‘Outlander’: Why They Left Out The Hot Springs Book Scene

Ronald D. Moore (Getty)

“Outlander” concluded its first season last Saturday, but for book fans wondering why there was no hot springs scene, there’s a good answer.

The story of Claire and Jamie Fraser on the Starz television series ended with the same reveal as it did in Diana Gabaldon’s book – Claire’s pregnant — but in a different setting. If you haven’t read the book, we won’t spoil the exact details for you, but the final scene took place in a cave/hot springs. During an interview with Executive Producer Ronald D. Moore late last month, Access Hollywood asked about leaving the scene out.

“I mean, first off, it’s really hard to do water on television. It’s really difficult to do that kind of a scene. You’ve gotta build a tank,” Ron said.

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Worse than working with cows, we asked? (They had to build a corridor for the cows’ Wentworth scene, with reinforced walls.)

“Yeah, worse than cows. It’s hard to believe. The cows will come on and then they’ll leave,” Ron said. “And when you’re putting actors in water for a long period of time, there’s health issues, there’s safety issues, now you’ve got to put cameras in the water, you’ve gotta construct this tank,” the EP said of the variables production would have had to deal with.

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“Anything dealing with water is a huge pain in the a** and we just immediately kind of went, ‘We’re not going to be able to tackle this. This will just be like such a logistical nightmare, we don’t want to deal with it.’ It’s one of the reasons you just don’t see a lot of scenes like that or underwater things,” he continued.

“To play that scene, they’d be in that tank for literally hours on end, and it just was like not practical for us,” he said.

“Outlander” Season 2 is currently in production now.

— Jolie Lash