Who’d have thought it? Turns out, the wilds of Yosemite National Park are the perfect place to get away with murder.
Or at least, it would be, if not for Kyle Turner. Played by Eric Bana, he’s the reluctant hero of Untamed, the wild new Netflix series that is by turns captivating and dividing audiences.
Set in Yosemite and written by American Primeval’s Mark L. Smith, it stars Bana as a National Park Investigative Services Branch agent, who finds himself digging into the death of an anonymous woman who falls from the top of El Capitan, a 3,000 metre tall rock formation in the park.
After a bit of digging, it turns out that she’s called Lucy Cook, and was a young woman with a troubled past. She disappeared from the park as a child in 2012, before showing up several years later. According to the evidence, she also fell off the cliff whilst running away from somebody, which means somebody is responsible for her death.
To add to it all, there’s a personal level to the investigation: Kyle’s own infant son Caleb was murdered in Yosemite five years ago, and the killer was never found.
With two competing mysteries at play, how does Untamed wrap them both up? Here’s our ending explained.
What happened to Caleb?
Caleb’s fate ties in closely to that of Lucy’s. Kyle and his partner Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago)’s investigations turn up a seedier side of Yosemite park, featuring an underground drug ring that may or may not involve Shane Maguire, the park’s sinister wildlife management officer.
Shane’s relationship with Kyle is rocky to say the least – the pair constantly antagonise each other and end up attacking each other (which leads to Kyle being suspended as a ranger) – and it seems as though Shane has some information over Caleb’s death that he uses to needle Kyle. And that Jill (Rosemarie DeWitt), his wife, is involved – at one point, she’s so terrified that the truth might come out about what she’s done that she attempts to take her own life.
“We started with the Lucy mystery, and we weren’t totally sure how the Caleb thing was going to play out,” Smith told Netflix of his writing process. “But we always had it set up that the reason for the Turner/Jill split was what Jill had done.”
During the show, another cold case pops up: a missing man named Sean Sanderson. But it turns out his fate isn’t such a mystery – in the final episode, Jill tells her new boyfriend that Sanderson was the person who killed Caleb. Shane was the person who first found out, and though Kyle trusted the law to do its job, Jill did not. She hired Shane to kill him, which ultimately destroyed their marriage.
“The fact that she had Maguire do this without Turner knowing — that is what really split them apart,” Smith told Netflix.
Who killed Lucy Cook?
At first, Kyle and Naya suspect Lucy’s killer might be her father, Rory, who was an infamously violent man. However, they discover that he was killed in a bar fight three years after her disappearance, and in an extra twist, a DNA test establishes that Rory wasn’t Lucy’s biological father at all.
The killer turns out to be somebody else. In the final episode of the show, we find out that Lucy became embroiled in the drug trade. After a cache of drugs and guns is found at the house of Shane Maguire, it also looks like he might have been the one to pull the trigger on her.
Case closed? Not really – Kyle decides to follow one last lead into Lucy’s life, and digs into the years Lucy was missing as a child. He finds the woman who used to look after Lucy, and it turns out Lucy was dropped off at a foster home in Nevada by a man claiming to be her father, who apparently was some kind of police officer. After that, Kyle re-sends Lucy’s DNA results to the lab and comes back with a definitive answer: her father is not Rory, it’s actually Paul Souter (Sam Neill), the chief park ranger.
Kyle confronts his old mentor about the truth, and it all comes out.
Paul had a secret affair with Lucy’s mother, but when her husband, Rory, became violent, he took Lucy away to what he thought was safety. Instead, it turned out to be a spectacularly abusive foster home, from which Lucy (then known as Grace) escaped and returned to Yosemite.
When she did, she started to blackmail him, threatening to reveal the truth of his affair to his family as a way of getting money and revenge.
In return, Paul tried to stop her from talking by scaring her. Armed with a gun, he chased her through the park, all the way to El Capitan. He fired a shot to get her attention, and Lucy – who was by then injured, cornered and terrified – ran to the edge of the cliff and jumped.
Sam bribes Kyle with the offer of his job back, but Kyle is having none of it, and walks away. Sam levels his gun at him, and then there’s a shot – it turns out Sam has shot himself. The Lucy storyline wraps up with her funeral: her body is cremated and her ashes scattered.
What does Kyle do after?
Suspended from the park ranger service, and thoroughly done with all the baggage he’s amassed there, Kyle leaves Yosemite for good. And despite hallucinations of Caleb, his son, tempting him to join the afterlife, Kyle decides he won’t.
Instead, he hugs him and says he’ll “always be with me.” Then he sets out to start anew, leaving behind a box of Caleb’s toys for Naya Vasquez’s son to play with. As he leaves, Naya takes out his horse into the park, ready to do her job once more.
Untamed is streaming now on Netflix
