‘Outer Range’ Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: Out to Pasture

The problem with airing a really, really good episode of an otherwise mediocre show is that people will raise their expectations accordingly. This what The Wire would refer to as one of them good problems. Of course you want your audience to respect and enjoy the work you do and eagerly anticipate more of the same, if not better. 

It becomes one of them bad problems when you fail to deliver on that forward momentum. The all-too-aptly titled “Do-Si-Do,” which believe it or not is the penultimate episode of Outer Range’s second season, shows that last episode wasn’t a breather, but a return to the status quo, even if it makes little storytelling sense to head back there to begin with.

Take poor Billy Tillerson, whose warbling rendition of Live’s “Lightning Crashes” shows off the show’s cheeky sense of humor with regards to its needle drops. (Yellowjackets used this overwrought song with complete sincerity, which is itself very funny.) You’ll recall that Billy began the season at death’s door, shot in the neck by Royal. His slow recovery, overseen by his resentful brother Luke and augmented by a dose or two of the mineral as applied by his loving dad Wayne, has taken up his entire season. This is the very first episode in which we’ve even seen him stand up, much less do anything. 

And by the end, he’s dead, brained by Luke in a fight for the hand of Autumn. Granted, death is probably about as permanent as a dry erase marker in Wabang, given Outer Range’s amorphous paranormal parameters. But even if you bring Billy roaring back in the next episode, why spend six hours spinning your wheels with the guy, just to get him right back to where he was at the end of the Season One finale?

It also makes little sense to me to dispose of the brotherly conflict between Billy and Luke so early in the show’s run, which I can only assume is intended to be lengthy given how parsimonious the show is with actual information about its central sci-fi conceit. Two hallucinating rivals for the love of a deranged cult leader, all of them tripping balls off time-travel dust? Why wouldn’t you explore that love triangle for as long as you can? Again, there’s every possibility Billy’s back right away, but even Autumn and Luke’s psychic visions appear to indicate there’s no future for the singing son. It’s a damn shame.

The torpid tale of Rhett and Maria, meanwhile, continues as it’s always been: boring. Sitting in a motel parking lot, lamenting how they remain stuck in Wabang, Maria reveals to Rhett that she never even actually quit her banking job out of cowardice. At this point my wife laughed out loud and said “These characters suck!” Even Rhett’s tattoos are dull. Maybe Rhett’s conversation with the ever-lurking Dr. Bintu and Maria’s confrontation with Autumn — in which Autumn warns her “Don’t let love make you out to be a fool! Leave before you’re left!”, the most memorable line in Aïda Mashaka Croal and Marilyn Thomas’s script — will send them off in new and exciting directions, but I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it.

There’s some nice material in this episode for Joy, who is finding reentry into the modern world difficult after her traumatic trip through time and its bloody climax. There’s only so much she feels able to tell her wife, while Royal, the only person she can count on to understand, is busy with his family’s bottomless black hole of drama, which in this ep involves beating the shit out of his daughter-in-law’s friend Louis to find out the name of the women’s shelter where she and Amy are hiding out.

Serving as director, Josh Brolin serves up several strong images — Royal and Cece on horseback against the prismatic sunset, Maria and Rhett seated in the parking lot with the bright yellow sign and brighter blue sky as a backdrop, Wayne Tillerson tripping time-traveling balls on the mineral in a bar soaked in Nicholas Winding Refn red. But my favorite is that of Joy on the floor, curled up against a cabinet, crying in pain and fear. I feel like I understand so much about this woman, and moreover her purpose on Outer Range, from that image alone. It’s so strange, the way this show seems so dialed in with one half of its cast of characters, and so checked out with the other.

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.