Outlander: Blood of My Blood: An Off-Screen Connection Propels Claire's Parents' On-Screen Chemistry

[Warning: Spoilers follow for the two-episode series premiere of Outlander: Blood of My Blood. Read at your own risk!]

What would an Outlander story be without a pair of lost lovers?

It's a question fans won't have to ask themselves as they settle in for Starz's new prequel series, Outlander: Blood of My Blood. In keeping with the tradition of Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Heughan), who were always being separated by some act of God or mortal mob, there's a new pair of lovers left to wander the Scottish Highlands in search of one another.

This time, it is Claire's parents: Julia (Hermione Corfield) and Henry Beauchamp (Jeremy Irvine), a young married couple vacationing in Scotland after World War I. At the end of the premiere episode, the Beauchamps crash their car in a Highland river, get washed downstream, and both step through the time-traveling stones at Craigh na Dun. It's an immediate and seismic twist on the lore of author Diana Gabaldon's books, which established that Claire's parents died when she was five years old in a car crash. Now we know that not only does she come by her time-traveler gene honestly, but she isn't the first in her family to take in the misty mountains of 1700s Scotland.

In the second episode of the two-part premiere, the story flashes back to show how the passionate couple, seen having a very public roll in the grass in their first scene together in the premiere, came to be so deeply in love. Julia was working in the letter office during the war when she came across Henry's written pleas longing for some type of connection while he suffered on the frontlines.

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"Henry and Judy meet at a point where they're both quite lonely in their lives, and Henry's letter is a cry for help," Corfield tells TV Guide. "It's him saying, 'Please, is anyone listening?' And Julia responds to that because she's got a nurturing spirit. She also recognizes in him this artistic kind of sentiment. The way he writes has a lyricism to it, and I think she is enamored by that. Then, when they start actually communicating, they get to know each other on a deeper level and it becomes clear that it's a meeting of minds. It's two souls meeting."

For Irvine, going back to World War I was old hat. Henry's time in the trenches were the first scenes Irvine shot for Blood of My Blood, and he says they conjured memories of another shooting experience from earlier in his career.

"It was the first time that I realized the scale of this production," he says. "The other World War I movie I did was a Steven Spielberg film called War Horse, and it felt very similar in terms of the scale of the set. This massive, enormous set where the trenches were all real and the mud is real, and then you had hundreds of extras and explosions going off all around you. It was just a laugh how big it was."

By the time Henry is back on the homefront and Henry and Judy fall into each other's arms on the most cinematic steps in London, there's nothing they can do but tumble headfirst into marriage and a family. Much like Harriet Slater and Jamie Roy told TV Guide about the parallel love story of Jamie's parents, Ellen MacKenzie and Brian Fraser, in the premiere, their "hearts choose for them."

It isn't a relationship and a marriage without significant challenges from the start. Once they meet, Julia must contend with and help heal, as best she can, the chasm of emotional wounds inflicted upon Henry by the traumas of war. Building that bond, much more quickly than Ellen and Brian are asked to, relies heavily on the long-time friendship between Irvine and Corfield.

"The story works quite well with mine and Hermoine's real relationship," Irvine says. "We've been friends for over 10 years. We know each other very, very well. So that made it a hell of a lot easier because we were very comfortable with each other from the get go. You can fake chemistry, but it's hard work and this was just very effortless."

Outlander is the last franchise you want to fake chemistry in; the fans will sniff out an insincere bond quickly. So building the undeniable relationship between Julia and Henry was key to anchoring them through the tragic wave of everything that comes next.

"I think we needed to find the joy and the lightness and the love in those scenes because things go wrong for them so quickly," Corfield says.

When Julia first stumbles into 1714, she happens upon a ragged couple who kidnap her and sell her into servitude to none other than Lord Lovat (Tony Curran), the cruel father of Brian, who is Jamie's father. This is an incredibly precarious situation for Julia, whose intelligence makes her a threat, like Claire. She does not find a friend in her new boss and his longstanding housemaid Miss Porter (Sara Vickers), who is Brian's mother by force. 

For eagle-eyed viewers, they will have noticed the show slyly introduced Julia in a scene in the first episode, during which her new arrival draws the unwanted attention of Lovat. Similarly, Henry's new station in 1714, as bladier of the Grant family, is first teased in the premiere when he attends a gathering of families at Castle Leoch, the home of the MacKenzies. There, he brushes paths with Ellen, who is resisting her brothers' attempt to marry her off to the Grant family for political and financial gain.

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Immediately, Henry is in desperate pursuit of Julia, but he has literally nothing but his wits to go on as a man out of time. Even those get him in trouble though, when he advises the Grants in a land deal without their consent, forcing him to accept the position of bladier or face their wrath.

Something else dragging Henry down is the lingering impact of his PTSD from World War I, something that the intolerant past is only likely to agitate. Julia is seen confronting and cradling him in their early years together, but without that stability, the effects of the past don't bode well for Henry.

"He's got a lot of battles that he's fighting, internally and externally," Irvine says. "The one thing that saved him in the past is Julia, and she is someone that he can't live without. Even the thought of living without her is completely unbearable. So the battle of him trying to manage his own psychological state is something he will deal with all season. But the thing pushing him forward is just knowing that he's got to get back to her. He's got to get back to her, for her sake and his."

Julia and Henry are, perhaps, the biggest question mark ever raised by the Outlander TV universe because it is the one unwritten part of Gabaldon's world. She advised the team behind the prequel based on her plans for Julia and Henry, who were thought to have died tragically but were far removed from the main story, up until recently — a story she is in the process of writing. But Corfield says she finds a thrill in being part of the new series' blindspot.

"I talked to Jeremy a little bit about how we're the uncertainty factor," she says. "We can die at any moment. We're not safe."

Outlander: Blood of My Blood is now streaming on Starz. Seasons 1-7 of Outlander are also streaming on Starz.