fans have waited a while before they get to see the new season, so I want to give them some immediate answers to what has happened, but I certainly want to ask a whole bunch of new questions. We want the fans to ask a whole bunch of new questions. What’s going to happen next and who’s going to do what? I think that’s really important too. I think there’s going to be a lot of questions and answers as we go and a lot of big reveals. You’re going to see a lot of fun people. Maybe fun isn’t the right word.

We knew at the end of last season that things were going to be perilous for Brian and Ellen this season. Do you think it’s harder for them to know what they’re going to be facing, as opposed to last season when they never seemed to really know what they had to overcome? They seem to have more of a sense this season of what they have to deal with.

MARIL DAVIS: I think so. Who knows what’s going to happen this season and whether they’re going to be together or apart, but they know they’re in it together. I think that’s the difference. If you have a partner and you know that no matter what the cost, the most important thing is the two of you, it’s easier to face some of these things. Before, they were on their own and it was unknown. That’s the difference. They’re fighting for each other.

Their relationship definitely feels like it has a different vibe because they’re a solid team now.

ROBERTS: The biggest difference is, when we started Season 1, they didn’t even know about each other, so they’ve accepted what they’re going to be. Ellen accepts that maybe she’ll run Leoch for her brother, and Brian accepts his role as being the bastard son of Lovat and doing his daily chores and whatever is called upon. And then, they find each other and all that changes because now they both want something and they want to be together. That will drive them for the rest of their lives.

Henry and Julia Have a Lot To Process With Their Relationship in ‘Outlander: Blood of My Blood’ Season 2

"There's no real cure for Henry, but what alleviates his PTSD is the love of his family, the love of Julia, and Claire."

Image via Starz

I can’t imagine everything that Julia and Henry have been through. They’ve been separated twice, she’s been forced to be a part of Lord Lovat’s life, he’s had his brain scrambled in an asylum, and now Julia knows that Henry was with another woman. How do they come back from all of this and get on the same page again? What is it like to be able to use this show to get to explore mental health in ways that you haven’t had a chance to before?

ROBERTS: That’s a really good question. A lot of times, when you see a show do something about mental health, they’ll let it go. What we really decided to do was continue it. There’s no real cure for Henry, but what alleviates his PTSD is the love of his family, the love of Julia, and Claire. One of the big factors of telling that part of the story this season was taking part of that love away from him to see how it affected him and then how he gets it back.

DAVIS: We talked about that a lot in the writers’ room as well. In terms of the events of Episode 4, how she processes and hears about Henry’s betrayal and his struggle and why is a lot to process. Had war not been on their doorstep and had all these things not been so pressing, it would be easy to wallow in that and not be able to forgive. That fact that she’s like, “Come back to me. I understand.” To say, “We don’t have the luxury of time to be able to be angry about this or to get into a huge thing about it,” I think it’s really interesting in a different way than some people would have betrayed it.

I actually think it’s really interesting that we don’t just move on from Seema after last season because that is also a huge complication. Aside from the fact that Julia now has to get past the knowledge she has about Henry, Seema also just seems mentally unwell. We’re left at the end of Episode 4 with this moment where Julia doesn’t know where William and Davina are. What can you say about what we can expect from that this season, for Julia and Henry, individually, but also for their relationship and for them as parents?

ROBERTS: Julia has the bigger picture perspective. I’m not saying that Henry doesn’t, but when you see the scenes with Henry and Julia, she knows the trauma that she’s had to endure just to get to that place where she meets Henry again, so she can put herself in his shoes. When he says, “I wasn’t with her, I was with you,” she has all that history. She has five or six years of Henry prior to that moment. She knows the struggles that he’s gone through and what the war has caused. There’s so much empathy that she has, and that’s why she says, almost immediately, “Oh, I’ll forgive you. That’s a done deal because you’re standing here in front of me and it’s bigger than us.” What I like about their journey together is that they’re able to put those things aside and go, “We are bigger than the events that keep trying to yank us apart.”

