‘Outlander’ Author Diana Gabaldon Has Already Confirmed How She Will Avoid the ‘Game of Thrones’ Final Season Curse
Outlander fans are still trying to process the news that the Starz time-traveling drama will be ending with season 8. Without Diana Gabaldon’s tenth and final book, how will the television adaptation of Jamie and Claire Fraser’s (Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe) love story end? Is it possible another Game of Thrones final season curse could be in the works for this beloved fantasy drama? According to the author, that’s not going to happen.
Which books will the final season of ‘Outlander’ cover?
Gabaldon released her first Outlander book more than three decades ago and has continued to publish a subsequent book in the series every few years. The author has made it clear that the saga of Jamie and Claire would last 10 books in total.
Book 9 — Go Tell The Bees That I Am Gone — was released in late 2021. Not long after it was published, Gabaldon confirmed that she was working on the 10th and final book. She also revealed that she knows exactly how Jamie and Claire’s story will end, and she says she’s kept that important detail a secret for more than 20 years. What’s more, she has promised that the mystery of Jamie’s ghost — which was in the pilot — would finally be answered.
Ever since Outlander premiered on Starz nearly a decade ago, one season of the TV drama has been loosely based on the corresponding book in Gabaldon’s literary series. So, the expectation was that the TV series would get 10 seasons. But now that it’s been confirmed the series will end with season 8, how will that impact the ending? How many books will the final season cover?
Will they end the story on TV where book 8 — Written In My Own Heart’s Blood — ended? Could book 9 be part of season 8? Will Gabaldon let producers in on book 10 and allow them to include the ending in the TV series, cramming three books into one season?
Diana Gabaldon has already confirmed how she will avoid the ‘Game of Thrones’ final season curse
The disastrous ending to Game of Thrones is now the stuff of TV legend. As the most popular drama on television throughout the 2010s, the HBO adaptation managed to catch up with author George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novel series in season 7 — and then passed him in the final season before he was able to finish the book The Winds of Winter.
Gabaldon says she feels “very sorry” for “poor George” because of what took place when the HBO series caught up with him.
“He [Martin] then met with the showrunners, and he told them what he was planning to do in that book so that they could then write accordingly,” Gabaldon told The Guardian in 2021. “Only they didn’t write accordingly, they took his stuff, and distorted it, and wrote their own ending, which wasn’t at all what he had in mind but used all the elements that he told them.”
Then, Gabaldon made a bold promise: “They’ll never catch me. I will certainly finish the 10th book before they finish the show.”
‘Outlander’ author Diana Gabaldon is sending mixed messages
Gabaldon was confident that she would be able to avoid the final season curse that took down Game of Thrones. But she made that statement long before Starz announced that season 8 would be the last for Outlander. Besides the fact that Game of Thrones passed Martin’s source material and then strayed from it, the biggest criticism was how badly the end of the story was rushed. And it appears that Outlander is in danger of going down the same path.
Gabaldon still insists that the TV show will never catch her, but will they incorporate her non-published ending into the final season? That appears to be the only way to avoid a Game of Thrones-type disaster.
When asked if the final Outlander book would be published by the time season, 8 premiered — which will likely be in late 2024 or early 2025 — Gabaldon simply wrote, “I doubt it.”
Fans will just have to wait and see if the Outlander showrunners can do something that the Game of Thrones’ bosses weren’t able to pull off successfully.
Outlander Season 7 premieres this summer on Starz.
