Outlander – the time-travelling drama whose second season came to a dramatic end earlier this year – is doing a Game of Thrones and departing from its source material.

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Speaking to EW, executive producer Ronald D. Moore said that season three would pick up directly after the events of season two. That means it will feature front and centre the historic Battle of Culloden, between the French-backed highlanders and the British army, rather than picking up after the conflicted as depicted in the novel Voyager.

“It just felt like for the TV show, we’ve been promising this for a while and it just felt like we should have something," he said. "We should give the audience some sense of what happened on that moor.

“We’re playing it out more,” he adds, promising that the battle shot in Scotland was “easily one of our biggest set pieces.”

And that’s not the only change from the books. Fans of the novels by Diana Gabaldon will know book three starts with the battle-worn Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) having almost no memory of the 1746 battle. However, the first episode of season three will see (spoilers ahoy!) Fraser duelling his arch enemy Jonathan 'Black Jack' Randall (Tobias Menzies).

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So how long will our wait for new episodes actually be? Outlander is due back in spring next year.

Authors

Thomas LingDigital editor, BBC Science Focus

Thomas is Digital editor at BBC Science Focus. Writing about everything from cosmology to anthropology, he specialises in the latest psychology, health and neuroscience discoveries. Thomas has a Masters degree (distinction) in Magazine Journalism from the University of Sheffield and has written for Men’s Health, Vice and Radio Times. He has been shortlisted as the New Digital Talent of the Year at the national magazine Professional Publishers Association (PPA) awards. Also working in academia, Thomas has lectured on the topic of journalism to undergraduate and postgraduate students at The University of Sheffield.

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