EPISODE 207: FAITH
WRITER:
TONI GRAPHIA 
DIRECTOR: METIN HÜSEYIN
An emotional atom bomb of an episode, “Faith” charts the solitary journey Claire takes from utter devastation to reconciliation and new hope. Writer Toni Graphia says it was a script that evolved dramatically in the course of its birth.
“I called my first draft ‘His Majesty’s Pleasure,’ because I was focusing more on Claire sleeping with the king in the Star Chamber,” Graphia says. “The baby was there, but it was more of the background story. The genius of Ron Moore is that he read the first draft and just said one sentence to me, which is, ‘It’s all about the baby.’ ”
“The little girl in the beginning was Ron’s idea, because he wanted to start the season with Frank and Claire in the fifties. He and I together came up with the scene in the future at a library and she’s showing the heron to the little girl. You see what Claire is losing, because this is the little girl she might have had.”
With that note, Graphia says, she rechanneled all her focus. “There are a lot of elements in the story that were very personal to me, and I thought, Maybe I’m a little afraid to even go there,” she admits. But go there she did, starting the episode with more urgency. “It’s what I call an eighteenth-century ER episode, where there’s triage and it’s crazy as they’re trying to save the baby. I wanted the excitement of that, and I also wanted to see Mother Hildegarde tell Claire she’s lost the baby. It was skipped over in the book, and I struggled for a whole day with how she would say it. That’s when I came up with ‘She’s gone to the angels.’ ”
“ ‘Faith’ was such a beautiful, beautiful episode written by Toni. I cried when I read it and had a moment thinking, Oh my God, I can’t wait to do this, and then, How am I going to do this? It all has to come from your internal life, which is great but also scary, because you don’t know until that moment [you shoot] what is going to come. It is terrifying because you can’t really rehearse, you can’t really do anything. You just have to hope and pray that all of the preparation that you have done will manifest in the right way. After that point, there is a light that has been knocked out of Claire. It’s just so tragic.”
Graphia says her other favorite moment is when Louise arrives to take the baby away. “I figured Claire just wouldn’t let go of that baby,” Graphia says. “She doesn’t want to let go of that baby. She’s almost in a fugue state, and her brain can’t comprehend. I took Diana’s words but put it in the moment where Claire is saying, ‘Look at her. Isn’t she beautiful?’ I think that’s the day that everyone on set cried.”
“I came from Paris the day before I came on the set, and they were already shooting [the miscarriage] scenes. The atmosphere was already there for a long time. It was very strong for me. Cait was beautiful and so strong. I didn’t need so much preparation, as I was prepared very brutally by the environment. We did one rehearsal, and we shot it very fast, actually. The little baby, they did it so real. I had the feeling that I have a real baby, dead in my arms. I wanted to cry. It was so real.”
“I would go up and down the eight or nine different altars in massive Glasgow Cathedral. There was something about sitting in that space—I became very aware that over the hundreds of years of this church existing, you can just imagine how many women would have come looking for solace at the loss of their child or the loss of their husband. I became very aware of this history of grief that existed within the walls of the building. It became a really important source for me in filming those scenes. I felt so lucky and honored just to be able to hold a space for Claire’s grief. I feel like that’s something so many women have gone through, and I have people in my life who have gone through miscarriages. It’s a very painful experience and something that people don’t just get over. I felt very privileged to be able to play that story line.”
Director Metin Hüseyin says directing that entire sequence was brutal but rewarding. “We did [the scenes] as much as we could in story order,” he explains. “My job was to protect Caitriona. She knows what she has to do. I would tell her if it’s too much or too little. She saved the biggest one for the end, when Louise takes the baby from her.”
“Caitriona is an amazing actress,” Graphia adds. “I don’t know how we got lucky enough to have someone of her caliber on the show. In my script, I had way more voiceover. We took out over half the voiceover because her face is so expressive, you can just see it.”
In the last act of the episode, Claire travels to the king’s residence to barter for Jamie’s prison release, which leads to the surprising Star Chamber sequence. “The argument came up in the writers’ room that we should split the episode, one being all baby and then another about the Star Chamber,” Graphia says. “To me, the Star Chamber is an organic part of the trial by fire that Claire has to go through to make this journey to accept the baby’s death and forgive Jamie.”
“The Star Chamber was quite the scene to do,” Hüseyin says. “We shot it over two days. The actors were in it and patient as we worked it through and improved it each time we shot it. The last shot, I put a Steadicam in there and the actors took it to another level and saw it as a fifteen-minute play. It was this amazing performance being done for us, and we shot the whole scene. It was fun and they really enjoyed it.
“The guilt I think Jamie has is just horrendous. He is sort of trapped. He’s put in prison and he knows that Claire is going through all this on her own. It must absolutely tear him to pieces that he caused all this pain, and he is hurting as well but he can never truly understand the pain that she is going through. Caitriona played it so well. She is sort of brittle, hard, yet you can see that she is broken inside.”
“When we did the horrible [assault] scene, I talked his mum through what we were going to do. His mum said, ‘I don’t like this scene,’ and I said, ‘None of us do.’ The only bit that he and Tobias did together is where Tobias throws him on the bed. I’ve done a few things in my career where I’ve been affected by them, and that was one of them, as was the stuff with Cait losing the baby. You can’t help but carry that stuff with you all the time. You can’t turn it on and off.”
“But the scene I’m proudest of is when Jamie comes back,” Hüseyin continues. “It was about working out how we could top everything that we had done. These are two different people now, where they’ve both had time to think about what they’ve done. They’ll never be the same again. They’ll mature with the grief and sorrow into the next stage of their life. I think [Cait and Sam] killed it.”
“It’s the proudest I’ve ever been of anything,” Graphia says. “If I quit writing tomorrow, I’m prouder of that episode than anything in my twenty-five years of writing.”
“I love the fact that Jamie leaves the apostle spoon from Scotland with Faith. It just feels that they leave a bit of themselves behind when they go back to Scotland.”
