'Outer Range' Season 2 Finale Recap: "The End of Innocence" (2024)

What did we learn during this short second season of Outer Range? This is not a rhetorical question — I’m struggling to recall.

Young Royal killing his abusive dad to save Joy, instead of shooting him in a “hunting accident” — that was new news. Perry creating a divergent timeline by stopping his earlier self from killing Trevor Tillerson, then taking his own place when Trevor accidentally kills Perry’s earlier self instead — also new. Rhett turning traitor out of the clear blue sky and selling out to Dr. Bintu — that’s number three.

Anything else?

No, for real. Did anything in the seven hours of television we just watched amount to anything in the end? An end which, in one of the more egregious uses of a cliché in lieu of profundity you’ll see on TV all year, the show assures us “is just the beginning”?

From a plot perspective, I don’t think so. We are no closer to knowing anything about the nature of the hole, its relationship to the mineral, or how either of them function as portals or psychic-power inducers. We have neither returned to nor significantly advanced toward the dystopian future Royal glimpsed in the show’s earliest episodes. Autumn’s cult of personality is still just a bunch of extras in yellow jumpsuits in gauzy visions and flash-forwards; we know exactly nothing about how they formed or what they believe. That mountain that disappeared way back when? How did that happen? Why did that happen? Yeah, your guess is as good as mine.

The west pasture of the Abbott ranch is still just sitting there, and the same parties — the Abbotts, the Tillersons, and the interests represented by Dr. Bintu — are still interested in controlling it. Rhett and Maria are still stuck in Wabang. Perry and Rebecca are still estranged. Amy is still missing, even if now it’s because she was knocked into the portal through the machinations of her older self, Autumn. Grief-deranged people are still leaping through portals to create cliffhanger endings, though this time it’s a grief-deranged Wayne Tillerson rather than a grief-deranged Perry Abbott.

Minute movement is about the best we can hope for here, and even then there’s no guarantee that movement will be in the right direction. Stealing from her job is a new one for Maria, but it’s such small beer compared to murder and time portals that I can’t conceive of anyone caring. Autumn gets shot, seemingly to death, but wakes up when the portal-displaced Amy does (in a desert, found by hikers). The emergence of a new timeline and time frame via Perry, whose storyline will now take place during the opening days of the storyline overall, is…well, frankly, I think it’s going to confuse the issue, not to mention make the prodigiously talented Tom Pelphrey continue to feel removed from the main flow of the drama. Royal and Joy, the show’s two most emotionally engaging characters, teaming up to stop Autumn is the one really exciting development.

It’s funny how much Outer Range reminds me of Westworld, the sci-fi Western that is almost certainly the reason this show was greenlit in the first place before it crashed and burned. It’s just as lost amid its desire to be mysterious, and to answer every question with a new question; you need more solid ground than this for a genre story to work. Coincidentally, both shows’ best episodes were stand-alone, emotionally engaging action-adventure stories set among 19th century Native American communities, too!

Unfortunately, the hoped-for Sophom*ore Surprise that would have made Outer Range must-watch never materialized. The revitalization of Joy and Luke as characters, that magnificent episode in the 1880s — these were the exceptions to Outer Range’s water-treading second season, rather than the rule. Watching this show feels like jumping in a hole in time, only to wind up right back where you started.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV forRolling Stone,Vulture,The New York Times, andanyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.