“Turtle soup” is a code word among Outlander fans. Just say it, and mischievous grins will purse lips, eyes will open wide, and giggling will escape from throats. “Turtle soup” is one of the spiciest moments of Outlander book three, Voyager. Long before the airing of Season 3, producers had reassured and teased their audience, announcing that a whole episode, the eleventh, would be entitled “Turtle Soup”. This was a bit exaggerated, though, for funny and tantalizing as it can be, turtle soup’s not so important within the story, whereas usually the episode titles are attributed to a plot’s key element. That’s why the title was later changed to “Uncharted”. Even so, the message to the audience had been made pretty clear, and has been kept in the episode’s opening frames, where a (very alive) turtle floats in the sea. How was “turtle soup” adapted from page to screen, then? In a nutshell, briefer, more playful, less sexy (make no mistake: not not sexy. Just: less sexy than in the book).
The scene’s focal point, as Diana Gabaldon has described it in Voyager, is that the soup has a very powerful turn-on effect on Claire. Not just for the meat of the poor animal, regrettably well known for its putative aphrodisiac effects, but mainly for the great amount of spirits used during the cooking. Suddenly impassioned by the dish, Claire therefore starts to make indecent proposals to her husband, and finds him – mind – quite reluctant to give way to sex. Jamie does resist – in the book. He truly doesn’t want to make love, for Claire has a fever, a wounded arm, and he’s not at ease with having sex on ships, fully aware that anybody may hear them. So he starts a skirmish with her, answering her provoking words without denying the fact of being aroused, but ruling out the possibility of satisfying her in that very moment. Claire finds herself in the position of having to convince him, then. And to get it done she uses a weapon well known to every woman – a weapon which seldom misses the target. She falls on her knees in front of him and gives him fellatio. That’s the very moment in which, just outside of the bolted door, the cook shows up; in that position Jamie has to answer, in a hilarious tit for tat, struggling to keep his voice neutral while “down there” Claire’s demolishing any last scruple of his.
Then Jamie pulls his wife up, sets her as best as he can on the cot, commanding her not to speak and telling the cook that she’s asleep. It’s a peculiar foreplay, definitely very hot. When the cook goes away, Jamie finally proceeds: he takes Claire from behind, “to an untoward degree” in Gabaldon’s words, and they give themselves up to a passionate embrace. When they’re done, Jamie asks Claire, “How is your arm?” and she answers “What arm?” – maybe the most brilliant line in the book, most certainly a tremendous one to testify to the successful lovemaking from her point of view. Jamie gets out of the cubicle, leaving her to sleep – “I'll tell Murphy ye liked the soup”. The TV adaptation takes inspiration, of course, from the original version, drawing strongly from it – especially from the opening verbal swordplay. Jamie and Claire are together in the cabin, she’s drunk and lecherous, but the screenplay introduces a few significant changes in the plot. First of all, Jamie is not actually reluctant. His initial unwillingness is very weak, almost nonexistent. Hence the screenwriters take away the scene’s principal and most exciting element: the need of Claire to persuade him. Jamie is already willing - there’s no need for Claire to insist. That’s the screenwriters’ poor choice: they cut the oral sex. No Claire kneeling in front of Jamie, no Jamie compelled to speak through the door with Claire’s head under his shirt. In the TV version they immediately jump one on top of the other. They get naked and start to make love standing up, Jamie behind Claire. Almost no foreplay. When Mr Willoughby (who replaces the cook, dead in the TV adaptation, and is therefore responsible for the turtle soup) starts to talk from behind the door Jamie does answer, but the tit for tat is astonishingly short. The TV editing escalates into a ping-pong conversation between the cabin – where Claire and Jamie, both naked now, are laughing and trying to disguise their voices – and the corridor where Mr Willoughby has smelled the rat and is grinning, amused.
And yet, when he goes away, the episode ends. Abruptly! The love scene had barely begun, and the viewers stare at the screen, incredulous. The camera does not return inside the cabin. End credits. From the moment when Claire bolts the cabin’s door to the end of the episode there’s exactly forty seconds. Well. Is this really the scene that had been proclaimed to the four winds for months? Cut, censored, and interrupted before its end? Where did the super sexy intercourse scenes of Season 1, which followed the characters’ climax until the end, go? In Voyager (and all the following books) they’re still there. Gabaldon’s spicy pen spares no such scenes. So – what? Both Outlander’s screenwriting and cutting teams are suddenly gone moral and prudish? The turtle soup scene's end, besides, was originally written in another way: after Jamie and Willoughby's dialogue the camera should have come back into the cabin, following Claire and Jamie until their climax (more details in this other article). Who decided to close the episode on Mr. Willoughby’s grin, and why has the final part of the script been changed? Just as a touchstone, Jamie and Geneva’s passion scene in episode four of Season 3 lasts over eight minutes, and it’s based on ten pages of Voyager. The turtle soup scene in the same book lasts twelve pages (twenty, actually, but let’s take out the eight pages where Claire and Jamie discuss things that the TV adaptation left out), and yet the TV turtle soup scene lasts barely five minutes.
Of course, the comparison’s imprecise and haphazard: a written text needs space to describe a setting, for instance, although a video may provide the overview of a room or a landscape in a few seconds. Some other times what stands out clear and sudden on the page needs more time to be rendered in a video adaptation. The touchstone’s useful, though, to prove that Outlander's notorious turtle soup scene, even if funny and sexy, has been disadvantaged by the TV adaptation. So, let me give advice to those who haven’t read the book yet: do relish the literary version of “turtle soup”, too. Contrary to other pivotal passion scenes (for example, the wedding, extraordinary in both versions and maybe even better in the TV adaptation!), turtle soup’s TV version is just a pale and short summation of the savory scene Diana Gabaldon has written in Voyager. © insideoutlander [English version proofread by Kath at www.gofoolproof.com] More articles in English? Please press here!
