UNTAMED

The Gravity of Grief

The first few minutes of *Untamed* have a nasty kind of elegance to them. Two climbers inch up the face of El Capitan, hanging there in the sort of vertical silence that makes your palms sweat, and then a body comes tearing down from above. It snags in their ropes for a second before dropping away again. Human violence landing in a landscape that usually kills by indifference alone—that’s a strong way to start. I’ve seen plenty of prestige crime dramas lead with a dead girl. It’s practically boilerplate now. But sending her into free-fall beside the most famous wall in Yosemite National Park is at least enough to make you sit up.



The person left to sort through that awful opening image is Kyle Turner, an Investigative Services Branch agent played by Eric Bana. Turner rides a horse, drinks too much bourbon, and carries so much grief around with him that he seems permanently one bad day from collapsing through his own cabin floor. None of that is exactly new territory. Mark L. Smith, who wrote *The Revenant*, and his daughter Elle Smith are basically working with a familiar procedural chassis here and dressing it in hiking gear. The difference is texture. Smith knows how to make wilderness feel hostile without turning it into scenery, and *Untamed* gets a lot of mileage out of that. Yosemite isn’t just beautiful in this show; it feels massive, cold, and oddly suffocating.

I’m not sure the series ever becomes more than a glossy, pulpy thriller, but it sure looks expensive trying. The camera keeps hanging back in those wide frames, making Turner and his rookie partner, former LA cop Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago), look tiny against all that pine and stone and rushing water. You feel the mud. You feel the damp. And Sam Neill, playing Chief Paul Souter, adds exactly the right kind of weathered authority. He has that gift of seeming fully in charge and utterly tired at the same time. He deals with park bureaucracy like it’s another animal problem—just one more creature rummaging through the garbage.



Where the series really lands, though, is in Bana’s scenes with Rosemarie DeWitt as his ex-wife, Jill. The thing binding them is the murder of their child years earlier, and it hangs over every conversation like bad weather that never passes. Bana plays Turner like a man who only knows how to move when he’s chasing the dead, but around Jill that hard, western stiffness drains right out of him. Suddenly he looks smaller, sorrier, like he’s folding in on himself. DeWitt is terrific at this sort of controlled devastation. She always looks like she has built a functional life around a crack in the center of things. Their shared grief is what makes them inseparable and unbearable to each other in the same breath.

By the final episode, the actual case starts to overreach. The writing begins tossing out conspiracies and red herrings with a panic that doesn’t match the slower, moodier work of the early stretch. It gets cluttered. Maybe that’s just the modern streaming disease, the compulsion to spike every episode with another twist. Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com hit the nail on the head when he wrote, "I won't remember much of the mystery of 'Untamed,' but I'll think about it the next time I see Bana or DeWitt in a project".



That feels right to me. The machinery of the plot eventually jams, but the bruised people inside it linger. Most crime shows promise the comfort of order being restored. *Untamed* gives you the usual clean-ish answer, sure, but its best scenes quietly admit that some things—mountains, grief, the loss of a child—don’t get solved. You just learn the shape of living around them.