Starz

When asked what he feels was most important in going about these scenes in a responsible way, Moore says: "There was a long buildup to it. We knew it was coming, so we spent a fair amount of time in the writers' room talking about the script and then once we had the scripts we set aside extra rehearsal time for the actors and the directors to go off and work by themselves. We had a lot of conversations with the actors going through the entire arc. ‘What does Jack want in this scene? What does Jamie want? What are their vulnerabilities? Where is the moment of violence going to happen? Where are we going to have quieter moments?' We just approached it professionally and I said, ‘We're going to try to tell this story as truthfully as we can. This is a story of these two men, and let's just play it. Let's not flinch from what it is, but let's not glorify it at the same time.' You have to watch it as you're creating it in those terms. For me internally, as I was cutting the show, if there was a point where I couldn't watch it anymore, then I know we had gone too far. I didn't want to lose the audience. I don't mind upsetting the audience. I don't mind making them uncomfortable. That's fine. That's a part of drama. But I don't want to lose them. So the only way I could keep track of that was my own sense of, ‘When would I stop watching?' I always pull back from that line. But on the other side, I always try not to shy away from that and cheat it and make it so that it's prettier than it should be. You're trying to find this perfect balance between those two thoughts."

"Perfect," of course, is open to interpretation. But it seems that Outlander has done something pretty unbelievable in its execution of what was arguably the most difficult source material ever for television: Doing the darkest part of the books justice without seriously turning off viewers for good, and even making fans more excited for season two.

—Additional reporting by Sydney Bucksbaum

Twitter: Follow @kristindsantos for more Outlander and Game of Thrones scoop