'Outer Range' Season 2 premiere recap: “One Night in Wabang” (2024)

A lot of people make their home, home on the Outer Range, where the bison and the time portals play. The biggest problem facing the show, created by Brian Watkins and now helmed by Charles Murray for its second season, is that some of those people are way more interesting than others.

Stone-faced, time-displaced patriarch Royal Abbott can always hold his own thanks to the commanding screen presence of Josh Brolin. Weirdos like Wayne Tillerson (Will Patton), his songbird son Billy (Noah Reid), and future cult leader — and, perhaps, Royal’s time-displaced granddaughter — Autumn (Imogen Poots) command attention easily. Even though his storyline is comparatively staid, at least until last season’s cliffhanger, the terrifying intensity of actor Tom Pelphrey makes Royal’s sad-sack son Perry come to a grim sort of life.

But while none of the show’s characters are bad, some are boring. Until now, that’s meant Luke Tillerson (Shaun Sipos), a kind of mix between a bad guy in an ‘80s teen drama and Fredo Corleone, and Deputy Sheriff Joy Hawk (Tamara Podemski), whose status as an indigenous cop has become a fixture of neo-Westerns and crime shows on TV of late. Neither character does anything much beyond stock stuff for the whole of Season One.

Ah, but we’re in Season Two now, aren’t we?

The best thing that can be said of “One Night in Wabang,” the show’s second season premiere, is that it instantly increases the entertainment value of these two relatively inert characters by an order of magnitude. It accomplishes this in part through the writing — making Luke the son who successfully finds a reservoir of the time-warping mineral goop his whacko father Wayne has been searching for since he encountered Royal’s portal in childhood; sending Joy back in time to a Wyoming peopled with stampeding bison and warring nations — but only in part.

The excitement of Luke’s discovery, which sends him spasming and twitching and careening around like he’s being constantly electrocuted, is transmitted through the clattering post-punk of “Televised Mind” by Fontaines D.C. blasting from his car stereo, and through the blasted-out echo of the spectral owl that speaks to him rings in his ears. The excitement of Joy’s discovery, meanwhile, is conveyed by dumping her, shocked and terrified, into the literal center of a sudden battle between Cheyenne and Shoshone warriors on horseback. I hate for Shōgun to catch a stray here, but that fine show could have taken lessons from how immersively director Gwyneth Horder-Payton stages this skirmish.

There’s more, much more, to this episode than just those two characters, of course. Royal saves Autumn’s life and reaches some kind of détènte after their mutual murder attempts, now that Royal believes Autumn to be his time-displaced, grown-up granddaughter Amy (Olive Elise Abercrombie). Together, they see the stars spin around the sky like a great wheel, which they assume means…something. Royal comes clean about his origin to his shouty wife Cecilia (Lili Taylor), Autumn has an instant spark with her lover Billy’s brother Luke, and the current version of Amy is in the clutches of Rebecca (Monette Moio), Perry’s long-lost spouse.

Perry himself has emerged into his own family’s relatively recent past, falling through the now-missing hole and emerging back when Cece and Royal (played here by Megan West and Christian James) were first married. They send him to look for work at the Tillersons’ as Pink Floyd’s “Time” drops down on the soundtrack like the hammer of the gods.

Also Rhett (Lewis Pullman) and Maria (Isabel Arraiza) get a motel room. It’s always a thrill a minute with these two! I don’t know why Outer Range continues to insist that this perfectly average small-town romance can carry its narrative weight alongside murderers, time travelers, post-apocalyptic visions, and tears in the spacetime continuum.

But I leaned so hard on the improvements made to Luke and Joy, and the way those improvements were manifested in a variety of ways that took full advantage of the medium, because I take that as a very promising sign. The Sophom*ore Surprise is a real thing in TV land, and perhaps Murray and his team (this episode was written by Cameron Litvack and Glenise Mullins, who deserve the shoutout for having Will Patton sing “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” to his comatose son alone) can accentuate the positives and eliminate the negatives in the grand tradition of the recent turnarounds enjoyed by Foundation and The Wheel of Time. The pieces are all there. It’s a matter of putting them together to create a single picture.

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.