There’s still something definitely not right with Seema.

ROBERTS: A lot of characters in Outlander have never had before. Henry was kind. He didn’t take from her. He didn’t want to her. That became whatever she turned that into in her head, and do you really blame her? She’s very similar to the Leary character. Where we see one thing, she sees another thing. It’s not necessarily unfair to think that there’s something wrong with her. It’s just that that want overtakes reason.

Dougal and Maura’s Relationship Really Evolves in ‘Outlander: Blood of My Blood’ Season 2

"They have so much fun and they have a great chemistry together."

Image via Starz

It’s not often that we get a sex scene with some actual humor and a bit of a laugh on the show, so it was fun to see the scene in Episode 2 between Dougal and Maura when they get interrupted with the fruit on the table. Did you always intend for that scene to have that sense of humor to it? Did that evolve out of how it was played? What was it like to just get to have some fun?

DAVIS: We always look to have unique perspectives on intimate scenes. It was always scripted. The writers came up with a great scene with Mrs. Fitz interrupting them, which was just so much fun, and Sally [Messham] was so good. We also explored that with Bobby [Rainsbury] and Sam [Retford], in their portrayal of Dougal and Maura. We’re so excited to have people see them this season and see that couple’s evolution because it’s uniquely different than our other two couples. They have so much fun and they have a great chemistry together. They can have sexy scenes that are fun and playful and just electric. That is one of my favorite scenes in the show, actually. It’s fun. We rarely get to see Dougal laugh, so it was a unique opportunity.

I loved getting to see Ellen lead and work with the women of Leoch. It’s under horrific circumstances, but it’s pretty great to see them team up together and work against MacKinney. What do you think it was like for Ellen to not only decide to go after all these men, but to really follow through with that plan? How did it feel to make her a little assassin and to have her actually be good at it?

ROBERTS: Part of the journey of that episode is showing the flashbacks as well, to show that her father had always trained her and schooled her to be more than what people would initially see. MacKinney’s downfall is that he only sees her as a woman in her place, to his detriment. That was the fun of it. We always say that we don’t have strong female characters, we have strong characters. Some of them just happen to be female, but some of them are male, and we have weak male characters on the show. They’re defending what they love. You don’t see it in the background, but there’s probably a lot of children and people there. You don’t want to get between a mama lion or bear and her cubs. That’s what this home is to them and they defend it, and MacKinney finds out.

Knowing that Brian and Ellen have forged this bond that will last forever because she’s pregnant now, how will that guide things for them this season? How big a part of their decisions will that be?

ROBERTS: It’s massive. There are so many stakes attached to her pregnancy, and it plays out over the course of the season. With a lot of things in Outlander, you can have joy in one minute and it could be ripped away from you in the next. If I was giving a warning to the audience, I would say that this is a pretty intense roller coaster ride. Before you get on, be prepared. Once it grabs you, you’re going to want to ride it again and again, trust me.

Brian and Dougal Have an Uneasy Truce in ‘Outlander: Blood of My Blood’ Season 2

"Bygones are not bygones with [Dougal]."

Image via Starz

It feels like Brian and Dougal could be good allies for each other, if Dougal could just get over hating Brian when he doesn’t actually really know him. What can you say about their uneasy friendship? Will we get to see more of that?

DAVIS: It’s an uneasy truce. It’s like, “We’ll put away our weapons for now, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to come back around.” Certainly, for Dougal, bygones are not bygones with him. But it is fun to see them on the field together, getting ready to fight, and we’ll see where that will go.

Colum always makes me want to hate him, but at least he's being a little bit more honest now, so I feel like I have to respect that a little bit.

ROBERTS: With all the characters this season, it opened up the story because we didn’t have to explain everything like we did in Season 1. You get to spend more time with them as characters and you get to understand more of their depth, what makes them tick, and what hurts them. You’ll find that in Colum, Dougal, Murtaugh, Jocasta, and a lot of the characters.

Outlander: Blood of My Blood airs on Starz.