‘Outer Range’ Season 2 Must Answer An Absurd Amount Of Open Questions

Amazon is forever in search of buzz-generating new series, and it seemed like they might have the beginnings of something on their hands with Outer Range, which initially looked like some sort of Yellowstone clone, but it takes a bizarre sci-fi turn when a giant…void opens up in the middle of a rancher’s field.

Outer Range has a great cast, Josh Brolin, Imogen Poots and Tom Pelphrey, to name a few, and while it kept me engaged enough to see the ending, I came away wondering if this show has any actual plans to answer its big mysteries, as it really revealed close to nothing by the end, and left a truly absurd amount of open questions, and inconsistencies about how its central “mechanic” works.

Spoilers follow.

The only two major reveals we got in the finale were that:

A) Royal himself is an accidental time traveler, having launching himself into the 1960’s from the 1880’s after he killed his father in a hunting accident and then dove into the hole. This really does not change much, since he was so young, there wasn’t all that much to adjust to in the future.

B) Autumn is actually Royal’s granddaughter, Amy, having traveled back in time from the future. This was not a huge surprise as it felt fairly obvious if you just…looked at the pair of them, plus all the stuff about her not having a memory before Amy’s age.

But the finale presented or didn’t answer a ludicrous amount of questions.

• Where was Amy’s mother? Who was she hiding from? Why did she come back now? Where is she taking Amy?
• Why did Perry jump into the pit even though it will produce the exact opposite result of what he said he wanted (taking responsibility for the murder so his family would be okay)? Now he’s in some other time period and his family will lose the land they put up for his bail.
• How and why does Royal die in the future?
• Why was Autumn shown alive in the future when Perry emerges if she’s now dead, trampled by buffalo?
• Why did the pit disappear after Perry jumped in? Why did it appear for Royal only back in the 1880s? Why was Luke able to dig far enough down where the pit used to be to find a “pool” of time travel juice that somehow let a giant herd of old buffalo into present day?
• How did the sheriff simply walk back in time to an era where the Indians were still settled there? Why are random things like individual people and entire mountains flickering in and out of existence?

There are “mysteries” and there is whatever Outer Range is doing here, which is stacking them on top of each other to the point where very little of this makes sense, even from a sci-fi perspective. I feel like you need to establish some universe “rules” here, and everything is just all over the place at this point. I guess it makes me somewhat interested in season 2, but in this age of streaming, I’m not sure you can always bank on that, and if this gets cancelled, this will remain one of the weirdest, open-ended series I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure I can recommend it at this point without knowing a second season is coming.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.