A Portal to the Past Somewhere in the Future
OUTER RANGE – created by Brian Watkins – Season One – SPOILERS
Billy Tillerson, Autumn, and Billy’s pocket knife about to begin the hottest scene of the series.
Royal Abbott (Josh Brolin) kicks things off with a dramatic aside: “You know anything about a Greek god called Chronos?” he asks. “He carried a sickle. He used it to cut a hole – a tear in the cosmos between heaven and earth to separate this world from the next. To separate the known from the unknown. The world has been waiting for something like this.” The Abbott Ranch and everything around it is full of zoological anachronisms, and shortly after the series opens Royal finds a hole in his west pasture that behaves like a wormhole. (It looks like it was made by an actual earthworm of considerable size.) Whatever enters the hole re-emerges at a different time and a different place.
Cecilia at her bible study class. The class reads a story involving Elisha and two bears. Later, both Cecilia and Autumn have bear encounters. Also, blue shirts are kind of a thing on OUTER RANGE.
Royal appeared mysteriously on the Abbott ranch in 1968 at the age of nine, saying he had no memory of life prior to that. He was more or less adopted by the family and years later married Cecilia (Lili Taylor). They have two sons. Perry (Tom Pelphrey) has a daughter named Amy and a wife who disappeared several months before the story begins. The other son, Rhett (Lewis Pullman), is a proficient rider of bulls and is sometimes romantically involved with Maria Olivares (Isabel Arraiza), who disapproves of Rhett’s family.
The Abbott Ranch is near the fictional Wyoming town of Wabang. Amelia Earhart is not mentioned in the show, but two or three years before her disappearance, she spent some time at a place called the Double D Ranch near Meeteetse, Wyoming (on the Upper Wood River about 70 kilometers southwest of Cody). The Abbott Ranch could easily be located in that same area. A billboard on the side of the road to Wabang reads: “America tells you that the only things worth knowing are those which can be known. America is wrong.”
Isabel Arraiza as Maria, who is in love with Rhett, but not with the rest of the Abbotts.
1886 is one of the few specific dates mentioned in the series, and it was a historically important year because of the weather. The summer was extremely hot, and a disastrous winter followed that killed most of the livestock in the area. Exactly how bad the weather was in the Territory that year is unknown because the National Weather Service observer became ill and was unable to keep records.
A woman named Autumn (Imogen Poots) turns up at the Abbott’s ranch shortly after the FBI discontinues the search for Perry’s wife, and asks permission to camp there. Autumn is mysterious about her origins and motives, has an interesting way of kissing, and attaches great importance to a pendant she always wears. She contacts two people by phone: her mother, and an unidentified person responsible for sending her money. Showrunner Brian Watkins described Autumn to Nick Caruso of TV Line: “She represents this zealot spirit of the west that Iโve encountered personally, and that historically, weโve seen so many people encounter as well. Sheโs sort of like Calamity Jane meets Janis Joplin meets someone that offers you a weed brownie at a concert.”
Martha Hawk (MorningStar Angeline), wife of Acting Sheriff Joy Hawk (Tamara Podemski), stoically enduring censure from a Christian minister.
The neighbouring ranch is owned by Wayne Tillerson (Will Patton) whose favourite drink is clamato juice. Wayne had some sort of mystical experience as a child and wants very much to own the Abbotts’ west pasture. The Tillerson patriarch has three sons, Billy (Noah Reid), Luke (Shaun Sipos), and Trevor (Matt Lauria). His ex-wife Patricia (Dierdre O’Connell) seems quite well off, and seems interested in taking control of the ranch through her sons.
Wayne finds a rock he believes is related to the strange events in the area, and it is made of the same stuff as Autumn’s pendant. His son Billy grinds the stuff up and swallows some and it gives him a vision of the future, so it might have hallucinogenic properties, or it might have the power to generate temporal distortions.
The relationship between the two families is illustrated by a story Royal tells Perry (in Episode 2) after Perry suggests “cozying up” to the Tillersons to avoid trouble. “Look, when you were a kid,” Royal explains, “Wayne Tillerson had a ranch hand that was gored by a bull. Stuck clean through the stomach. Everyone knew he was done for, but no one could get him free of the animal. So, with the ambulance like, an hour away Wayne had two choices: shoot the bull, killing valuable stock but giving the man a dignified death, or don’t. Wayne chose the second one. Sent everyone back to work as the guy dragged around on that bull before the ranch hand breathed his last. You don’t cozy up to the Tillersons.”
The Owls
The spacetime anomalies in the area seem to make everyone behave strangely. Gunfire becomes commonplace. Animals and people are killed, sometimes pointlessly. Some mysteries are resolved in the first season, and some are left hanging. In Episode 7, Autumn says (to no one in particular while staring into a restroom mirror): “Somewhere on this land is an altar that has not been built yet, but I will build it. Somewhere in the future is a portal to the past, and I will own it. Somewhere in your heart is a hole, and I will fill it.”
Gigi Erneta (Jennifer Sawyer in HOLIDAY IN SANTA FE) and Monette Moio (Kaley Cuoco’s stunt double in ROLE PLAY) appear in the first episode of the second season.