Outer Range: Season Two SPOILER FREE (2024)

Watched 5/21/24 (Prime Video)

In its sophomore season, Outer Range spreads its wings to deliver a wildly ambitious, impressively confident, full-chested expansion of its first season’s sci-fi/western genre mashup, now spanning multiple timelines with an ever-increasing roster of characters ranging from psychotic to mysterious to just plain cool. It’s a show that, despite having a variety of pulp sci-fi trappings, takes a surprising amount of interest and care in giving its characters inventive, thoughtful dialogue and weighty character beats. Even when laying on an abundance of stagey monologues, somehow without pretension, the show manages to sustain momentum through complex, self-assured character building and a sense of sometimes morbid fun amidst all the intriguing, mystery-box weirdness. And much like Lost, with which Outer Range shares much DNA, character is not sacrificed at the altar of the water-cooler theory setup.

Even with so much going on, there’s a cohesion to the tonality that just wouldn’t be there in the hands of lesser showrunners. Brian Watkins of season one has disappeared, but newcomer Charles Murray barely misses a step in a season that threatens to over-extend itself but ends up giving almost completely appropriate amounts of time to all of its increasingly-disparate threads.

In a real Two Towers of a season that splits everyone off to build them up in their own way, this middle chapter gives us a contemporary family drama with an increasingly-mysterious stranger, a time-travel father-son fable, another time-travel story focused on cultural immersion, a somewhat underdeveloped romance between two very attractive young people getting a second chance, and a villainous strand focusing on some truly wacky rival neighbors. It’s so much but rarely ever too much, with each element providing something exciting; whether it’s unnerving, funny, or just odd. This season finds a way not to lag, never insulting viewers with janky editing or scenes that feel without purpose.

Beginning with perhaps the most surprising departure from season one, that season’s Sheriff Joy finds herself back in the 1800s for this outing. Being inducted into a Native American tribe of yester-century, Joy finds herself swimming in thrilling new waters, as do we. It’s perhaps the least-connected plot to the rest of the show but it is impressively mounted, with expensive, Amazon-fueled period-production values that scream authenticity. And it gives us a lot of time to connect with one of the show’s best characters, played with tremendous believability by Tamara Podemski, somehow managing to pull off warm and extremely dangerous in equal measure. Her care for those around her, both past and present, does lots to build her up so that when push comes to shove, we care for her as much as she does for others.

Some interesting twists, a staple of Outer Range as a whole, keep Joy’s story from feeling overly secondary as this quickly becomes its own proudly revisionist mini-Western. It quickly establishes itself as a cool corrective of a bonus-show inside of the larger Outer Range trajectory. By the time Joy ties back into the larger narrative, we have really sat with her, and it sure does seem like we have a great more to come in season three with her that this season has certainly set the table for.

The main story focuses on the continued trials and tribulations of Royal and Cecilia Abbott, the respective patriarch and matriarch of a ranch family whose members are dwindling. Their symbiotic relationship with surrogate-daughter figure Autumn takes center stage amidst a landscape of ever-shifting unknowns. Who all three people are in relation to the show’s central void/black hole makes for a suspenseful, engrossing, edge-of-your-seat emotion puzzle. Lili Taylor is still brilliantly cast as the jumpy, woman-with-a-plan hard-ass. Imogen Poots brings a shifty, oft-bizarre, Twin Peaks-reminiscent energy to her wandering outsider role. And Josh Brolin as Royal is the glue that holds the whole show together, his gravelly voice serving as both a calming and suddenly volcanic cornerstone for the show to return to time after time. Brolin also serves as director on an episode, a new avenue for the long-working Hollywood actor—and he pulls it off real swell. This is a show of great zooms on interesting faces, and all directors champion that camera move with aplomb.

Royal and wife Cecilia’s mission to save their family and ranch is played out with a compellingly poetic fatalism. As they struggle to scrape together the funds and legal means to keep their ranch, a move made entirely for the future of their family, they fail to realize or choose not to accept that their family is already more separated than it has ever been. Each of their desperate chess moves to save this way of life plays out with a brutal dramatic irony that is equally painful and addictive to watch. It’s a great central conceit on which to mount all of the other characters’ secondary struggles, and Brolin and Taylor are so winningly depressed about the whole thing that it is hard not to feel something for them and their kin.

Lewis Pullman’s Rhett and Isabel Arraiza’s Maria are the seemingly destined-for-doom young-love couple that Outer Range wants you to get invested in. Their romantic plot that started in the back half of season one digs in here, although not as much as it could have. They’re ultra-believable in that they happen to have really solid chemistry, but if we were told why they care about each other in season one, it isn’t really brought up again here and I did find myself a bit hard-pressed to remember their relationship’s inception and reason for being other than being hot, smooth talkers. I can see it behoove the show in a future season to have this kind of small-scale sexy energy in the grand scheme of its mostly epic aspirations as it could definitely keep things grounded, but it needs more specificity and clear motivations from these two if the good actors playing them are to be rewarded for their efforts.

Then there’s Perry’s story. Played by the ever-watchable, effortlessly cool Tom Pelphrey, Perry finds himself back in time hanging with a young version of his dad. This tough-as-nails Back to the Futureemulation earns its stripes by casting an equally-charming actor as young Josh Brolin…guy by the name of Christian James. This buddy movie in the middle of all the heaviness has moments of fun and moments of genuine warmth and moments of offbeat terror—enough to make it feel as essential as the other storylines despite its lesser screentime. And boy it’s hard to write too much about this part because it takes such a nutty late-season twist. Have to see where it goes before much more can be said.

Finally, the Tillersons. A great amalgam of over-the-top ‘80s villains crossed with flamboyantly modern personalities. Will Patton is the standout here as the foil to Brolin’s sturdy, reliable patriarch. Patton is instead the seemingly Stephen-King-written creep with great power and furious rage at his disposal, equally hilarious and terrifying. This season helps realize Patton in what this author believes to be his most perfectly-cast roles and one of the better television villains in quite some time. The relationship between that never-better Will Patton and his wide-eyed, juvenile, attack-dog sons is both timeless and original in its screentime and depth. Not often do you get such idiosyncratic, chaotic, well-explored human villains in a sci-fi property. This one really works hard to give them a lot to do. They feel just as real and three-dimensional as the heroes and it does a lot to add juice to the conflicts between the Tillersons and Abbotts that inevitably come.

Overall, this Outer Range season is in fact a middle chapter. It doesn’t end with any kind of great battle or memorable set piece, but unlike other Amazon TV franchises, that isn’t what Outer Range seems to be super interested in. It sticks to its guns here as a miraculously well-blended potpourri of genres and characters, with a nicely-spread budget and amazing casting bolstering the potboiler sci-fi conceit at its core. It’s a show that demands more seasons to continue unpacking its mysteries, and hopefully its characters to an even deeper extent. So far that has been the case, selling us on all of their truthful quirks, troubling conundrums, and pivotal decisions, as any great show does, especially here in season two. The crackling dialogue, well-placed twists, and general good Western vibes are just the cherries on top of this layered, well-decorated, fully-baked cake of a series.

8.5/10