Outer Range Season 2’s Trailer Goes Full Dune
Outer Range Season 2 is revealing more than just time travel.
In 2022, Josh Brolin and Imogen Poots starred in a subtle, twisted science fiction western called Outer Range. If you slept on Season 1, it was one of the best sci-fi shows of that year, subverting all kinds of time travel and alternate universe tropes, and putting the Upside Down from Stranger Things to shame. And while Season 1 dropped one big time travel reveal, it seems that Season 2 is upping the ante with a possible new timeline in play, as well as several scenes where characters are going full-on Dune, complete with a mind-altering substance that changes their eye color and helps them tap into infinity.
The Outer Range Season 2 trailer is here, and it seems like it’s going to make the twists of Season 1 downright straightforward in comparison.
Outer Range Season 2 trailer
The new trailer for Outer Range Season 2 reveals two apparent twists. First, unlikely partners Royal (Brolin) and Autumn (Poots) experience events in Wyoming that seem surprising. Considering Autumn and Royal both have knowledge of time travel, the fact they’re shocked by anything means that this season could be moving the mystery box secrets away from these characters, and onto someone else.
Because one character tells Royal of a theory that “time is fluid” — and we see Joy Hawk (Tamara Podemski) in the past — the notion that we’re dealing with an alternate timeline, or a conflicting timeline seems likely. The previous season ended with Joy traveling to the past, witnessing her Native American ancestors in a bison stampede. Has Joy’s time travel jaunt changed the present?
If dueling timelines are the focus of Outer Range Season 2, then the stakes of the show have shifted from secret time travel to, possibly, a battle for which timeline will become the dominant one.
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Meanwhile, the trailer also seems to present a new kind of super-power acquired by both Autumn and Wayne Tillerson (Will Patton). When ingesting a powder form of the strange rocks from the first season, both characters have their eyes go all black, and it's implied they can see the future. But which future?
Will Autumn and Wayne become dueling prophets, fighting over which future will come to pass? We know Josh Brolin himself has directed one episode of the new season, and that a new showrunner, Charles Murray, seems to be taking the show deeper into its big questions about time. In an interview with EW, Murray said: “Okay, so this whole thing is about time. In what ways can we show how differently time can be conceived from one person to another?”
As of now, we don’t know whether or not Outer Range Season 2 is fully introducing alternate timelines, but if characters are seeing possible branches of the future — Dune style — then it seems the precognition is the newest weapon in the West.
