Here's What OUTLANDER Would Look Like Made With LEGO Minifigures

Like Diana Gabaladon's series of novels and the Outlander TV series returning to Starz this weekend, the story of LEGO Outlander involves a bit of time travel. Fortunately for you, we're only going back to Christmas 2013, when I presented the 1500-piece LEGO Downton Abbey model and minifigure cast to my girlfriend, Sofia. Without bragging too much, it was an incredible gift, and Internet (and even some non-Internet, paper-based) publications loved it. Over the next few weeks, I was asked a dozen times how I could possibly beat it the following year.

Fall 2014 came around, and that question weighed on me. The LEGO Derek minifigure photo I published in the spring got a little attention, and LEGO Seinfeld in the summer got a little bit more, but I had nothing for Sofia. Then, on a rewatch of the premiere episode of Outlander, it seemed pretty obvious to me. My girlfriend was a big fan of the books and was giddy with the idea of seeing these characters coming to life.

I designed a small vignette, using sand green on one half and bright green on the other to capture the tone of the series: Subdued colors for the present (the series protagonist Claire's present being 1945), and bright colors for the past (1743, where she finds herself after a tumble through a giant stone).

I didn't build it for Christmas, with time being tougher to find, and sand green bricks being very expensive. I showed Sofia the rendered image a few weeks later, and she insisted we build it. By then, I was already devoted to getting LEGO Community finished, not knowing when the new season would be returning. We scrapped the design I had, and balanced her knowledge of the novels with my eye for detail in reference photos. We designed it the weekend after Community was published, had most of the bricks in-hand a week later, and raced against a setting sun to shoot photos to get this out for the Internet to enjoy before the mid-season hiatus ended.

No one has asked what we'll be doing next, yet, but I'm sure we can come up with something pretty great.

Check out more images of Stevens' LEGO take on Outlander.

The second half of Outlander's freshman season begins April 4 on Starz.