We're coming up on the second half of the seventh season of Outlander, Starz's epic time-traveling romance. New episodes start dropping on November 22. After that, there's only one more season to go before the series wraps up for good.
But how will it all end? If you're hoping that Diana Gabaldon's Outlander books hold the answer, you're out of luck. For one thing, she's unlikely to have published the tenth and final book in her series, which does not yet have a title, by the time Outlander season 8 premieres on Starz next year. Responding to comments on Facebook, Gabaldon clarified that she's given the producers "a synopsis and pieces for dialogue," but they don't have the full book. And considering that season 8 is already shooting, it's too late to get it.
And even if they had it, there's no way for the producers to fit in the whole of Book 10 into the final season, considering that, according to Gabaldon, the seventh season will get the story only to the end of Book 7, An Echo in the Bone. That leaves three books to adapt in the eighth and final season, which means a lot is getting left out.
"Well, there's only so much I can say about the show," Gabaldon wrote, "but what I can say is that it really won't resemble the end of the book series. Coming into Season 8, the show-runners have/had only ten episodes (rather than the sixteen, say, in Season One)--and material from THREE WHOLE BOOKS to fit into that. Season 7 ends (roughly) with AN ECHO IN THE BONE, leaving WRITTEN IN MY OWN HEART'S BLOOD, GO TELL THE BEES THAT I AM GONE, and BOOK TEN almost untouched."
"Now, in normal circumstances--one book per season--they can fit roughly 10% of the book's content into the show. How much of the (VERY roughly speaking) 1,200,000 words of those three books do you think they can get into ten hours of television?"
Obviously, the answer is "not much." It sounds like fans will have to resign themselves to the idea that the final leg of the Outlander TV show won't much resemble the final leg of the books. "Obviously, they're going to have to cherry-pick some prime scenes/threads to film, and try to fit them into a framework that makes sense for one season, and that they can bring to a reasonably satisfactory conclusion," Gabaldon concluded. "Unhampered by space considerations, I can continue doing whatever I damn well please, and Book Ten therefore will contain a LOT of stuff that the show simply can't."
That said, just because the endings will be different doesn't mean that both the show and the books can't be good. Gabaldon herself is hoping for the best. "I hope y'all will enjoy them both!" she wrote.
Preparing for the end, Starz is working on an Outlander prequel series called Blood of My Blood that sounds like it will premiere before the eighth and final season of the original show, so fans will have something to hold onto. There's no release date for the tenth Outlander book as of yet, but considering Gabaldon's normal release schedule, it's probably a few years off.
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