For Fans of the Outlander Books and Show

There are a number of small changes from the source material, none of which annoyed me, but there were two major ones. I can't say they upset me -- but I don't know why they felt a need to change events.

The first really obvious one is the incident wherein Fergus loses his hand. As we book readers know, in Voyager, Fergus is intercepted by red coats one day when he is bringing a cask of ale up to Jamie hiding in his cave. Jamie watches in frustration and then horror as Fergus taunts the soldiers, insulting them in gutter French and waggling his backside at them. Four of the soldiers run after him and one takes his sword out and brings it down, probably aiming for the cask, but instead he slices off Fergus' hand. Jamie sees Fergus' hand lying in the mud and he faints. The cask falls into a burn below the hill, thus giving the place the name "Leap o' the Cask".

None of this is really critical to the overall plot of the story -- Fergus loses his hand either way -- but it is something that comes up when Bree and Roger are doing research trying to find out if Jamie is still alive after Culloden. They reference Leap o' the Cask because it's part of the Dunbonnet legend. Also, in a later book, I think Written in my Own Heart's Blood, it finally dawns on Roger that the Leap 'o the Cask incident was Fergus -- he hadn't previously connected the two, and it's quite poignant when he does realize that it was Fergus. I really don't know why they felt a need to do things differently here.

The other major change was having Mary take the blame for 1) having a gun and 2) firing it. I can understand why the decision was made to give Mary McNab more prominence in the episode -- in the novel, she's largely background furniture until the scene in the cave with Jamie. It wouldn't have worked well TV-wise (and for non-book readers) to see some random servant they barely noticed in the show do what Mary does at the end. However, by making Mary the key player in the scene with the red coats after Jenny's given birth to Ian, we lost the book scene where wee Jamie overhears Jenny telling them that the babe was stillborn and Young Jamie believes this to be true and flies into a grief-filled rage. It is his behavior that drives the soldiers away and prevents his uncle from being discovered. Again, I sort of understand why they needed to give Mary a larger role, but I don't think they needed to change this bit, and it would have been good to see wee Jamie drive off the nasty red coats.

Again, neither of these changes have any really major plot impact (unlike the Laoghaire thing in 208), but they felt unnecessary to me and I sort of wish they had followed the source material in these instances.