Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Outer Range’ Season 2 On Prime Video, Where Royal Tries To Piece His Family Back Together While Dealing With The Time Void On His Ranch

Two years ago, Outer Range debuted and, to be honest, we didn’t like it. We thought the first episode was hard to see and was so slow that it put us to sleep. But by the end of that first season, many of the strange goings-on were explained, while other mysteries were left unanswered. Finally, the second season is here, and there’s a whole lot of time traveling going on.

OUTER RANGE SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We hear Royal Abbott (Josh Brolin) talk about what happened when he jumped into the void as a kid, sometime in the 1880s, and emerged 80 years later on the ranch he and his wife Cecilia (Lili Taylor) own.

The Gist: We then see younger versions of Royal (Christian James) and Cecilia (Megan West) dealing with a suffering mother cow who just gave birth. The calf is fine, but Cecilia tells Royal that he has to shoot the mother cow to end her suffering.

Back to the present, where Cecilia tells Royal that their granddaughter Amy (Olive Abercrombie) is gone. When he tells her that she’s upstairs, Cecilia runs up and finds… Autumn (Imogen Poots), whom she doesn’t know. She’s badly hurt, and Cecilia tells her husband to “be a man” and take her to the hospital.

During the bison stampede, Royal, who was about to kill Autumn, saw a scar on her head that matched one that 8-year-old Amy had, which is why he now thinks that Autumn is a grown-up Amy that traveled through the void. On the way to the hospital, Autumn reinforces Royal’s theory by saying she doesn’t remember anything that happened before she was 9.

Rhett (Lewis Pullman) and Olivia (Isabel Arraiza), who also got caught up in the stampede, manage to pull their truck away from the billboard they crashed into and go to a cat-filled no-tell-motel to regroup. They still want to be together, but what that might look like is still up in the air.

In the meantime Cecilia continues to look for Amy. She finds out from an acquaintance that Amy was seen at the rodeo, but there still seems to be no sign of her. However, we see her in a truck with a face that’s very familiar to her. Where they’re going is unknown.

Luke Tillerson (Shaun Sipos) finds himself having hallucinations of both the auditory and visual kind, like when he hears his own berating voice come out of stuffed owls at his father’s house. Also, his father Wayne (Will Patton) is somehow out of his coma; they both have to go to the hospital because Luke’s brother Billy (Noah Reid) is in surgery after having been shot.

Missing since the stampede is Joy (Tamara Podemski), the deputy sheriff. She lands on what she thinks is the Abbotts’ and Tillersons’ land, but has to fight to avoid getting killed when two separate Native factions fight each other. After one Native tries to stab her, she tells the rest who find her that she’s Shoshone and she comes in peace.

With Amy still missing — at least the young version of Amy — Royal decides to come clean to Cecilia about his origins.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Yellowstone meets Westworld meets Doctor Who.

Our Take: Remember when we said that Season 1 of Outer Range started slow? Well, the season didn’t end that way, and now there’s so much going on in the series that we are now starting to wonder if creator Brian Watkins and his writing staff have now gone in the other direction and bitten off more story than they can chew.

Don’t get us wrong; this season certainly has our attention, in a way that the beginning of Season 1 didn’t. But there are a ton of threads that are now in play after that eventful first season finale, not all of which we think are going to get the time they deserve. Now we see young Royal and Cecilia in what we think is the late 1970s or early 1980s, interacting with someone who is definitely going to make this rift in space and time into a mind-bending exercise where the past and present intermingle in a way that we’re not sure if things change in the present or if they’re presented as just being the way things always happened.

The overall theme, though, is still family, especially with Royal trying to figure out where young Amy is, why Rhett ran off with Olivia, if his older son Perry (Tom Pelphrey) is coming back, and if Autumn is truly an adult version of his granddaughter. There’s also a family theme going on with the Abbotts’ rivals, the Tillersons, though where that story is going is somewhat less well-defined. We know that Luke has some sort of supernatural thing going on, but how that relates to his father and brother is a bit cloudy at the end of the first episode.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: A mysterious man limps on to the ranch where the younger versions of Royal and Cecilia are outside working. He asks if they are in need of any ranch hands, and Cecilia points him to the Tillersons’ ranch. Pink Floyd’s “Time” plays as the mysterious man walks away and we get a drone shot of the ranch.

Sleeper Star: Lili Taylor, of course. The woman knows how to be authentically emotional on demand, then get herself together and be believably tough.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Luke asks the voice he’s hearing, “Who are you?”, the voice says, “Well, you sound like an owl, so I guess I’m Luke.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. The second season of Outer Range certainly isn’t boring, but we just wonder if all the time jumping is going to either get confusing or just make for a bunch of jumbled mysteries without answers.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.