Untamed, released last week, is currently the top show on Netflix. I liked it. It’s a novelistic mystery with a killer opening sequence, and a handsome Eric Bana jaunting around Yosemite. But when I said in my original review that it has one too many twist endings, what I really meant was: There’s one twist that makes absolutely no sense.
So, let’s talk about it. Spoilers, obviously.
Eric Bana plays Kyle Turner, a special agent with the National Parks Service stationed in Yosemite. He and his ex-wife Jill (Rosemarie DeWitt) have a son who died under mysterious circumstances several years earlier. Turner and his partner, Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago), are investigating the death of a Jane Doe, who was murdered and fell off a cliff. Sam Neill plays Paul Souter, the Chief Park Ranger of Yosemite and Turner’s mentor and father figure, who protected Turner’s job when he was grieving his son.
We subsequently find out that Jane Doe is a woman named Lucy Cook, who disappeared over a decade earlier. For much of that time, she’d been wandering through the woods of Yosemite. She was essentially living with squatters and working as a mule for a drug trafficking operation based out of the mines in Yosemite.
The first major twist is this discovery, and the ensuing shootout. Initially, it’s believed that the drug operation was responsible for Lucy’s death. A shady ranger named Shane was running the drug ring. We later learn that Jill had secretly paid Shane to kill Sean Sanderson, the man responsible for her son’s death. Jill couldn’t bear the idea of going through a trial, so she arranged for Shane to kill Sanderson, but she never told her husband.
Turner was already suspicious of Shane and tried to connect him to Lucy’s death. He was unsuccessful until he was booted from the case (and fired) for punching Shane at a restaurant. After being removed, he randomly found Lucy’s phone in her backpack (it’s never explained why the phone wasn’t initially discovered, or why the police would collect the backpack as evidence without searching it — it’s something of a deus ex machina in the form of an iPhone).
The phone contained video footage of Lucy looking fearful, and there was a brief glimpse of Shane. Despite being a trained investigator, Turner jumps to the conclusion that Shane killed Lucy. He treks out to Shane’s campsite in Yosemite, where Shane shoots him. Turner spends the day running for his life until his partner, Naya, arrives just in time to save him by shooting Shane dead.
Case closed, right? Well, no.
Turner also conducted DNA testing and discovered that his boss and mentor, Paul Souter, was Lucy’s biological father. When Turner confronted him, Souter eventually confessed that Lucy had been blackmailing him, threatening to reveal to his family that he was her father. Desperate, Paul went out to confront Lucy and shot her in the leg to silence her. Lucy fled, and during the ensuing chase, she fell off the edge of a cliff. Turner told Paul he planned to expose the truth, and Paul responded by taking his own life.
And aside from Turner leaving his house to Naya and deciding to finally move away from Yosemite, that’s how the season ends. Which would be fine, except no one ever acknowledges that Ranger Shane didn’t actually commit the murder he was accused of. And yet, Shane was killed for it. Granted, it’s no major loss to humanity — he was a bad man — but the fact that he was gunned down based on flimsy, overly convenient evidence and Turner’s gut instinct is never properly addressed. Nor is the fact that, in a twisted way, Shane actually did Turner a favor by eliminating the man who killed his son.
This twist sucks because it short-circuits the show’s own moral complexity. The story spends hours painting shades of gray around grief, justice, and redemption, only to shrug off the implications of killing the wrong man. Shane wasn’t innocent, but he wasn’t Lucy’s killer, either, and his death should’ve mattered. Instead, the show glosses over it, undermining both the investigation’s credibility and the emotional weight of Turner’s arc. Turner never reckons with killing the wrong man; Naya never deals with the consequences of it; and Jill doesn’t react to the death of the man she paid to kill her son’s killer. It feels less like a twist and more like a misdirect designed to give extra weight to Paul’s ultimate confession.”
