When we were first doing scenes with Laoghaire in Season 1, we always had to keep an eye on the fact that, eventually, Jamie and Laoghaire were going to be married. That’s why we brought Laoghaire back for a scene in Season 2. I pushed very hard on that, because one of the changes we made in Season 1 was that Laoghaire was more complicit in setting up the whole witch trial, which wasn’t in the books. And so, given that Laoghaire was now set up as someone who knowingly and deliberately set up Claire to be killed, it just felt like too much ground to cover, too big of a leap, to go from that to Jamie’s marrying her. We don’t have to completely redeem her, but at least let’s open the door to redemption.

So when Claire tells Jamie to forgive Laoghaire someday, it’s not as crazy an idea. You need to get to the place where you can at least see that maybe something happened in those 20 years, and we started to move toward this idea that what was really behind Jamie’s marrying Laoghaire was his desire to have a family and be a father.

We realized, after losing one daughter in Paris and sending his other child away with Claire to the future, there’s an empty part of him. He wants to wake up from the nightmare he’s been in all these years. He wants to come back to the land of the living. And then comes this perfect night, this magical night — Hogmanay, which is the Scottish version of New Year’s — and there are these girls, and he’s caught up in that moment of being a father figure, having paternal feelings. And Laoghaire appears, out of nowhere, like she’s the ghost of Christmas Past. From there, we kind of justified the marriage.

We know before Claire does. We’re clued in, before it explodes.

We went back and forth in the writers’ room about the “how” and the “when” and the “why.” The fundamental thing we wrested with was when — when is he going to tell her? It’s a structural argument, because it blows up the rest of the print shop episode. As soon as she walks into the print shop, and he accepts that she’s actually back, there should be an alarm going off in his head: “I married Laoghaire. How am I going to tell her?” The Jamie Fraser that we know had better get this out in the open, and quickly. And Claire opens the door for that. In all versions — in our version, in the book version — she basically says, “Did you ever fall in love with somebody else?”