Sometimes I feel less like I’m watching Outer Range and more like I’m rooting for it. Somewhere within “Everybody Hurts,” the third episode of the show’s second season, director Deborah Kampmeier and writers Dagny Atencio Looper and Glenise Mullins have the makings of the fun, surprising show Outer Range can be. It’s like tracking a promising team’s progress, hoping this is their year.
The show continues to have a lot of fun with the hallucinations brought on by exposure to residue from the time mineral buried beneath the Abbotts’ west pasture. Middle son Luke, still struggling to find his place in all this, sees the arrival home of his wounded brother Billy like it’s a hair-metal video, complete with sexy nurses and Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” (via Gabe Hilfer’s consistently surprising and thoughtful music supervision) blaring in the background. When Wayne Tillerson uses the mineral to revive Billy — kissing him full on the lips in the process — first the vocals and then Billy and Wayne themselves soar, semi-literally uplifted by this miracle. In a show dedicated to a pretty consistent palette of both color and dramatic tone, these standout sequences, well, stand out.
So does Autumn, though sometimes I can’t decide whether that’s better or for worse. Actor Imogen Poots excels at making this woman seem like a ratty, shifty little weasel, whether she’s playing her sexual chemistry with each Tillerson brother against the other, taking advantage of Cece’s well-meaning pastor to learn how to recruit and indoctrinate people, or precipitating yet another blowout argument at an Abbott family dinner. She’s so good at making Autumn seem like walking poison that you start to recognize the need to make her Royal and Cece’s granddaughter Amy all grown up. There’s no way even people as distracted and messed up as the Abbotts would keep someone this nakedly toxic around unless there were good reason.
And though Josh Brolin is still one of the most naturally intense screen presences around, do not sleep on Tom Pelphrey as Royal’s time-displaced son-turned-friend Perry. Watching this man zombie-walk his way through the past — venting bile at Royal for his future shitty parenting while barely raising his voice and earning no catharsis, decking Wayne Tillerson with a single punch and making the decidedly unfunny wisecrack that if all he broke was the guy’s nose he got lucky — is like watching a little one-man horror story. This guy’s wife abandoned him. She returned to kidnap his daughter. His father lied to him all his life, about information that has reshuffled his conception of reality. Now he’s stranded out of time forever. Pelphrey, a scary-intense actor whose manic monologue in Ozark was arguably that series’ singular high point, wears every bit of this like a set of uncomfortable clothes he’s been forced to put on. It’s riveting acting.
The plot there is proceeding in an interesting fashion as well. It mainly concerns Royal trying to gentle Perry — get him to accept that his past, or rather the future, is gone to him, and he has to accept that. Only after he tracked down his last surviving relative, Royal says, did he finally let go. In the cases of all of our time travelers, the journey is seen as a sentence rather than an adventure, which is probably a lot closer to how suddenly discovering you’re decades removed from everyone and everything you knew feels.
But the weak points remain. Rhett and Maria badly need to be given something to do that they couldn’t just as easily be doing in an old CW teen drama about sexy rodeo cowboys. Cece’s flickers from mama-bear protectiveness to despairing exhaustion like someone playing with a light switch; I almost wish the show had actually made good on its tease of an indecent proposal by Wayne in exchange for the money to save the Abbott ranch, kicking off a rekindled affair between the two that would have made Cecilia a million times more interesting literally overnight.
Still, the show ends on a high note, more specifically an upside-down one. As an angry Roman drives off after hearing Wayne’s offer from Cecilia — he’ll give them the money to pay off Perry’s bail, in exchange for the west pasture and a personal apology for stealing Cecilia from him years back — he has some kind of episode. The camera slowly rotates until the image is upside down, and it stays that way for a surprisingly loooooong time as Royal drives up to the suddenly reopened hole, flipping right-side-up only after Sheriff Joy reemerges. Personally, I believe a show with the courage to air its final scene standing on its head has the courage to do a lot more things besides. I want to see it happen.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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