Outer Range is Unique, Interesting, Pretentious, And Confusing

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR SEASON ONE OF OUTER RANGE

There’s been a strange trend in TV dramas: piling on the mysteries. It isn’t enough to have one mystery. Dramas now need lots of mysteries, with as many subplots as possible to keep the audience asking questions. Outer Range takes this approach in season one, seemingly intent on baffling the audience as much as possible.

Aside from all the mysteries, it has a brilliant cast, some phenomenal acting, stunning scenery, and compelling moments of human drama. Amazon’s original science fiction drama combines the awkward scenes of a French art house indie film, the ominous atmosphere of X-Files, and the frontier culture of Yellowstone. It is a unique blend and, at times, extraordinary.

It is also frustrating. Season one moves at a painfully slow pace, crawling from one plot point to another among at least four subplots with Royal Abbott (Josh Brolin) at the center. His fantastic discovery intersects with an inter-family rivalry, murder, tragedy, and crises of faith. It is a lot to cover in 8 episodes.

The show opens with Royal’s discover of a large, seemingly bottomless hole on his cattle ranch. Wyoming is devoutly Christian, seeing God’s will and purpose behind every event, no matter how insignificant. Royal struggles to understand the hole because it defies everything he knows about the world and has altered the course of his own life and his family in tragic ways. Later, we learn it is a time portal, possessing a black material (suspiciously like the black goo in X-Files) that can move one through time, either forward or back.

Royal struggles to comprehend the existence of such a portal in the same universe created by God. The savage randomness of the portal’s nature conflicts with the belief in a loving Creator who has a grand design. It doesn’t make sense and it is driving him mad.

Royal’s son Perry was left alone with his daughter Amy after his wife vanished a year before. It is suggested she may have fallen into the hole but that’s just another mystery. Another possibility is Perry killed her or tried to kill her. That becomes more probably after he kills Trevor Tillerson, a member of the rival Tillerson family.

The young Amy is precocious, as all children are on TV these days, noticing that something is wrong with the family but doesn’t know what. Royal’s wife Cecilia, played by the exceptional Lili Taylor, is also having a crisis of faith as she witnesses her strong family fall apart in the wake of a murder and Royal’s bizarre behavior.

Another mystery that gets a partial explanation is Wayne Tillerson’s obsession on obtaining some of the Abbott land. He doesn’t know about the hole at first but knows there’s something special going on over on his neighbor’s land. Wayne (played by Will Patton) is eccentric, his grip on reality shaken by his own encounter with the hole as a kid.

The Tillerson’s are an eccentric bunch overall. There are numerous scenes with singing, dancing, awkward stares, and disjointed dialogue. While the Abbotts have a more recognizable family dynamic, the Tillersons are just off, with the exception of the mother. Many residents of this town are not normal, including the rancher who is seeing Mastodons on his property.

The strangeness is further enhanced with some jarring music choices, switching from oldies to 80s and 90s pop music, to a bit of heavy metal. None of it fits the rural Wyoming setting and often clashes with what is happening on screen.

But wait, there’s more!

If that isn’t enough, the show throws in a hippy named Autumn Falls who wants to camp on the Abbott land and obviously knows something special is happening. She discovers the hole but keeps it secret. Like Wayne, she also seems to have been changed by her connection to the hole and its power. Everyone in and around the hole gets weirder and perhaps that is what the show is trying to convey.

Encounters with the supernatural change you, rocking your sense of reality, and damaging your sanity.

The big reveal of season one is that Autumn Falls is actually future Amy. Somehow she travel backward in time through the hole-portal and is fixated on this moment in time and understanding what is happening. Autumn/Amy knows more about the portal than Royal and the others, but it isn’t encouraging that even in the future the characters are still trying to figure it out.

The most frustrating aspect of the show is the somewhat disappointing payoff in the season finale. A lot happens but nothing is explained. Some might compare this show to Lost, J.J. Abrams’s famous example of what happens when you have a show of mysteries without a plan. You’d hope the writers of Outer Range learned from that debacle and know how their story will end, with a satisfying reveal of the hows and whys.

We learn the hole has disappeared and reappeared over time, can send people forward and backward in time, and can shoot them miles from the hole as it did with Trevor Tillerson’s body. There is no apparent pattern to how it works. We don’t know why it’s there or how it is shooting out people. Later it seems to make a mountain disappear, shoots out a herd of buffalo, and a native American village.

We learn Royal is a time traveler from the 19th century but it isn’t clear why that matters, only that he knew what the hole could do all along. Wayne saw Royal emerge from the hole as kids so he had some idea what it was. The hole must’ve disappeared since the two remained civil and respected property boundaries up until the events of episode one.

There are more questions: why is Billy Tillerson—Wayne’s youngest son—batshit crazy? Where has Rebecca been this whole time? Is Royal cursed? Why is it that that the time jumps and creatures going through it increasing to the point that more people are seeing it?

In a way, Outer Range may be following the Abrams’ mystery box approach to storytelling. There is an obvious problem. The Abrams approach has not had much recent success, with a track record of frustrating and occasionally infuriating audiences. At this point, one could conclude it doesn’t work. It isn’t that the mystery box concept is flawed but more how Abrams deploys it. He should not be an example for others.

While the show is clever, unique, and brilliant in many ways, it is frustratingly slow and baffling. It was difficult to enjoy many of the episodes and I look to season two with reluctance more than anything. The show has demonstrated it likes keeping the audience in the dark for extended periods of time and stick to a painfully slow pace. Neither make me excited for season two, despite the show’s more impressive qualities.