If time is a river, as the oft-repeated phrase echoes through the second season of Prime Video’s mysterious, existential Western and metaphysical sci-fi series, the “Outer Range,” then the unrelenting flow of time is also an unforgivable force that stops for no man. Weirder and darker than ever, and yet somehow streamlined and more ruggedly focused, thanks to the series’ new veteran showrunner Charles Murray (“Deadwood,” “Hill Street Blues,” and “Sons Of Anarchy”), “Outer Range” continues to grip and mesmerize with its mind-bending, enigmatic blend of family anxieties, crisis-of-faith dilemmas, impending land rivalries, and the burden of keeping secrets. All that, of course, and the portentous notions about being unable to outrun your cosmic destiny (read our season one review here).
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If “Outer Range” season one played with the absence of God as the hole in the hearts of man and the inscrutable mindboggling notions of time that upended one’s belief system, then season two ups the ante in the uncanny realm. Arguably leaving some of the religious predicaments behind, the new season burrows deeper into the past and the dirt, like concentric circles of time in a downward spiral, just as complex, intriguing, and sometimes captivatingly unfathomable. We once described the series as “Yellowstone” meets the “X-Files” or “The Twilight Zone,” but in truth, it is more akin to “Arrival” or some dark, brooding, and ominous Denis Villeneuve sci-fi-ish thriller set in an American heartland filled with Taylor Sheridan-esque melodramas. It’s sometimes a slow and challenging series, full of gloom and doom, but the sprawling cast is aces and keeps things captivating throughout.
The onset of the series, to recap, centered on the Abbott family, its patriarch Royal Abbott (Josh Brolin), a gruff rancher fighting for his land and family, and the tragedies that beset them, circling over their head like black ravens and a bad omen. In season one, Royal made an incomprehensible discovery at the far edge of his land in Wyoming’s wilderness: a mystical, bottomless black void pit that everyone soon learns is an imprecise portal through time.
The Abbott family was coping with myriad heavy crises: the disappearance of their daughter-in-law Rebecca and eldest son Perry’s (Tom Pelphrey’s) emotional trauma from her unsolved vanishing while trying to parent their daughter Amy (Olive Abercrombie); the war with the neighboring Tillersons vying for their land, (the flamboyant owners of a profit-driven ranch next door); and the sudden, upending appearance of Autumn (Imogen Poots), a cryptic young woman camping on their land with seemingly suspicious intentions.
Season one also dealt with the cover-up of a murder when Perry accidentally killed Trevor Tillerson (Matt Lauria) in a street brawl following vicious taunts about the whereabouts of his missing wife. Trying to protect and keep the family together, Royal disposed of the body in the black hole, setting in motion yet another darker moral story about the desperate lengths we’ll go to protect the family and the unyielding consequences that boomerang back on us. To make matters worse, Rebecca finally turned up and reclaimed/abducted young Amy, another bruising tragedy for the Abbotts to reckon with that made its religious matriarch, Cecilia Abbott (Lili Taylor), seemingly lose all hope and faith.
At the end of season one—spoilers for those who didn’t see it—several ambiguities were finally exposed. Namely, Royal being a product of the black void—originally a boy from 1886 who fell in the hole and was transported to the 1950s—and the revelation that Autumn was the grown-up version of Amy from the future (or at least, we believe she is).
Season two picks up immediately where things left off, just as dark and moody, arguably more so, contending with the notions that the Abbott family is on the verge of collapse and the end is near. Royal, haunted by the secrets he kept all his life and the distance it created with his wife, confessed his inexplicable past to Cecilia while trying to explain the incomprehensible theory that Autumn is actually Amy. Season one also saw time blur and bleed into the past, and this time, distortion continues in a slippery manner, where people on the plain suddenly stumble into a past era.
Several engaging narrative threads branch off on their own tributaries. With Deputy Sheriff Joy Hawk (an increasingly excellent Tamara Podemski, the series MVP after Brolin) seemingly closing in on Perry’s manslaughter crime in season one, he jumped into the void to escape it all. His story in season two is told in his new transported timeline of the past, where he finds work at a ranch led by a 30-something workhand named Royal Abbott (now played by Christian James). Yep, the son and father reunited in a new context that upends and playfully toys with the traditional family dynamic.
Sheriff Joy also disappears into the past, suddenly ending up in a timeline where she joins a Native American Indigenous tribe, eventually crossing paths with the young Royal from the 1860s.
Meanwhile, the wicked Wayne Tillerson (Will Patton) lords over the Cain and Abel story of his two warring adult sons, Billy and Luke (Noah Reid, Shaun Sipos) —both still vying for Autumn’s affections— and his obsession with destroying the Abbott family, name and ranch for various past trespasses (Tillerson is also seen in the past as a young man, and still immoral and debauched). His zeal in this mission is unquenched, and Patton really chews the scenery in all his feverish scenes.
More importantly, “Outer Range” remains as moody and atmospheric as ever, a tenebrous fable that also never lets go of its wild and wry bursts of surreal humor, often punctuated like unhinged dance spasm from the eccentric Tillerson family side of the story. There’s a lot more plot and story, and while largely not difficult to follow, it is a lot to contend with. Sometimes, “Outer Range” feels bleak; the bad moon rising of all these mounting dramas a little overwhelming.
What normie audiences have made of this show so far is unclear. It’s strange, unpredictable, and sometimes emotionally despondent in its weighty sense of contemplating our own existence, the fragility of humanity, and the way God has abandoned us. Like its black hole, “Outer Range” is often on the brink of pushing its heavy and grim severities into something too much to bear. But the series knows how to employ odd, quirky humor to disarm, astonishing mystical elements to awe, and the ideas of redemption, spiritual or otherwise, almost in reach, as seductions to keep one compelled and obliged to see where the porous elements of the drama will flow.
While not drastically different in tone, “Outer Range” is arguably a little less ponderous and arty in season two, names like directors Amy Seimetz, Alonso Ruizpalacios, composers Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans (“Enemy” “The Lodge”), or cinematographers like Adam Newport-Berra (“Last Black Man In San Francisco”), are replaced with arguably more conventional ones. While still cinematic, it’s arguably less enigmatic, less David Lynch-like, and more defined now that the abstraction of the void is less ambiguous. It doesn’t hurt the show, per se, but some of its more hardcore fans might lament the loss of these more conceptual qualities.
If anything, “Outer Range” lands so many points for firing its original creator (Brian Watkins), yet it never dumbed down or simplified its heady ideas in season two. For all the claims that “Outer Range” would go in a different direction, thankfully, its modulation is almost invisible. It’s arguably the same show, and it still has an existential sense of anxiety that permeates it. Josh Brolin once said he took the show in the first place because it “frightened” him. At the time, he meant its big, ambitious swing, melding the seeming incongruent elements of Western and sci-fi into a new hybrid drama. But the mind-killer fear of “Outer Range,” aside from grappling with the unknowable, is not only confronting the past but the truth and ourselves—in this case, dark mirror images that are hard to face, especially when coupled with the dread of losing our families, our land, and our faith. If time is a river, the “Outer Range” waters are still cold and challenging, but the various branches of the stream and the unpredictable manner in which things flow are always deep and absorbing stuff worthy of your attention. [B+]
