‘Outer Range’ Season 2 Episode 4 Recap: Once Upon a Time in the West

Hell yeah, brother! It took eleven episodes to get here, but Outer Range has finally, truly, knocked it out of the park. Set entirely in 1886 until its final moments, the cheekily titled “Ode to Joy” is exactly that — a showcase for the time-displaced Sheriff Joy Hawk, and for actor Tamara Podemski. Both the character and the performer take that spotlight and make it a star turn, transforming Joy into one of the show’s best characters and cementing Podemski as, perhaps, the equal and opposite reaction to Josh Brolin’s Royal Abbott. 

But more than that, this episode demonstrates that the action in the season premiere, in which Joy found herself in the middle of a breathless battle between warriors on horseback, was no fluke. Working off a fantastic script by Aïda Mashaka Croal and Randy Redroad, director Blackhorse Lowe puts on an action/thriller clinic. Joy and her young friend Flowers’s (Lily Joy Winder) quest to defeat and escape their white captors and pursuers treats the real-world sociopolitical horrors with sensitivity without being afraid to use them as fuel for powerful genre storytelling. 

The plot of the episode is simple. In the late 19th century, Joy has been living among her Shoshone ancestors for four years now, with her Led Zeppelin–loving friend Falling Star by her side. But Falling Star, a trained nurse, knows she’s dying of cancer, and wants Joy to take over as liaison with the “homesteaders,” whose government-appointed representative Carson Krum (Mark Sivertsen) seems like a decent enough guy.

As is so often the case on this shoe, though, bison are the harbinger of doom. When young hunters Flowers and Mountain Lion (River Novin) shoot a bison — it’s the same bison with two arrows jutting out of it that trotted around mysteriously all throughout Season One, of course — they pursue it into the settlers’ territory. There, they are accosted by Shelton Cape (John Ales), a grey-bearded shitkicker, and his men. Mountain Lion escapes, but Flowers is captured, and with all of their warriors out on a hunt, it falls to former LEO Joy to come to the rescue.

And now, a personal aside. I quite literally can’t conceive of myself as a person without Led Zeppelin. Their ten-disc complete studio recordings box set was the soundtrack of my entire adolescence. So I’m right there with Falling Star and Joy when they quote “Stairway to Heaven” at each other at the start of Joy’s perilous journey. That song is absolutely commensurate with such a moment; quoting it is a way of showing Falling Star, Joy, and Led Zeppelin their due respect. I got choked up, but can you blame me? “Stairway to Heaven” was the first song I ever sang to my child, when they were in a tiny little plastic box in a neonatal intensive care unit. That song means as much to me as it does to them.

Anyway, Joy heads off to the rescue armed with the power of an automatic pistol (or whatever, I’m not a gun expert, go home and play with your kids), a gun that has a level of accuracy and stopping power for which the white men of 1886 are quite unprepared. But Gage wounds her in the leg and escapes, all but ensuring a racial bloodbath once the news gets out. Joy convinces Flowers to leave her behind in order to make better time back to the village, giving them ample warning. This pretty much means Joy has left herself behind to die.

But she didn’t count on her nearest pursuer being young Royal Sumner (Teauguen Arbogast), and his abusive father Levi (Brandon Stacy). Astonishingly, Joy — who comes from a “place” where men like Levi are considered the scum of the earth and imprisoned for such behavior — convinces Royal to kill his father rather than her. 

This is the “hunt” that Royal was on when he “accidentally” shot his dad. This is what caused him to flee his family and leap into a hole in the world. This is what also caused Joy to do the same, pursuing young Royal headlong despite her wounded leg and falling through the bottomless void just shy of Royal’s own descent. You’ve now seen where both of them end up. Meanwhile, the white men find themselves outfoxed and surrounded by the returning Shoshone warriors. All’s well that ends well, for now at least.

The great thing about heavily serialized New Golden Age/Prestige TV/Peak TV storytelling is that when a standalone episode like this one does come along, it really pops. (That’s why the critical vogue for such episodes is nonsensical: If they were common, they wouldn’t hit half as hard.) Outer Range used this one to, in wrestling parlance, get Joy over — make her someone the audience will cheer for, loudly at that. I’m hugely impressed by this effort. I’m excited to see where things go from here.

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.